Guns in national parks — trading tranquility for fear

The gun lobby and our outgoing president are not only misguided but delusional. To introduce guns, long and short, into the bastion of our national treasures of parks and forests will forever take the safety, family-friendliness, and intrinsic beauty away and replace it with a gut fear. You will never know if the next person you see or don’t see is training a gun sight on you legally. Must Congress give in to those who only feel safe with the cold metal next to their body?

The forever-paranoid have even gone so far as to use my daughter’s murder on the National Park Service’s Blue Ridge Parkway by a spree killer to promote their cause. They claim that if she had a gun, she could have saved herself. These zealots have rewritten the facts of her murder. My daughter was shot in the back of her head because she had no idea anyone was there. It was the middle of a warm, sunny, fall afternoon. She was in plain view of her car before her murder. The world will never know of the talents she will not be able to share. All because an angry man stole a gun and the gun owner did not report the theft!

By opening our national parks and forests to guns, people will not feel as safe or free to wander, visit, or camp and enjoy the beauty of our natural wonders.

Columbia, S.C.

They missed the early signs of recession

From Wes Pedersen

How odd that so many of those on Capitol Hill now making recommendations for the national economic resuscitation plan should have missed the signs a year ago that the nation was in a full-fledged recession. Had they listened then not to the frauds at the elite economic journals but to their in-pain constituents, they could have effected programs to react early to the greatest threat to the economy since the 1930s.

As it is, we are racing out of the Great Recession of 2008 into the Great Depression of 2009. Dithering and posturing by Congress are two luxuries this patched-pants new era cannot afford.

Chevy Chase, Md.

Oust Duncan from post

From Linda Featherston

Republican National Committee Chairman Robert “Mike” Duncan has been a sorry leader for his entire term. He does not represent conservatives and he better not get reelected if the Republican Party ever expects to receive another dime from the grassroots.

Waxahachie, Texas