The U.S. gun issue: Consider that around the world everyone has access to the same video games, the same movies, and the same programs which portray violence. Yet the U.S. leads the world with gun related killings.

Given human nature’s penchant for anger, for attack, and for killing each other, possibly the only difference between the U.S. and the rest of the world is the choice of what mode of killing is favored.

Many terrorists in the Middle East favor suicide bombings. Many radical groups in Africa seem to favor uprisings by armed groups who intimidate and even force very young people to engage in rape, pillage, and brutal killings neighborhood by neighborhood.

And how about China? It seems that many of its average citizens are being cast aside simply by the consequences of very fast growth and a government more concerned about its place on the world stage than about its citizens.

And of course there are the so called “third world countries,” who simply see their citizens starve to death through poverty and die needlessly due to very poor health care.

Pick your poison world, but pick it we seem to.

Young people of other nations are very eager to get to America for education and to be immersed into our culture. We are a nation filled with a great diversity in cultural backgrounds. We are a nation built upon the idea of personal freedoms. We are a nation of open communication and unrestricted travel.

Yet, we are also a nation struggling with the same destructive attitudes, which perpetuate violence in so many forms throughout the world.

The way I see it, until our individual and collective attitudes and our mind-sets change from greed to sharing, from anger to thoughtful listening, from selfish aims to unselfish acts, from anger to compassion, and from fear to love — our nation and our world will simply continue putting band-aids on gaping wounds with which the band-aids have no chance of healing those gaping wounds.

Bob McClellan,

Polson