Might there be a connection between U.S. foreign policy and gun violence within these borders? While the United States funnels the highest amount per capita of the populations’s tax money of any country in the free world into its military and sends those professionals and their ordnance into chaotic situations that only become more chaotic as a result, the U.S. sustains, within its borders, the highest death-by-gun-violence rates (by far) in the entire world.

Might the same impunity we, as a people, display internationally be imitated by individuals here that wreak their versions of justice among the most vulnerable in their American communities?

Might it not be time to withdraw from violent confrontations with foreign powers and confront our own weaknesses at home and learn to live as a proactive healing community, before attempting to bomb others around the world into submission to our way of life, which by all accounts is becoming the most voracious, self-centered and toxic it has ever been, and seems to be worsening?

Greg Boardman, Lewiston