Donald Trump has another international failure on his ineptness- genocide

Echo opinion published in The Sun Chronicle in Attleboro, Massachusetts:

Donald Trump: The man who caused the Kurdish Holocaust

It’s maddening to see America's Kurdish allies and their families needlessly slaughtered.

Within hours of President Trump’s announcement of U.S. withdrawal, the Turkish military, which was poised on the border, rolled their heavy guns into Syria and began killing Kurds. 

As everyone predicted, the Turks immediately began a genocide.

I’ve felt sick over the past week, to helplessly watch as our loyal Kurdish friends are betrayed.

Condemnation of Trump’s actions is full-throated, from Democrat and Republican alike. To mollify the furor, Trump promised to devastate Turkey’s economy if they started a Kurdish genocide.

But how do trade sanctions help massacred Kurds? They are dead and continue to die. Sanctions do nothing as the Turkish Army continues to destroy them.

It’s telling (and infuriating!) that Trump has not rescinded an upcoming White House meeting with Turkish President Erdogan. Trump does not really want to punish the Turks. I fully expect him to weasel out of his threat and allow them to proceed with their Kurdish Holocaust.

A footnote to all this is that thousands of imprisoned ISIS soldiers will be freed. The president offers no explanation why he is instigating this betrayal of loyal allies. What’s wrong with him?

Ken Watson,  Foxboro Massachusettes

Yes there is a solution to gun violence

What will it take to stop America's gun violence?

An opinion editorial published in The Virginia Pilot and reprinted in The Sun Chronicle, a Massachusetts newspaper.

Virginia Beach, VA- Twelve hard working innocent people were murdered in a mass shooting in Virginia Beach, on May 31, Friday afternoon.

The Virginia Beach community is now going through a process New Englanders know all too well because of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, — remembering the lost, struggling with incomprehensible grief, wondering if life will ever return to normal and asking, over and over, “Why?”

But for too many, this is normal now. (A heinous "new normal")

The Virginia Beach shooting bears some resemblance to other workplace shootings, including the massacre at Hartford Distributors in Manchester, almost nine years ago, when a deranged and disgruntled shooter sought to take out all his frustrations on his coworkers.

The “why” question will echo — nobody will be able to satisfactorily pin down what motivates people to do this. 

But the “what” question can be answered: The shooter had easy access to deadly weapons. And that problem has a solution.

The Virginia Beach shooter is said to have purchased the weapons he used legally. Two .45-caliber handguns, one of which had a “suppressor” that quiets the weapon when fired, and several empty extended magazines were found at the scene.

Saying they were purchased legally doesn’t say much. 

Virginia’s gun laws are among the loosest in the nation, according to the Giffords Law Center, which gives it a grade of “D.” Even after the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, when 32 people were killed, the state didn’t tighten up its gun laws as much as it could have.

Handgun purchasers in Virginia must undergo a background check to insure they are not convicted or indicted felons and that they do not have restraining orders.

There are few other restrictions.

There is no waiting period.

No license is required.

The only restrictions on the purchase of assault weapons are age and citizenship.

Machine guns must be registered with state police.

The looseness of the law might explain the Giffords Law Center finding that “in 2017, Virginia ... supplied crime guns to other states at the 12th highest rate among the states.

Virginia exported crime guns at nearly twice the national rate and nearly three times the rate at which it imported crime guns from other states.”

That underscores the need for legislation on the national level.

It’s plausible that the Virginia Beach shooter would have claimed fewer lives if he didn’t have access to those extended-capacity magazines. But engaging in an argument about hypotheticals is a distraction.

The concrete question is simple: Would stricter gun safety laws erect reasonable barriers to keep military-spec weapons from getting into the hands of madmen without infringing on the Second Amendment rights of responsible gun owners?

Yes. They would. With better federal laws, there would be fewer deaths from firearms.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam made stronger gun laws part of his 2017 campaign, but efforts to pass legislation that would limit gun magazine size and give local governments broader authority to ban guns in city buildings couldn’t get any traction in Virginia’s legislature.

In January, the legislature killed a bill that would have banned sales of large-capacity magazines such as the ones found in the Virginia Beach massacre.

But this is not a state-level problem. This is a national problem.

As of Monday, 167 people have been killed in 156 mass shootings just this year. The number will continue to grow.

It’s time to continue the push for national legislation similar to what Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut already have — a ban on assault weapons and extended magazines, among other smart restrictions.

Given the number of guns already in circulation in the country, it’s unlikely that legislation will end gun violence. But we cannot let it continue unabated.

The nation needs to look in its mirror and acknowledge the facts staring back at us: If we do not enact better gun safety legislation at the federal level, we share the responsibility for what comes next.

Impeach or not to impeach- opinion echo from Massachusetts

Letter to the editor of The Sun Chronicle a newspaper published in Attleboro, Massachusetts:

The national emergency called Donald Trump

We are in the midst of a national emergency. 

Impeach Donald Trump - now!

Trump is right about that, only he’s declared his emergency in the wrong place, because it's Donald Trump is himself that is the emergency.

Now, he is telling his people to defy rightful subpoenas, and not to cooperate with Congress. 

Why? Because he doesn’t want the country to hear about what a pathetic crook he is, and how he is filling the halls of power with miscreants like himself, that will do all his bidding.

The Constitution provides that Congress has the power to call witnesses before the people so we can hear their testimony for ourselves. The law is very clear on that. The Congress can also subpoena his tax records. The law is very clear on that also. We haven’t been in this much of a constitutional crisis since the Civil War, and we have to ask ourselves; what is this man hiding?

Just because we haven’t shown a direct legal link between him and Vladimir Putin doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

We know that Paul Manafort, his campaign manager, gave the Russians the Republican poling data. Why would he do that; if not to conspire with a hostile power to rig our election. Betrayal is a continuing theme with this administration, like the time at the Helsinki accords, when Trump betrayed his own intelligence people by upholding Putin’s denial of his 2016 election interference. So far, he’s done nothing to stop Putin from continuing his attack on our democracy.

Impeach Trump now!

He has ridiculed our free press and called it “the enemy of the people,” and why not? If you were him, would you want to hear your lies being fact checked, and hear the truth being spoken?

The Democratic Congress has a tough decision to make; whether or not to begin impeachment proceedings, which, with the Republican controlled Senate, is almost sure to fail. (MaineWriter- how much longer can Republicans ignore Donald Trump's incompetence?)

Do they go ahead on the grounds of principle, or do they play it safe, and err on the side of caution? Well, since we haven’t had crisis like this since the Civil War, maybe we should use a quote from back then; “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

Barry Close  Norton, Massachusetts