Editor’s note: This letter is much longer than we normally print, but it deals with a number of topics that the writer and others have been discussing in recent weeks and we have decided to run it in full to give her an opportunity to respond after others have taken her to task on some of these issues.
Editor:
As I’ve said before, rural America accounts for just 16 to 20 percent of the nation’s population. Linn County’s population is 118,122 (2011) in an area of 2,292 square miles.
That’s 50 people per square mile. Sweet Home’s density is 1,684 people per square mile, while New York’s is 27,012 people per square mile (that’d bring Sweet Home’s pop. to 143,163.6) .
Los Angeles has 8,092 people per square mile.
Now consider demographics: Linn County and Sweet Home are 93.20 percent and 93.30 percent white respectively.
New York is 44 percent white, 28.6 percent Hispanic ethnic groups, 25.5 percent black ethnic groups and 12.7 percent Asians… Los Angeles is 49.8 percent whites, 48.5 percent Hispanic ethnic groups, 11.3 percent Asian ethnic groups, 9.6 percent black and on and on….
Imagine all of ‘em armed to the teeth.
So I think Sheriff Tim Mueller is out of place and waaaay out of touch with America.
He lives in the snug, sparsely populated, homogeneous, insulated little community of Linn County. It doesn’t get any better than Oregon but you have to realize that you are not the norm. Support for gun control is much stronger among big-city police chiefs.
Plus Mueller is a law enforcement officer. Enforcing the law is his job! He can’t cherry pick.
And now Mueller will go on Glenn “I could give a flying c–p about the political process – we’re an entertainment company” Beck’s show and embarrass Linn County and Oregon, all for the love of a killing machine.
Police Chief Scott Knight, co-chair of the National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence — a coalition of nine national police groups that favor gun control — says he doesn’t think the NRA actually cares about cops. He was once a member himself, but dropped out after the gun lobby fought restrictions on Teflon-coated “cop killer” bullets, which are capable of piercing police body armor.
“The NRA has ingratiated itself with the rank and file. It is very masterful. I call it window dressing, a facade. It is all part of a shell game being played on the American public,” Knight says.
A con game.
Police officers being pro-gun is like Christians being pro-gun (and/or Republican). It’s counterintuitive, inappropriate.
Imagine being a cop and trying to contain a bad situation when – everybody is carrying a handgun! Our policing system would become impotent wouldn’t it? The GOP wants to cut the police, fire etc. anyway so this works for them.
Heck, even guns in the hands of the police is scary.
I witnessed an incident from my bedroom window around 2 a.m. a few years back with a Sweet Home cop screaming and going bananas pointing his gun at the head of a subdued (kneeling/hands behind back) ectomorphic boy (13 y/o?) who lived on the corner.
The cop was hiding behind his open car door most of the time pointing his gun through his open window. The boy was trying to talk to the officer but every time the cop would scream for him to “SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!”
I figured I’d go over and get the boy’s parents, but the cop was so totally hyped-up hysterical I was scared to go out for fear of making things worse (I would have been coming up behind him).
Finally an older officer came and took over, letting the boy go home. Whew!
What looked to be the very same officer made the front page of this newspaper, again pointing his gun at the head of a subdued (handcuffed) suspect.
Just imagine that same cop or similar hysterical cop with the added worry he was surrounded by guns?
The NRA should be smacked down for inciting nationwide paranoia; for promoting violence.
Unlike in 1791, the U.S. today has a strong judicial system, a strong police force, an independent media, the biggest military in the world, and a relatively strong civil society. These make it unnecessary for citizens to carry guns.
As for the NRA’s fears of crime, gangs etc. I say, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Corporations and their GOP enablers have, over the past half century, insidiously re-established their control over WDC. They’ve slowly dismantled all the safeguards put in place after the first Great Depression and gutted the power and wealth of the American worker via union busting, and their right-to-work (ie.for less) propaganda etc.
Since 1982 productivity has surged. Corporate profits are soaring but income and wages remain in 1982.
Profits are shared amongst the upper management and CEOs, not the worker; the worker is sacrificed for even more profits via layoffs, benefit cuts, wage cuts, reduced hours. It’s immoral.
Not only that, but it has caused a 43.5 percent shortfall in Social Security’s tax revenue.
They have redistributed the wealth back up the food chain into their greedy hands, taking it out of play to where it just sits in vast offshore accounts, doing nothing.
America was at its best when income inequality was at its lowest 1940s thru 1970.
The Institute for Economics and Peace says: “The flattening of income distribution after 1945 helped facilitate the creation of a large consumer oriented middle class which was the foundation stone for the long post-war boom that underpinned the U.S.’s subsequent political economic pre-eminence.”
Add the Korean War, paid for with taxation; Vietnam with inflation; and then Reagan’s Cold war, like GWB’s Iraq/Afghanistan Wars, “paid” for by charging it on the American public’s credit card AND making sure via tax cuts that there would be no money to pay the balance, caused the U.S. to have budget deficits until 1998 and then again starting in 2002 and what looks to be in perpetuity.
The Iraq war also caused a seeming endless escalation in the price of oil – another killer. Dr. Mamdouh G. Salameh, an international oil economist, believes the price of oil would now be no more than $US40 a barrel, if not for the Iraq war.
Then, in 1986, their man Reagan granted our first-ever blanket amnesty to illegal aliens that set the precedent for six more amnesties and a general relaxation of enforcement.
Illegal aliens undermine various job markets, bring in lots of drugs with the help of their gangs, communicable diseases, send billions in remittances back home and now have very real political power that both parties are kowtowing to.
Question: How can you say less drugs equals less drug users/abusers, drug violence, etc. but chuck that logic when it comes to guns? Less equals less.
Pack bear spray.
My unalienable right to life means that you must give up your freedom – to kill me.
Peace.
Diane Daiute
Sweet Home