Readers Write: Gun violence, various prices

Opinion editor's note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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Only in contemporary America is this not ironic. As we celebrated freedom from colonial tyranny on July 4th, we once again suffered the tyranny of freedom for average citizens to arm themselves with weapons of mass destruction ("Gunman on rooftop sprays parade crowd," front page, July 5).

I need not await the death or injury of family, friends or colleagues to know that our national embrace of semiautomatic weapons is deadly and costly. I agree with state Rep. Steve Sandell (Readers Write, July 5) that we should at least attach a surcharge to every weapon and ammunition sale that covers the cost of loss of life, medical care and long-term disability incurred by victims. Just as automobile owners and homeowners purchase liability insurance, gun owners should be required to share in this cost to society. If common sense and humanity do not speak to this issue, perhaps monetary factors will.

Mary Kemen, Chanhassen

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As America comes to resemble El Salvador in its gun violence, conspiracy-driven politics and corrosion of institutional norms, I find myself saying what supporters of Donald Trump have been saying for years (although for different reasons than they do): This is not the country I grew up in and raised a family in.

One thing we do have are lots of good people with guns and lots of police committed to serving the public. And yet the massacres continue.

Michael Harwell, Blaine

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"The Lottery" is a short story by Shirley Jackson. It was first published in 1948. Despite being controversial from the start, it eventually made its way into the mainstream. I read it as part of high school literature class.

The story, in which a random member of a community is selected for execution, was memorable and frightening. Like a lot of readers, I felt revulsion for a community that could nonchalantly maintain such a hideous and awful tradition. Fortunately, my adolescent mind assured me that this was "just a story" and that such a situation would never be tolerated in the real world.

The horrific slaughter in Texas and now in Highland Park, Ill., only prompts the usual tropes. The Republicans say it's a mental health issue and the Democrats blame the guns. Who knows? Maybe it's something else altogether. It really doesn't matter, because whatever the reason, we will do nothing. Our leaders will do nothing. By our inaction, and failure to demand change, we are complicit. We all have blood on our hands, but it's easy to find others to blame. And so it will happen again and again and again. An American tradition.

Just like the people in the story, we stand on the edge and stare into the violent carnage we sanction. We may be relieved that it wasn't our turn, but deep in our gut, we are terrified. Perhaps we won't be so lucky next time.

The last line of the story haunts me now more than ever:

"'It isn't fair, it isn't right,' Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her."

James Ingebrand, Scottsdale, Ariz.

Points and counterpoints

I'm sorry to rain on a July 5 letter writer's parade ("Fuel prices: Biden's fault, not Putin's," responding to "Prices: How Putin's war is affecting me," Readers Write, July 1), but here are the facts:

Fuel prices do not rise because of rhetoric about where the country should go 20 years in the future. They rise because of supply and demand. And, no, fuel prices were not rising long before Russia invaded Ukraine. They rose as a direct result of that invasion.

It's laughable to say that "Biden's weak foreign policy made it easy for Vladimir Putin to boldly invade Ukraine with little fear of consequences." The weakness was all that of his predecessor's, who sold out the Ukrainians by refusing to deliver the weapons that Congress had already approved unless they first manufactured dirt on Biden. Moreover, Trump, on international TV, explicitly told the world he trusted the word of his buddy Vladimir over the U.S. intelligence services. Now tell me whose weakness emboldened Putin.

President Joe Biden's policies are being blamed for inflation. This is demonstrably false. Two major pieces of legislation have been passed since the president's inauguration:

• The infrastructure bill that upgraded our roads, ports, bridges, railroads and the like.

Both were popular enough that even Republicans who voted against them later took credit for them when their provisions began to take effect.

A second "infrastructure" bill, known as the Build Back Better Act, was never passed. Bills that are not passed cannot possibly cause inflation.

Inflation is the result of pent-up demand that burst forth when America emerged from the pandemic; from the dislocation of worldwide supply chains undermined by the same cause, and from the drop in the availability of oil due to the Western allies boycotting Russia's exports due to the invasion of Ukraine.

Stephen Kurt Partridge, Edina

I, too, live in a modest single-family home and am on Social Security, but I take issue with the July 1 letter writer's belief that the utility price increases are the fault of the war in Ukraine.

It is true that some of the increases can be attributed to the situation in Ukraine, but the energy bill rise is also largely due to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission deciding it was OK for our rates to help offset the cost from states like Texas. Texas residents, as well as some others, got huge price reductions on energy for heating, then got caught flat-footed when severe winter storms hit in 2021.

Minnesota residents were not the cause of the cost overruns, but we need to reimburse the energy companies for the increases ("Judges say gas users must pay $660M," front page, May 25).

Of course we also have supply shortfalls, bird flu, and some plain greed by oil companies and producers to add to the problems.

Please don't lay this at the feet of the Ukrainians. They have enough problems.

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Before we get all superior pointing fingers at our favorite gas price scapegoat (fuel prices letter, July 5), let us remember the old saying about one finger pointing out leaves three pointing back. Sitting on my porch recently, I counted five delivery trucks rumbling through my neighborhood — Amazon, U.S. Postal Service, FedEx, UPS, Amazon Prime — on a Sunday! I'm not sure about all the issues surrounding gasoline supply, but there does seem to be an excessive demand for immediate gratification. I suspect that as Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of the free market inevitably sorts this out (it always does) the scapegoats will claim hero status as in, "I alone fixed this."