Letters to the Editor | Dec. 18, 2024

There have been 488 mass shootings so far this year. Eighty-three of them have occurred in schools, the latest in Wisconsin. The FBI is studying why the U.S. has become a veritable hotbed of mass killing. We are unlikely to solve the problem of access to weapons — our country has 400 million guns — but ninth graders don’t ordinarily aspire to kill their teachers and classmates. Our society needs to look at the role social media and electronic communications play in causing this carnage.

Almost all of us recall being harassed by fellow students. Yet, before the day of the electronic phone and personal computer, mass shootings by children were unknown. We need to realize that electronic devices are, in a sense, as deadly as the guns themselves. There is a movement afoot in some school systems to regulate the electronic gear children have access to and the breadth of communication access. Teenagers may need a phone, but do email and social media accounts really enhance their childhood experience? Parents magazine reported that older teens average 3,000 hours a year looking at screens — nearly half of their waking hours. We have a crisis in America when second graders are calling from school to save their lives. But guns themselves don’t provoke shootings. There is another culprit we need to investigate, and its most dangerous element is called a screen.

Mark Ashton, Collegeville

The Inquirer and Trudy Rubin are to be applauded and thanked for her insightful column on the Israeli government’s cruel and inhumane attack on the people of Gaza and the destruction of their homes, schools, hospitals, and places of work. Rubin is right to call this out as the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. It should not be acceptable for Israel and its American supporters to promote this ongoing brutality as an act of Israel’s right to self-defense. Indeed, we Americans are complicit in this ethnic cleansing. The awful death and destruction in Gaza cannot be undone — but it can be stopped. That needs to happen now.

William B. Lane, Glen Mills

I agree with the Sunday editorial that there was a failure of leadership regarding the Sixers arena. What passes for a planning and development strategy in Philadelphia is to sit and wait until somebody with money proposes something and then city officials tweak the plan. The Department of Planning and Development should be renamed the Billionaire Plan Review Office. I disagree that there is no public subsidy for the plan since the Sixers get tax-free land. How many homes and businesses would like that? This is a massive public subsidy.

This follows a pattern of the city neglecting an area and then just accepting an offer when it becomes desirable, on the grounds that the area needs something, anything. The Sixers obviously want it because East Market Street is already poised to soar. The mayor and the building trades union are shortsighted because the jobs will be there no matter where the arena is built. We could do far better.

As Inga Saffron’s column points out, this will also negatively affect Jefferson Station in various ways. It’s a fantasy to think that all these suburbanites will leave their cars behind when venturing into Center City. Before the Pennsylvania Convention Center was built, the claim was made that there would be no auto traffic increase due to everybody walking or using transit. It was always false. The arena on Market Street idea was bad from the start, and never honestly reviewed.

Mark Zecca, Philadelphia

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