Editor:

The column “Mental health to blame in Navy Yard shooting” was a pleasant surprise…until I read the conclusion.

Michelle Chan is on the right track when she says banning guns would only penalize peaceful people who have followed the laws all along. But going from there to calling for mandatory classes and universal registration for all gun owners?

Why should 100 million responsible people be registered and tracked as a “precautionary step” — as if they were sex offenders —because a random handful of dangerously ill people managed to harm the public?

I wonder what the writer might think about a few other small concessions Americans are making for that elusive feeling of public safety.

Should we all be OK with the TSA’s ‘enhanced pat-downs’ and body imaging? Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policy in NYC? Secret drone strikes? The government tracking and spying on the press? The NSA vacuuming all our metadata and reviewing it in secret?

If the writer objects to any of those, then subjecting gun owners to intrusive scrutiny should feel just as wrong.

Instead of doing something to gun owners, let’s do something about violent mental illness.

Dallen J. Rose

WSU Communications