The forces behind mass shootings and a suggested solution: Letters
The forces behind mass shootings and a suggested solution
July 15 — To the Editor:
When they flash a photo of the last dozen mass shooters, what you see are 18- to 30- year-old broken young men. Boys with fake lives who see up to 200,000 acts of video, movie and TV violence by the time they are 18. Their relationships with women are based on the pornography they watch. These boys become grievance collectors, they think of retaliation, settling grudges, and seeking vengeance. Why? Here are some reasons.
Hollywood, movies and TV: The most elite liberals in our population (the entertainment industry) put out entertainment with non-stop gratuitous gun violence to make a lot of money, at the expense of the goodness in society. They should be ashamed, but do not count on it. The promotion of killing is astounding. The natural tension media puts out helps create a psychosis.
Mental health: The outrageous sums of tax dollars wasted doing favors for constituents should be redirected.
Access: Gun owners should lock up their guns with gun safes and with trigger locks. Helpful solutions should be debatable, not absolute. It appears the Red Flag Law did not work for us with the 4th of July shooter in Illinois.
Smart phones, computers: Check out the killing in these games online. Mortal Combat, Mafia 11, etc. You get to live, everyone else dies.
Marijuana: It is legal now, let’s get a buzz and play guitars around the campfire. Not so fast Cheech, this is not the THC of 1975. Anyone whoever smoked pot knows that they have witnessed a certain percentage of smokers freak out, start getting a bit psychotic. It is proven mass shooters fill this category. Every one of these mass shooters suffer from a psychosis, from the heavy use of this extremely strong marijuana, brought to you by our politicians. The NIH talks of this with the AKT1 gene variant associated with risk. They could not just let pot fans grow a couple of plants for self-consumption: they turned it into an industry, as potent as you want it, getting the distribution for themselves. I am not referring to medical, or occasional recreational use. Mass shooters are also victims of improperly prescribed anti-depressants, big Pharma is making a fortune, as usage is up 3,000% since the '90s, and in many cases prescribed improperly. Please listen to the words of popular songs today, they can be vile and degrading, again with the desensitizing.
It is not healthy for the current president to call 71 million voters white supremacist and racists when we are not. Being whipped into a frenzy repeatedly is no way to live. Entertainment, the mainstream media, and academia are whipping our world into a seemingly unrepairable world of despair. It is at this point the young grievance collectors emerge. Songwriter Harry Chapin wrote about this in his song “Sniper” about the Texas Tower shooter. The cure for most of our problems is the promotion of family life, faith in our Constitution, and the distribution of kindness, and eliminating the indoctrination of violence.
Mark Schlieper
Rye
Beware of the forces trying to turn the United States into a theocracy
July 21 — To the Editor:
Responding to Ethan Bald, Biden’s powers concerning abortion are extremely limited. The Founding Fathers envisioned three co-equal branches. To suggest that the Court’s authority be uncontested is a relatively new concept, largely dating to Brown v. Topeka in which Eisenhower used the National Guard to enforce the Court’s order. If we have a Constitutional crisis as a result of Dobbs it’s because three Justices who were approved by 50 Senators elected by just 27 percent of the national voting public, along with unorthodox machinations by Senator McConnell, inserted their own personal beliefs into their rulings. They have thus undermined First Amendment and Separation of Church and State by facilitating laws at the state level that adopt one religion’s view of when life begins, undermined voting rights by allowing discriminatory gerrymandering, forced the State of Maine to send taxpayer money to religious schools, eviscerated non-enumerated rights as provided by the Ninth Amendment, allowed policies contrary to our Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search and seizure, ordained unrestricted gun access resulting in heavily armed anti-government militias and in the process, nut-cases to shoot up kids in our schools and malls.
They seem on the verge of undermining checks and balances at the state level next session with three justices already having expressed support for a fringe reading of the Constitution that would allow partisan state legislatures to over-ride the results of a free and fair election. This and more has facilitated the division of the country into two widely disparate camps.
Which leads to Ms. Polidura’s letter about inflation.
Oil prices and inflation in general are determined by market forces, not executive action. Pinning that on President Biden is just political gamesmanship, which, if successful, as seems likely, would lead to the election of the very same people who still support the former president despite all the testimony against him. People like candidate Mastriano in Pennsylvania, Senators Hawley and Cruz of Missouri and Texas, and Congresswoman Boebert of Colorado who unabashedly want to turn the United States into a theocracy. And a theocracy by definition means minority rule, which explains their voter suppression measures, their opposition to immigrants not of their faith, and their support for the Jan. 6 coup attempt.
So, if anyone is looking to place blame for our country in decline, there we have it.
Jeffrey Cooper
Portsmouth
Speak up against offshore oil drilling in New Hampshire
July 29 — To the Editor
Profit is more important to large corporations than accommodating Americans during a period of turmoil and inflation. While oil and gas companies are still earning a profit, they raise gas prices while simultaneously damaging our Earth. Talk about two atrocities at once; criminal gas prices in addition to the Congress allying with the fossil fuel industry to increase offshore drilling. Yet, there is something we can do on a more local level.
Within the month, a Five Year Plan will be released by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which will determine the time and location of drilling on our coasts. New drilling locations will do nothing to ease the already nefarious gas prices. Not only this, but the addition of new sites would worsen our deteriorating air quality. In April of this year, the The American Lung Association stated that New Hampshire had improved grades for ozone, but had more days with high particle pollution. While this is partially positive, the addition of offshore drilling would increase our already high particle pollution. Additionally, the addition of new sites could disrupt wildlife and decrease our beautiful biodiversity in our community. This is an era where we desperately need to transition to clean energy.
I call on the public to contact BOEM and tell them Granite Staters do not support new offshore drilling in their upcoming plan. The future of our health and biodiversity in our communities depend on it.
Jennifer Ross
Portsmouth
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: The forces behind mass shootings and a suggested solution: Letters
