Letters: Supreme Court decision on bump stocks puts countless lives at risk
Supremely dumb decision
Bump stocks effectively convert assault weapons into machine guns, able to fire 800 rounds per minute. They create weapons of war! They don’t belong anywhere near civilians. Any sane person should be able to recognize that. But not the Supreme Court’s MAGA majority. No, they overturned the federal ban on bump stocks, putting countless lives in danger.
We saw just how deadly bump stocks are in 2017, when these devices were used in Las Vegas to kill 60 people and wound over 400 in America’s deadliest mass shooting. This ruling is a stain on the memory of those killed, wounded or impacted by the events of that night in 2017 — and will only put more lives in the line of fire.
With this decision, most protections against bump stocks have disappeared. States that don’t have their own laws restricting bump stocks will find that bump stocks are legal — enabling people to turn assault weapons into machine guns.
Machine guns don’t belong in our communities — and extremist judges who prioritize the gun lobby over public safety don’t belong in our courts. Come November, please vote up and down the ballot to prevent more extremist judicial appointments.
Jennifer Logan, Brunswick
Destroying basic humanity
I believe poverty is situational and never should be generational. I vehemently believe it never should be criminal.
The Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, wherein the ruling makes homelessness a crime destroys our basic humanity. Instead of arresting people who are homeless, we as a community must strive to address the key factors of increasing homelessness.
A key factor is the severe shortage of decent and affordable housing. Not to mention the challenges with mental health and addiction. Noone wakes up in the morning and says they want to be homeless — it is not a choice — it is a reality induced by a shortage of livable wages and decent affordable housing.
Fining people who are homeless only furthers their struggle with poverty. It gives them a criminal record now, which certainly does not help in their job searches and/or housing searches. Clearly, the answer is decent affordable housing, period. Let’s focus on our collective humanity.
Jeff Wilhite, executive director, Family Promise of Summit County
Uproar over nothing
Deceit, prejudice and mean-spiritedness are never pretty. The USA Today column by Ingrid Jacques (“Biden overplayed his hand on Title IX rewrite,” June 23) was all three.
There are at most 300 out of 336,000,000 Americans who call themselves “transgender” athletes, and fewer than 100 transgender public school students compete at all. The uproar about their participation in school sports is a tempest in a teapot — a filthy teapot at that.
Contests are meant to measure things against each other. Define those things and measure away. Name your athletic contests anything you want, “Boys only,” “Girls only,” “People over 5 feet,” “Runners with corns,” “Gymnasts who call themselves transgender,” “Gymnasts who don’t call themselves transgender,” “Plain old gymnasts” — whatever you want.
Making laws deciding who your athletics contests are allowed to include seems anti-American. The only reason it’s an issue is to degrade transgender people.
Politicians need to stop setting us against each other and do the work that needs doing. Education and health care have been parasitized by rich businessmen. The planet’s burning up, for God's sake. Get real.
Tricia Thomson, Akron
A deficit of facts
We progressives share Patrick T. Conley’s eagerness to see a “level playing field” on the Beacon Journal’s editorial pages (“Conservative balance,” June 16). On the other hand, we don’t share Conley’s predilection for misinformation, misdirection and making things up.
Conley claims that the national debt has increased by $10 trillion during the Biden administration. This simply isn’t true. In fact, the national debt has increased by about half that figure from the start of the first fiscal year of the Biden term. And that was due, in large part, to the failed Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and extravagant and unnecessary military spending. In fact, Trump is responsible for some of the largest budget deficits in our history. He and his fellow Republicans increased the deficit by more than 30%.
Conley claims, without evidence, that the Biden family “has been shamelessly enriching itself at public expense since WWI.” Republicans have carried out multiple investigations into President Biden’s finances and have found NO evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever.
Conley tells us that “illegal immigrant health care costs are overwhelming American hospitals.” Again, this is patently false. A study published in the journal Health Affairs found that immigrants accounted for about 12.6% of the U.S. population but only 8.6% of total health care spending. Other studies show that providing insurance to immigrants costs the health care system about $3,800 per person per year, less than one-half the corresponding cost ($9,428 per person per year) for U.S.-born adults.
Conley claims, again without evidence, that immigrants have cost Florida hospitals $566 million. This figure has been widely contradicted because it’s based on a flawed calculation. A more reasonable estimate by the nonpartisan Florida Policy Institute is $21.3 million.
Even his claim about Hunter Biden’s laptop is an exercise in misdirection. It’s true that the laptop has been used by the Biden Department of Justice in its case against the president’s son. Conley, though, conveniently ignored the Republican claims that the laptop contained reams of evidence showing corruption on the part of the entire Biden family. Those claims have been found to be utterly false.
I won’t address Conley’s personal and ad hominem attacks on the president.
Once again, we progressives welcome dialogue with our conservative neighbors. We just don’t like it when they cook up their own “facts.”
Rick Bohan, Akron
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Overturned ban on bump stocks will cost lives
