The time to speak out on climate change is now
EDITOR: It is heartening and inspiring to hear the voices of young people like Greta Thunberg challenging world leaders to take substantive and effective action to address the critical issue of our age, the growing climate catastrophe.
They know that their generation and those to follow will be the ones to pay the price for our inaction and our silence in the face of this existential threat to human civilization and the integrity of our planetary ecosystem.
But however passionate and powerful a message one young woman delivers, we cannot allow her to just speak for us. Everyone who cares about future generations and the health of our only home needs to join our voices to hers.
The time to speak and to act is not 12 years from now. It is now!
Larry Robinson
Sebastopol
Listen to the kids
EDITOR: Last week’s Global Climate Strike march in Santa Rosa was de-ja-vu to this 76-year-old. I wanted to join the march but couldn’t because my sinister (better known as “left”) foot, which I had re-injured playing a set of tennis earlier in the day. Years ago as a science instructor at Piner High (and as a sub at many Sonoma County highs, including Analy), I’d often stressed the real and present danger and present danger of global warming.
Although I arrived later than most, I enjoyed the speeches. The so-called “kids” who led it were much more knowledgeable and persuasive than most of the present presidential candidates will ever be. After the Parkland shootings, I marched against gun violence in Santa Rosa. I also demonstrated against the seemingly endless war in Vietnam during the early 1970s.
We need to listen more to our children instead of laying on the petty criticism many of us “seniors” tend to do. They are inheriting a sadly sick, dying planet. More protests are going to follow this one, weekly and internationally. If I can walk, I’ll try to participate.
Frank Baumgardner
Santa Rosa
What the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre has to teach us about gun control
EDITOR: In 2000, a year after the Columbine High School mass shooting which left 12 students and one teacher dead, Charlton Heston, as President of the National Rifle Association, held up a flintlock musket and stated, “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands.”
One of the first attempts to pry guns from hands was in response to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929. The incident was the brutal slaying of one Chicago mob of another. It wasn’t so much that Bugs Moran and his crew were sympathetic or innocent victims. Hardly! It was the power and deadly force of the two Thompson submachine guns, invented for World War I and used in the massacre, that created the overwhelming reaction by the public that forced Congress to act, creating the National Firearms Act. When that was challenged in 1939, the act was upheld by Supreme Court in United States v. Miller.
The NRA has been chipping away at firearms legislation ever since. In 1986, it influenced Congress to pass the Firearms Owners Protection Act, which prevents a national registry of firearm owners. In conjunction with the lapsing of the Assault Weapons Ban, Congress passed the Tiahrt Amendment in 2003, which prohibited releasing data about where criminals purchased their firearms to anyone other than law enforcement agencies. NRA is on a roll here. In 2005, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act which said no federal or state lawsuits could be filed against gun manufactures. Finally, the NRA’s lobbying effort paved the way for the Heller Decision in 2008, in which the Supreme Court overturned Miller decision and ended many restrictions that had been placed on gun ownership. (Heller emphasized the right to bear arms, while Miller emphasized the well-regulated militia clause of the Second Amendment.)
So, there we have it. Movie stars, Civil War generals, outlaws, judges, politicians, cowboys and Indians and cold dead hands. It is quite a lot to think about and the debate goes on and on. Should the right to bear arms be regulated? Simple question, complex answer. After St. Valentine’s Day 1929 there was one answer; after Parkland 2018, not so much.
It just seems odd that our representatives in the past reacted more strongly to gangsters being killed than current representative do to school children being killed.
Paul Weinberger
Sebastopol
