Faso a chameleon on guns
Dear Editor: The New York Times published a story Feb. 27, 2017, “Guns Create a Political Minefield in the Midterms: After Florida Shooting, Candidates Carefully Adjust Views.”
And so we see those adjustments in recent statements by U.S. Rep. John Faso.
His Feb. 16 public statement offered his prayers and the assertion that “the shooter shouldn’t have been eligible to purchase firearms.”
In a more hopeful development, a later response evolved. Although criticizing the FBI, he 1) repeated his support for strengthened background checks, 2) agreed that a ban on bump stocks should be examined, and 3) said we should “seriously explore” raising the age to buy semiautomatic weapons.
Faso promotes himself as a moderate member of the Problem Solvers Caucus in Congress. We are encouraged to believe he will work hard to advance his proposals. Contrast these statements on his website: He is “proud” of his A rating from the NRA; he says he will fight “liberal efforts to trample on our freedoms”; he voted for a bill loosening restrictions on carrying concealed guns across state lines.
In a C-SPAN interview, Faso rejected as an “outlandish smear” the claim that the NRA’s $8,000 donation to him would influence his votes and offered a defense of the NRA lobby: Some NRA members work for police, fire and other emergency departments and are “enmeshed in our community, and ... to say that they somehow don’t care about school shootings and other violence is really an outright lie.”
Chameleon: A lizard ... that changes its skin color to match its surroundings so that it cannot be seen. (Cambridge Online Dictionary)
Tom Denton, Highland the house and a fence. The vivid colors of the leaves drifting to ground announce the approach of fall, as does the occasional loud thud of an acorn bouncing off an old abandoned pickup rusting in the undergrowth. Someone used this place to find the peace of mind that comes from disavowal, exchanging once proud ownership for anonymity.
A plastic grocery bag snatched from the breeze by a high branch noisily competes with the birdsongs. Discarded plastics far outweigh all the vehicles abandoned on the landscape. A sturdy reusable shopping bag can last for a decade, and in that time displace about a thousand disposable ones. The reusables needed for an average shopping trip can easily push that number to 5,000. And plastic is forever.
An individual committed to keeping that many single-use bags out of the environment certainly will not solve the problem. But for each friend, and each friend of a friend, gently persuaded to come on board, the impact grows exponentially.
Eventually our footsteps begin to leave a smaller footprint.
Lee Goldman, Modena