Your Voice: June 15, 2022

Please refer readers to the more worthy source of news, like maybe CNN? The classy network with sexists being fired on a regular basis? The network being sued for lying to the American people about Hunter Biden’s laptop? Suddenly (according to you) innocent Americans are now complicit in murder for watching a news channel? Does any part of your conscience realize how ignorant that sounds?

I don’t agree with CNN, MSNBC, or even Fox News for that matter, but it is not my place to tell you what you can or cannot watch. To imply that people are murderers because they watched the news that you disagree with is exactly what’s wrong with this country. I can’t imagine having you anywhere near our education system, teaching children that it’s okay to suppress others’ speech if you disagree with them. Absolutely disgusting …

By the way, last week you mentioned how much you love people and that’s why you’re imploring them to stop watching Fox, this week you love them so much that you refer to them as murderers … oh to be loved by you …

Chuck Carbone

The Dalles

The true problem

Is the firearm the problem?

Over the last few years, I have seen the mass shootings on TV and am truly sorry for those that have lost children/friends/family members.

I feel it is easier for people to blame an inanimate object than the real problem. It is the people that are using these firearms that cause pain and death. So why not start addressing this instead of something that by itself cannot do anything? It always takes people to cause pain and murder.

I hear of people of the same numbers killed by different means, with cars, stabbings, domestic violence, etc., and they get a five-second blip on the news and are never heard of again. I guess death by these methods is socially acceptable.

Any loss of life is tragic, but it is the fault of the person yielding the weapon, whether that is a gun, knife, car, or bomb, and not the item used.

Why don’t we fix the problem rather than making another law that doesn’t help?

Try funding the police and give them back the tools they need so they enforce all the laws that already exist. If there are no consequences for our actions, even law-abiding citizens will not follow the law. Do you speed or use your cell phone if there is not a police officer around?

And politicians need to listen to the silent majority, not the loud minorities when making decisions and new laws.

Give mental health a try instead of turning these people needing help out on the streets to fend for themselves.

Tim Sipe

The Dalles

Protect children

Now I see clearly why Republicans don’t want gun safety legislation — they want to protect the gun rights of the killers not our children’s right to be safe and live a full life. That is why when a tragedy like the Uvlade shooting occurs they say it is not the guns that kill, it is people with mental health problems. It is not the gun that kills 19 children and two teachers, many of which were shot in the head, decapitated, and unrecognizable.

Does a killer without a “military style weapon” do this amount of human damage? How many children would have been killed if the killer had a knife or single shot rifle? If you Republicans are not for protecting our children, who are you for?

The Uvalde killer should say to Mitch McConnell, the loyal party and heartless Republicans, and the Texas governor, “Thank you for making it possible for me to buy an AR-15 rifle and 300 rounds of ammunition a few days after my 18th birthday. You guys protect my gun rights so I can kill all those innocent children and teachers.”

Nancy Johanson Paul

Hood River

Blasphemy

The Bible says that thousands of years ago, God commanded Thou Shalt Not Kill. Since then, the righteous have murdered millions in His name. Meanwhile, some forgetful scribe left out the story of Jesus’s Father commanding him to carry a high-capacity weapon to the town square.

If I ever felt compelled to own an assault weapon, I would question my faith long before I would question whether or not I left a round in the chamber. To say owning an AR-15 is a “God-given right” is simply malarkey and blasphemy.

Steve Kaplan

Hood River

A paid-for congress

As we approach yet another election, I consider the issues that are relevant to me. I am weary of a Congress that is bought and paid by corporations.

The sudden conspiratorial interest in election integrity is a distraction fueled by elites with no evidence to support their assertion that massive voter fraud is occurring. More than 60 voter fraud court cases were dismissed, primarily for lack of evidence. Meanwhile, corporations and special interest groups have spent $4.4 billion since the 2010 Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Who benefits from these donations? Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, and the NRA.

Both political parties participate in this assault on eliminating the voices of voters. Our Congressional representatives serve those who pay for their campaigns, and to keep their powerful positions, they must continue the cycle. This is the true fraud in our system: Congressional members who serve their own self-interest and those of the elite.

Ask your Congressional representatives to support a Constitutional Amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling and, more importantly, to enact and fund public campaign funding systems. Without this change, the United States will continue its path to becoming an oligarchy.

Sue Kusch

The Dalles

Double standard?

Conservatives are predictably outraged, incensed, aghast, take your pick, over a woman’s right to choose, yet they could easily save 321 lives each day by working to eliminate gun deaths.

That is, of course, unless they have a strict political double standard.

Alison Lynch-Miller

White Salmon