Person of interest had history of mental illness

Editor, The Times:

I was not surprised to find out that the alleged murderer of the four Lakewood police officers has a documented history of mental illness [“4 officers slain; Seattle manhunt,” page one, Nov. 30].

We will continue to see innocent members of our community become victims of violent crime as long as the judges put the rights of the seriously mentally ill ahead of the safety of the public.

We deserve to be protected from people like this.

— Doug Hjellen, Mill Creek

Gun sales: a U.S. epidemic

The tragic massacre of four police officers at a coffee shop in Tacoma reminds us that even with John Allen Muhammad dead [“Life and death not black and white,” Opinion, Leonard Pitts Jr. syndicated column, Nov. 15], his spirit lives on.

Recall that it was a Tacoma gun shop that not only supplied this D.C. sniper and his sidekick with their guns, but which was implicated in selling guns that were involved in more than two dozen crimes. It used to be said that scofflaw operations and gun fairs accounted for a very high percentage of guns obtained without background checks, but dicey gun sales are now the rule in much of the U.S. No one thought to alert authorities, for example, when Fort Hood Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a former psychiatrist-turned-mass-murderer, bought his gun at Guns Galore.

The gun epidemic in the United States now costs at least 30,000 lives a year — as many deaths as influenza causes, with another 70,000 being injured each year, 10 percent of whom are children. The United States is painfully in need of civilian gun control, and I write this as a good neighbor from Canada with many relatives and friends living in the U.S.

American guns pouring over the border end up on Canadian streets, making police work in Canada much more perilous as well.

— Ron Charach, Toronto, Canada