Universal background checks won’t work
Regarding “How you and everyone you know can help stop California mass shootings” (Open Forum, SFChronicle .com, Jan. 26): One of the authors’ recommendations is universal background checks. This is pretend thinking because there is no such thing now and never will be.
Proof ? Humboldt County, where I live, is a high-crime area. Any time I check the list of people arrested for various offenses, a common phrase among the charges they face is “felon in possession of a firearm.” That firearm was not acquired legally, and the person in possession did not go through a background check.
The reality is that America is so awash in stolen and illegal firearms that anyone can buy one on the street. Words will not change that.
Richard Sanborn, Bayside, Humboldt County
F for school segregation
Regarding “Teachers like me know what kinds of schools California considers excellent. Segregated ones” (Open Forum, SFChronicle.com, Jan. 29): Thank you to Sarah Wheeler for once again highlighting our long-standing issue with white privilege and segregation in education.
The schools cited, Hillcrest and Crocker Highlands in Oakland and the Piedmont schools, as well as other schools with similar demographics, have no reason to make changes to their elitist system. These neighborhoods consist of more than a majority of white, affluent residents.
Unless the residents of these exclusive enclaves decide that they are affected negatively by their closed system, or the government or a court steps in, this issue remains insoluble. Linda Sayler, Oakland
Time to listen
Regarding “‘Living in shipping containers’: Half Moon Bay shooting reveals poor conditions on California farms” (Politics, SFChronicle.com, Jan. 25): When I was chair of the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board, I saw many farmworkers who had no housing whatsoever — they lived in their cars in shopping centers in cities like Mecca in Riverside County. I gave many speeches about this throughout California, and no one would listen.
It’s time to provide housing as well as adequate housing. Maybe these killings will wake us up.
William Gould, Stanford
Use propane for cooking
Regarding “Would giving up gas stoves threaten the art of Chinese cooking?” (Food, SFChronicle.com, Jan. 26): We need to distinguish between preserving traditional cooking practices and maintaining a public fossil fuel delivery infrastructure.
Yes, people have been cooking with flames for hundreds of thousands of years, but only for the past 100 years have we been piping methane gas into homes and businesses via utilities.
I love my Bosch induction stove; it is fast, safe, automated and easy to clean. And I am committed to complete home electrification in line with San Francisco’s climate plan. However, there are options for people who want to keep cooking with a flame, such as propane stoves.
Propane stoves are ubiquitous in places without extensive methane gas networks. Using propane would decouple us from these pipe networks designed to deliver much larger volumes of gas to furnaces and water heaters — the applications responsible for almost all of the climate and outdoor air pollution.
Moreover, while burning fossil propane still produces some carbon dioxide, unburned propane is not itself a potent greenhouse gas like methane, so further climate impacts from leakage would be avoided.
Zack Subin, San Francisco
Big disappointment
Regarding “Legendary S.F. stripper Carol Doda immortalized in new North Beach mural” (San Francisco, SFChron icle.com, Jan. 28): Of all the women who could represent North Beach and the Beats, the choice was Carol Doda? Famous for her artificially inflated physical attributes?
Why not Beat poet ruth weiss or someone else out of Brenda Knight’s book “Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution”?
The choice of Carol Doda was a “boob job” in and of itself.
Beth Elliott, Oakland