Cartoon an insult to law enforcement
I am an AJC subscriber. I am also a 75-year-old white male, U.S. Air Force Security Forces Vietnam veteran and a retired Milwaukee, Wis.-area police officer with 25 years of service. I’ve been shot at, stabbed at and experienced countless physical and verbal confrontations. I understand that differences of opinion and lifestyle occur in our country. I understand the controversy in Ferguson, Mo. I understand that there is always more than one side to a story and believe that the AJC does a good job in reporting same.
However, the Sunday Mike Luckovich cartoon depicting a uniformed police officer shooting at a statue of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is over the top. It’s inflammatory, discriminatory and totally disgusting. It’s beyond a slap in the face of law enforcement officers of all races and gender who have served and are now serving.
ROBERT KACZKOWSKI, MCDONOUGH
With guns, we’re not the Wild West
With the so-called “open gun carry,” it seems that I will be limited in the places I formerly was “allowed” to go. Why would I go unarmed into a situation where many people are packing a gun? An untrained gun carrier is dangerous to everybody. Fortunately, there have been no shootouts whereby people get into an argument and innocent people get shot and even killed.
In the “Wild West,” guns were necessary; quite often, there were no lawmen around. Guns at that time also were “normal” weapons — a six-shooter. Today, rifles and guns that shoot many rounds per second put everyone at risk, including law-enforcement officers who may be called to quell an incident. The right to bear arms is guaranteed by the Second Amendment, but not to bear arms as we have developed them today.
DAVID CLARKE, BUFORD
Basic solutions for congestion issues
Kyle Wingfield’s article in Sunday’s AJC (“Roads plus transit,” Opinion, Aug. 24) is well-received, but it misses some key points. One of the missing elements in our transportation planning is the lack of real origin-destination demand studies to guide our planning, making most of it reactive instead of proactive. Another real weakness is the lack of real east-west arteries across the north side of Atlanta.
Roadways like Holcomb Bridge Road, Old Milton Parkway and Haynes Bridge Road have all been turned into local roads with heavy stoplight density. They need to be redesigned as continuous-flow roadways with overpasses, roundabouts and side roads for local access. The proposed rail extensions up Ga. 400 and into Cobb County are of benefit to major developers, not the traveling public. Atlanta is the least-dense city of its size in the world, and rail can never be a real source of transportation congestion relief.
MIKE LOWRY, ROSWELL
