Winston-Salem Journal LTE SU 02/03/13

Paying attention

One of your contributors to the Jan. 26 Scorecard, in referring to the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya, stated that if a Republican had been president at the time of the attack, he would have been forced from office. She goes on to say that "no one died at Watergate." I don't know what point she was trying to make, unless it is that criminal acts should be acceptable as long as her party commits them and no one dies, but it does give me the chance to wonder if she knows how many U.S. Marines and other U.S. service personnel died in Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983, and who was president then.

I would suggest that more attention be paid to Bobby Jindal ("rising star" in the Republican Party and governor of Louisiana) when he states that the Republican Party needs, among other things, to "stop being the stupid party."

All the reports I've read say that 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers died in Beirut and Ronald Reagan was president. He claimed to be a Republican, didn't he?

PAUL D. WHITSON

Advance

Public information

The writer of the Jan. 22 letter "Public permits" sincerely believes that the restriction of access to gun records is analogous to the restriction of a free press. However, the real difference between gun records and journalism is plainly obvious: ownership of a firearm is private business not meant to be aired for public consideration, especially consideration by the more unscrupulous members of our community. True journalism is the reporting of material pertinent to the public interest.

Do we have a right, as citizens, to know which of our neighbors are secretly hiding weapons in their nightstand drawer? Perhaps to make decisions for the safety of our children? I'd humbly suggest that providing easily searchable gun records allows criminals a dream map of homes to, depending on their particular strategy, avoid or invade, contingent upon whether or not there are firearms present in the household.

Yes, it's a fact that permits are public record, but, as Gene Policinski, the executive director of the First Amendment Center, put it, "in the pre-Internet era, much information that was 'public' existed in practical obscurity." So is it, foremost, a safe, and, secondly, practical action to invade these citizens' privacy and publish the names and addresses of law-abiding gun owners, essentially equating them to sex-offenders and other felons?

The privacy of law-abiding gun owners, private citizens in all capacities, is not paramount (or even barely necessary) to the maintenance of a free and democratic society.

RYAN BULLARD

Lewisville

Sum It Up

Will North Carolina’s conservative trend last?

Correspondent of the Week

A little kindness

I’m a conservative, but not the kind you read about in the media.

I believe we should have a small government that doesn’t intrude in our lives, but I include the lives of gay people in that. It doesn’t bother me for them to get married. (There’s no reason they shouldn’t suffer too, I say jokingly.)

I believe in low taxes. Government wastes a great deal of our money, even with revenues as low as they are today.

We need a social safety net. But I believe that we have created a culture of dependency that injures individuals and injures us as a nation. We can’t just throw people out on the street, but we need to do something. It makes sense to me that if unemployment is undesirable, people will do their best to avoid it.

I believe liberals usually have their hearts in the right place, but they fail to see the practical application of their beliefs. And they too often denigrate conservatives without hearing what we really say or checking their facts first. I think the media often distort things.

But I don’t believe everything I see on Fox News.

I’m glad that we have a two-party system; with it, things tend to even out. We don’t swing too far to the left or to the right (if that’s even possible, I say jokingly).

We’re all just doing the best we can. Let’s try to do so with a little kindness.

ERIC WELLER

Winston-Salem