Tuesday letters
National debt, air fares, guns and more in today’s letters to the editor.
Pick of the day: What do we choose to protect?
When I lived in Salt Lake City, Utah, I took up the sport of bird hunting. I used a 12-gauge shotgun with a full choke. The magazine was capable of holding six shells, and with one in the chamber, it was a seven-shot repeater.
However, the Federal Migratory Bird Regulations limit the capacity of any repeating shotgun to three shells. Therefore, I was required to use a wooden plug that would permit only two shells to be inserted in the magazine. This limited the total capacity to three shots.
This raises a question: Do ducks have more political clout than schoolchildren?
SANFORD GROSS
CHRISTIANSBURG
January 15, 2013 - 7:56 AM
There is something fundamental that I don’t understand about arming teachers. How can a teacher’s gun be “armed and ready” to shoot an intruder at a moment’s notice and simultaneously “out of reach” so that a student could never gain access to the weapon? Even trained law enforcement officers have been stripped of their weapons. William Morva clobbered a sheriff’s deputy with a toilet paper dispenser, took the deputy’s service weapon, and shot Derrick McFarland, who was coming to help the deputy. Will we need to train our students what to do if another student takes a teacher’s weapon? Or what to do if the teacher turns out to be the perpetrator? (I realize the latter situation is unlikely, but after all we do, however rarely, have teachers who turn out to be predatory pedophiles, so the possibility that one might become a rampage mass-murderer is not zero. If we are considering every possible situation, this has to be on the table.)
Do you suppose each and every duck hunter immediately obeyed the law and modified their shotguns or maybe there were a few extremist, fanatical hunters obsessed with shooting ducks who ignored the law and kept their guns loaded up. I wonder how this was enforced.
This law was “supposedly” enforced (it existed in similar form in VA in my youth and probably still exists in VA) by the threat for the Game Warden inspected your guns as they prowl around the roadside looking for illegal poachers and stuff.
By stuff, I mean anything other sort of infraction/tax revenue that they could charge you with.