No longer a Democrat
Today I removed this filthy uniform. Having been registered “Democrat” to support Bernie Sanders’ presidential run, prior to his retreat to cowardice and fealty, I return to “non-affiliated” with respect to party politics.
Local issues aside, in this upside-down world, national Democrats are now the war party, abandoning diplomacy and showering Ukraine with weaponry in the U.S. proxy war against a nuclear-armed Russia.
President Biden just killed the Senate resolution to end the Saudi war on Yemen, the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
And despite another Pentagon audit failure where they couldn’t account for more than 60% of their assets (trillions!), Democrats joined Republicans to overwhelmingly pass the $858 billion 2023 military spending budget.
It is still true, as MLK Jr. stated in 1967, that the U.S. government is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” I won’t “affiliate” with the immoral, corporate-owned partisans engaged in apocalyptic, destructive warmongering.
Derek Volkart
Talent
High-capacity magazine ban
Harney County Judge Robert Raschio put the voter-approved high-capacity magazine ban on hold until questions about its constitutionality can be decided.
There are nine other states that ban high-capacity magazines and there was a federal ban from 1994 to 2004. The NRA and others have already challenged these bans and their constitutionality has been repeatedly upheld by the courts.
The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on the basis of there being no inherent right to an abortion mentioned in the Constitution. The same can be said about high-capacity magazines — or assault rifles, for that matter. If we were to go by the intent of the Founding Fathers, as “constitutional originalists” like Justice Alito insist we should, then the only guns we’d have any right to would be those they knew about — muzzleloaders.
How many more schoolchildren need to be mowed down before we finally realize how insane it is to let gun fetishists prevent us from addressing our epidemic of gun violence? Some say it’s just the American way, but it doesn’t have to be. There’s nothing legal that can be done with a gun that can’t be done with a 10-round magazine.
Michael Steely
Medford