Dear Editor:

A memorial erected for the 26 innocents slaughtered at Sandy Hook 10 years ago reflects our thoughts and prayers to the families of those victims. And thoughts and prayers are about all that we can expect from an entrenched and paid for congress.

It would be easy to dismiss this type of violence as the doings of mentally unbalanced individuals, but we would have to ignore those who figuratively put the gun in their hand and who told them to pull the trigger.

Words matter. They communicate not just facts and ideas but feelings and passions. It is with words we woo and win our mates. Similarly it is with words that we know fear and loathing.

It was the words of Alex Jones that triggered the harassment of the Sandy Hook victim’s families and even the desecration of those children’s graves. It was words that incited people like Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs to mount a seditious and violent assault on our capital. And it is the angry and fearful words of people such as Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and others that pits American against American; their acid words, eating away the fabric of our national heritage of democratic process and the rule of law.

It is people such as these who, from behind their veil of clever rhetoric, inflame the passions of those who would answer this siren’s call with loaded guns. And it is at their feet we should lay blame for the consequences of their words; thousands of dead innocents, violent threats against our elected government, attacks against the very thing for which we form a government, protection of our individual liberty.

Propagandists manipulate people through the puppet strings of emotions. Therefore we, as consumers of media, need to be alert to how vulnerable we become when emotion gets in the way of our thinking.

At stake here is the rule of law and the democratic ideals that make America great. Freedom comes with responsibility for without it we descend into anarchy.