Editor: We don’t need gun control — we need people control. This starts in school. There is no discipline in today’s schools. The students seem to control the classrooms rather than the teachers. If the schools implement any discipline, liberal parents jump up and down that their little snowflakes’ egos are being hurt. Social and cultural problems can be resolved with proper discipline.

When I went to school many decades ago, I went to Catholic schools, where any infraction of the rules was met by Sister Mary with a wood ruler in her hand ready to issue any warranted punishment.

In high school, I had a home room teacher, Father McGuire, who would not hit his students with his hand, but would lash out with a shoulder block that would knock a student out of his chair. If you were unlucky enough to sit next to a wall, you bounced off the wall when that block hit your shoulder.

That was discipline! We respected those teachers; and I was glad for the discipline when I got out into the world of business, as it instilled a code of conduct in my life. Without discipline, we have chaos, as we have seen with the mass shootings.

Backpacks should be banned from school. I carried my books and lunch every day. In the digital age, why are books even being used?

I hate to see our schools turned into a fortress, but that appears to be necessary. Every school needs a secured anti-room, where visitors must check in before being allowed in the main school area. All exterior doors should not be allowed to be opened from the outside without a pass code.

Although many people object, I strongly believe that teachers should be allowed to carry a weapon once properly trained. Special training could possibly be arranged with FLETC in Brunswick where police officers from around the country are trained.

Yes, we need to raise the age to 21 to purchase any firearm. The background check also needs more in-depth review. Law enforcement needs to check Facebook and Twitter during that background check, and deny the sale if anything negative shows up.

Red flag laws or extreme risk protection orders, which allow the police to temporarily take away guns from people deemed by a judge to be dangerous, often after a family member or acquaintance raises concerns, should be passed.

Federal and state agencies should be held accountable if they fail to upload criminal history records to the background check system.

There should be a 30-day delay in picking up any firearm after the background check was completed. It should be illegal for people convicted of domestic violence or those with restraining orders against them to possess firearms. There have been mass shootings where a spouse was the intended target.

The law should not allow any facility that caters to the public from preventing firearms being carried on the premises by conceal permit owners. 98 percent of all mass shootings have been "soft" targets—locations where firearms are not allowed.

A gun is a neutral object and by itself can do no harm. It requires a person to pull the trigger. This is where our efforts should be targeted, not just the weapon. Banning AR style rifles would be found unconstitutional, as the second amendment was designed to protect the citizenry from a tyrannical government.

I am a Second Amendment supporter, but controlling people is different than controlling firearms.

Len Calderone

Midway