Readers Write: March 20
Campus carry challenged for good reason
Gov. Nathan Deal is wise to require substantive changes in the ” Campus Carry ” bill before signing. The consistent opposition of Georgia’s public academic leadership is based on expert knowledge. What professor feels free to challenge a class if there’s a brooding sense that the reward might be a bullet? The absolutization of the 2nd Amendment is absolute madness. If classroom safety is a justifiable concern, we taxpayers should be willing to support trained security police as they stand guard over academic freedom.
JOSEPH D. HERRING, JOHNS CREEK
Where are the SCOTUS Protestants?
President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, is chief judge of the District of Columbia and yet another Washington insider. As Scalia pointed out in 2015, the SCOTUS is not representative of America, particularly in that they are all only Yale- or Harvard-educated lawyers, and not a single one is Protestant. None grew up in middle America, are all products of coastal states. Garland grew up about 10 miles north of Chicago, which still leaves out everything south of Chicago coast-to-coast unaccounted for. He attended both Harvard and Yale, which certainly doesn’t expand the court’s educational background to any of the fine law schools in other parts of the country. Garland is Jewish, so adding him would continue the total control of Catholic and Jewish faiths, split 5-4. There would still be no Protestant on the Supreme Court, to represent that 47 percent of the U.S. population who belong to that faith. Surely the president can find one measly qualified Protestant from a law school like Emory, Duke, Vanderbilt, Stanford, etc., to place on the highest court in the land.
L. G. EDMONDS, DECATUR
Washington has only fueled Trump’s appeal
Mona Charen is missing the point (“Future GOP will longingly remember ‘establishment’,” Opinion, Mar. 14). Trump is succeeding because folks are tired of the same old establishment failures. It is not the failure to repeal Obamacare that angers us, it is never introducing an alternative. And the “establishment” could never come up with a proposal for immigration reform either. No action on tax reform, entitlement spending or reducing our debt. And if Trump was not leading, then Cruz would be another candidate that the establishment hates. A total lack of accomplishment in Washington over eight years has fueled Trump’s appeal, as it has for Bernie Sanders. After all, who is more establishment than Hillary? The voters are becoming as polarized as our Washington “leadership” and the establishment, both Democratic and Republican, have only themselves to blame.
STEVE HAVEY, CUMMING
Mayor should be thanked for MARTA support
Kudos to Mayor Kasim Reed for his support of MARTA. For many reasons, we need great public transportation, including for jobs and economic development. Even if one opts not to ride MARTA personally, she will still benefit from improved traffic, better air quality and better health. During Atlanta’s 1996 Olympics, G. Teague of Emory’s School of Public Health did a study revealing that when extreme traffic was diminished and more people took MARTA, there was a 41.6 percent diminution of childhood asthma cases severe enough to require hospital visits. We need to reduce carbon emissions, which are invisible, but which contribute to climate change and serious health problems. Our children and grandchildren deserve this. We all should support this half-penny increase in sales tax in order to reap the many benefits of improved public transportation.
KATHERINE MITCHELL, ATLANTA
