Readers
To win war on drugs, strategy must change
Our war on drugs is nearly lost. Our consumption of illegal drugs has not only devastated our friend, Mexico, but also is consuming our own country.
Insane violence has crossed the border and become commonplace in our own cities.
Neither elected nor appointed leaders have the stomach to face the issue directly.
Powerful and possibly dangerous interests benefit directly from this war.
Penitentiaries, public and private; all levels of law enforcement; and others who profit from incarceration resist the only path to bring our national nightmare to an end.
Decriminalizing all illegal drugs is the path forward. There is no other way.
They must be regulated and taxed the same as cigarettes and alcohol.
When prices collapse, as they must, criminals will no longer have the incentive to continue in this immoral trade. At the same time, we must provide counseling and rehabilitation to help those who seek it.
We cannot expect help from politicians. This can only succeed as a bottom-up movement as American citizens demand an end to this nightmare.
Grant Hilden
retired
Green Valley
Calling for a revolt on Tumamoc Hill
Would someone explain to me why Pima County can spend $4.7 million to buy 320 acres of Tumamoc Hill while cutting mandatory services county government is responsible for?
As far as I am concerned, every person who touched this abomination of wasteful, luxury spending should be fired from county government and impeached or recalled from the county Board of Supervisors.
I want it done now! It’s past time of a full-fledged taxpayer revolt!
Patricia Noyes
Oro Valley
Waging her own battle against war machine
Who is the boss of our commander in chief? When it’s not “we, the people,” we’re in trouble.
When we surrender our power to the wealthy war machine, and when our mightily armed military is not taking orders from its civilian commander in chief, who has not been taking orders from us, the result is our present situation.
The war machine, to which we sold our military, has turned mainstream media into a propaganda vehicle – newspapers, television, and even military recruiting films at the movies.
It has made the military its poster child and placed its grieving mothers on a pedestal. It is a treacherous, tricky, untouchable tyrant.
Favorite kids of the war machine, the billionaire bosses of Raytheon, rendering us a prime target for other terrorists, brag about their products.
While Raytheon hires workers with tunnel vision to build weapons of mass destruction, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base seduces abused young brains to use them, and the media broadcast worshipful odes to the mother of war.
Educated, rational people of Tucson and the world have been bullied and brainwashed into accepting the war machine’s abuse – mind, body and soul – as “the way it is.”
“That’s the way it is,” is the way it is because most people who know the truth pretend not to see it and do nothing about it, in fear of the even more fearful, and violent, “messenger-killers.”
I am outraged by our collective cowardice and, at the same time, I feel sorry for us. I don’t enjoy hurting anybody – we’ve all been hurt more than enough.
I want only to knock the mother of war off her pedestal. Her children – the children of our world – are not dying for God or freedom or any other bogus cause.
Her kids are trained to kill and are being slaughtered because the war machine, boss of the people on Earth, is a ruthless liar. Only the courage to face reality can save us.
Gretchen Nielsen
Firearm Licensing Act in reader’s cross hairs
U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., recently sponsored H.R. 45, aka Blair Holt’s Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act.
The bill, a licensing and registration scheme, is a reintroduction of a 2007 bill that contained much of the same language and was co-sponsored by several well-known anti-gun legislators, including Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.
H.R. 45 has no co-sponsors. Hopefully, it will not get any.
Under H.R. 45, possession of firearms will be illegal without a license issued by the U.S. attorney general. The application requires a photo, address, thumbprint and fee. And those are only some of the requirements.
Under this bill, firearms (private property) could only be sold or transferred via a licensed manufacturer, dealer or collector who also has a valid firearms license. Is this the back-door approach to closing the nonexistent “gun show loophole”?
The bill eliminates the prohibition against establishing a registration database and requires the attorney general to establish a database of every handgun sale, transfer and owner’s address in America. The possession of any legal firearm without a license would be a crime with stiff penalties.
These are just the highlights of this bill. If you are OK with this manipulation of your constitutional rights, then do nothing (silence is consent).
If this legislation becomes law, it will be our fault, not “the government’s.”
Bob Foster
Hereford