Addressing Another Shooting
Dear editor,
Another sad shooting on one of the country’s best holidays, he posted many online rants about shooting people, and dying at the hands of the police. His family refusing help from a school and deciding to home school him, Illinois shooting suspect was ‘known to law enforcement’ | Watch (msn.com). The left Democrats cry band the guns in less than a day after the shooting. For those of you who have forgotten the Las Vegas Police had a worst shooting some years ago in a high rise building during a big concert. Hats off to the Secret Service and the NYPD who put police snipers on tall buildings to prevent someone hurting the president or other people during special events. Guess New York has more high-rise buildings than most small towns that think it will never happen here! It is the same thinking with the schools, cost too much money to secure the doors or invest in active shooter software systems like we did after 911. Have not had another high jacking since then but we sure spent a lot of money on an outfit called TSA! When we will start spending money to prevent mental cases from doing stuff like this, putting them in a data base if they every try to buy a gun, spend money on our police departments, and security at our schools nothing will change. We talk about it a lot but never seen to get it done. Maybe if we quit sending so much money to other countries, we might have enough to spend on America!
Signed,
Mr. Harry L. Hall
USAF Veteran
Retired Police/Sheriff Lt.
Don’t Forget the Unborn Child
Dear editor,
In light of the recent Roe v. Wade decision, the Cibola Citizen published three long articles that strongly disapproved of its outcome. In all the articles a very important factor was missing. Nobody wrote about what actually happens in an abortion, including the fact that every abortion kills an innocent human. All embryology textbooks state that human life begins at conception. What happens to that life during an abortion is nothing short of horrific. He or she is sucked through a tube, dismembered, or delivered dead in a toilet from a medically-induced abortion. These procedures are not done to a blob of tissue or clump of cells as abortion advocates often state, but on a human that is smaller, less developed, more dependent, and in a different location than those outside of the womb. A newborn has those same four qualities when comparing them to a toddler, but obviously, we don’t allow or promote their demise.
The articles talked about abortion as healthcare or a human right. How can a procedure be called healthcare or a human right when a human dies every single time? AG Balderas wrote about several of our fundamental rights but left out the right to life that is in our Declaration of Independence.
Abortion proponents will usually come back to "my body, my choice," but the unborn have their own body parts, own DNA, and are a separate, distinct human from their mother. It’s obvious that the unborn is in the location it's supposed to be in at that time of his or her life. Well over 90% of abortions are because of convenience’s sake of the mother or coercion from a male partner or parents. The small percentage that is from rape and incest are often claimed as abortion defenses, but in reality, the pro-abortion advocate is often using those reasons to justify abortion in every case. Rape and incest are horrible crimes and the perpetrator should be punished to the full extent of the law. Obviously, those incidences are traumatic to the woman, but in the end, the crimes of the father should not mean the death of an innocent child.
Women are often in difficult situations, but there are 3,000 pro-life pregnancy centers nationwide that offer valuable assistance, plus the baby can be placed for adoption. Having their child killed is not the answer.
Monte Harms
Grants, NM
Press Releases 6/29
Dear Editor,
I found the two press releases from the governor and attorney general laughable. First, celebrating the murder of an innocent child like MLG does is sick and wrong. Choice comes before, not after conception. I know. What about rape victims? Thousands of rape victims have delivered the child and are glad they did. Besides, rape abortions account for less than 0.5 percent and incest less than 0.2 percent of all abortions performed. For fetal health three percent and the woman’s health four percent (strange to call them mothers when they are killing the person who would make them a mother). At best, less than eight percent of abortions are for the talking points of the pro-death movement. More statistics: four percent would interfere with education or career, seven percent not mature enough to raise a child, eight percent don’t want to be a single mother, 19 percent done having children, 23 percent couldn’t afford a baby, and 25 percent not ready for a child*. In other words, more than 93 percent were because the child would be an inconvenience but the act that produced the child apparently was not. For the record, abortion has not been banned. And this court undid an unconstitutional overreach in Roe just as the 1954 court did in correcting Plessy.
To my point. In both press releases, they said, “safeguarding the right of every woman in this state to make critical decisions about their own health" What about those women who were forced to get Covid tested? What about those women who were forced to wear a mask? What about those women who were forced to take a vaccine? The governor (and the pro-death movement) run around screaming “My body, my choice.” What choice did women (and men) have about their bodies when it came to her unconstitutional mandates?
Jerry L. Pike
*Statistics from a 2004 Guttmacher Institute study.
LWV NM responds to SCOTUS ruling on Roe v Wade 6.22
Dear editor,
The League of Women Voters of New Mexico is deeply grateful to the 2021 New Mexico State Legislature and the Governor for the passage of the Repeal Abortion Ban Act. With this protection in place, we will continue to exercise our constitutional rights and make our own decisions about reproductive healthcare. It took foresight to pass this legislation and the League is thankful for New Mexico’s leadership on this issue.
We call upon our policymakers to take further action ensuring the health, safety and freedom of all New Mexicans in light of the SCOTUS decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
The League of Women Voters of the United States President Dr. Deborah Turner and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón said in a joint statement that this ruling “will have devastating — and immediate — consequences across the country.”
Without the power to make our own decisions about our bodies, we become second class citizens.
New Mexico League of Women Voters
Our Two-Party Political System
Dear editor,
I am concerned at the inability of our two-party political system to address important issues. Apparently, I am not alone. Most voters are unhappy with how things are going, regardless of their party affiliation according to Katherine Gehl of The Institute for Political Innovation. According to Gehl, if you think of politics in the United States as an industry, it has only two major companies, Democrats and Republicans. These two political parties control the industry. They are both doing extremely well, raising lots of money, and winning elections. We, the voters, are the customers. Most of us don’t like the product they deliver but we keep buying it. Gehl says the system isn’t broken, its fixed (rigged) by our two political parties! She offers a possible solution-a new model for elections.
Recently I learned this new model for elections is being implemented in the state of Alaska for statewide offices.
Alaska is now using an open primary where all candidates are listed on the same ballot. Citizens cast their vote for the candidate of their choice. The top four candidates from the primary are then listed on the ballot for the general election. In the general election voters can rank the candidates 1-4, first choice, second choice, and so on. The winner of the general election is candidate who gets the majority (minimum of 50 percent) of the votes cast. If no candidate gets enough votes to win on the initial count, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and the votes redistributed to the other candidates who were ranked as the voters second choice and so on until a candidate gets enough to win.
I am interested in how this new system will work for Alaska. Will it give Alaskans a better more functional political product?
You can learn more about this model at the website for The Institute for Political Innovation (https://political-innovation.org). It has a link to a TED Talk video that explains it better than I can or get the book The Politics Industry-How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy by Katherine M Gehl and Michael E Porter.
Harry Sheski