Chickenhawks I say
When a guy blusters and bloviates about his determination to protect America from all enemies foreign and domestic, all one needs to do is compare what others with similar bluster and bloviation in their permanent records have expressed.
Mr. Trump sounds a lot like Ex VP Cheney and our conservative friend Mr. Limbaugh. All veteran chickenhawk draft dodgers. But they know best, don’t they?
Tommy Holeman/Niwot
Suitable gun ranges?
I am most perplexed and upset over revisiting the “possibly suited” gun fun ranges in populated areas in nearby mountain communities, in my case Allenspark. A few years ago this idea was soundly and sanely condemned and abandoned as not only far too dangerous, but an extreme insult to the quiet environment in our mountains. Are you now willing to risk the collateral damage, like Glenn Martin, the grandfather killed last week by a stray bullet? Has the resident and guest population in our nearby mountains decreased, do you think? And now the risk of an occasional Glenn Martin killing is acceptable? I raised my family in a cabin near Allenspark and well within range of the proposed sites. I would not have let my children live next to a shooting gallery where they would have to think about a stray shot every day.
Bullets travel far. Twice as far as their sound. Even a .22 will carry a mile. Hundreds and hundreds of homes, cabins, guest facilities, hiking, camping, biking areas lie within easy range of gunfire which is still lethal, like an offhand shot into the air. Do we really think that stray shots don’t land and won’t occur? How much would the odds go up with each beer? Shooting is not like snowshoeing. Even if no one happens to get shot on a given day — at the very least it interferes with many others’ “right to quiet enjoyment” of their home or campsite and is completely incongruent in our mountain recreation areas. Add the four-wheelers and dirt bikes? What are we creating? An auditory war zone? Is that the idea? With an occasional grandfather sacrifice to pay for our fun and amusement.
A shooting range needs not to be a hidden, unsupervised, unbounded hillside in a mountain forest. It would serve far better to be in the open where sightlines are long and safety is certain. This should happen on the plains on private property as legitimate business for landowners and ranchers where shooting can be enjoyable, safe and professionally managed. It would also be safer to build indoor ranges if we need them that badly. If there is really a demand, people will come and enjoy their firepower, and others will not be forced to endure the awful sound of gunfire, and the occasional meaningless destruction of a family, (it’s not just fireworks, which we are much more responsible and careful with than bullets).
No amount of happy fun or recreational imperative overrides the certainty of careless periodic loss of a life and destruction of a peaceful, natural environment. No gunfire occurs naturally in nature. There already are a number of successful privately owned and managed shooting ranges in our county. Why is this long-established, common sense recreation establishment not encouraged and our mountains left to nature and in peace?
John Gilburt/Allenspark
Whatever works best
The world will be a more dangerous place, unless we write to our elected officials as follows: If the sanctions on Iran will keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons and from funneling more money to terrorists, then we should keep the sanctions in place.
If, however, we need a deal in order to keep Iran from getting such weapons, we must make such deal as effective as possible: We must make the lifting of sanctions contingent upon unlimited access to possible nuclear weapons sites—and this should be in effect for more than 10 years.
Alex Sokolow/Santa Monica, CA
