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Wednesday, November 15, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
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Editorial…
Contribution and responsibility
Cris Converse, formerly of Pine Meadow
Ranch, made an extraordinary bequest to the
City of Sisters last week, in the memory of
her mother, Dorro Sokol, longtime owner and
operator of PMR.
After negotiating with the City to allow
the acquisition of 2.1 cubic feet per second
of quasi-municipal water rights, Converse on
Thursday zeroed out the $250,000 price tag, in
effect giving the City the water.
Sokol was one of the people who shaped
the community of Sisters — an outsized pres-
ence that belied her physical stature. She
served Sisters on its planning commission and
as a Rotarian. She felt strongly about what
made Sisters a good place to be — and she
was never reticent about expressing herself on
that subject.
Converse’s largess was offered in the spirit
of service — of contribution and responsibility.
“The world is a little whacked out,” she
told the City Council. “But I believe that we,
by being responsible and contributing, can
make a difference.”
She’s right. The national discourse has
grown so bizarre and toxic that it some-
times feels like everything is coming apart
at the seams. It’s easy to feel like your voice
doesn’t count; that it’s not even heard amid the
maelstrom.
We’re fortunate to live in a community
that’s small enough and tight-knit enough that
anybody who feels responsible for the quality
of their community can contribute and make a
difference. Many, many Sisters residents do,
every day. Contributions of time and talent are
every bit as valuable as any donation. We’re
not all in the position to make a quarter-mil-
lion dollar donation to the citizens of the town
— but we can all do something.
And we can all tip the hat to Cris Converse
for offering up a gift that honors a legacy of
service.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
Letters to the Editor…
The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer’s name, address and phone number. Let-
ters to the Editor is an open forum for the community and contains unsolicited opinions not necessarily shared by the Editor.
The Nugget reserves the right to edit, omit, respond or ask for a response to letters submitted to the Editor. Letters should be
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To the Editor:
In response to the headline “Bus Barn to
be built at high school,” I say: “Hold on…
not so fast!” There are big problems with this
proposal.
Traffic safety issues are not adequately
addressed. The proposed entry/exit is a poten-
tial choke point as buses, student drivers,
maintenance vehicles, delivery trucks, bicy-
cles and pedestrians converge. This traffic
density will also degrade air quality.
Students who attend classes in the new
technical education classroom must walk from
the main building across several active traffic
lanes.
Users of SPRD, skate park, bike park, disc
golf and sports fields must negotiate a confus-
ing route to their parking areas.
Snow removal will be significantly more
difficult, with multiple traffic lanes, a round-
about and chain-link fencing to deal with.
This plan is like dropping an industrial park
in the middle of the high school landscape. It
is ill-conceived, unsightly, noisy and pollut-
ing. A metal warehouse doesn’t complement
our beautiful high school building. Trees will
be cut to make way for an ugly chain-link
fence. Rows of yellow buses will be fully vis-
ible through that fencing from the State Scenic
Byway (Highway 242).
What’s the hurry to push this project
through? It wasn’t on the list of projects that
taxpayers voted for in the bond measure. $2
million is a lot of taxpayer money for a glori-
fied bus barn! No overall vision has been devel-
oped for use of the windfall $4 million grant.
See LETTERS on page 16
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Jonah
Goldberg
Among the many prob-
lems with the Great Gun
Debate these days is that
the pro-gun crowd wants to
make it a culture-war bat-
tle and the anti-gun crowd
wants to pretend that it isn’t.
On public policy grounds,
the pro-gun people have the
better arguments. Firearm
homicides have declined
since the 1990s despite the
loosening of gun laws.
Almost none of the reme-
dies proposed in the wake of
mass shootings would have
actually prevented those
crimes (though had so-called
bump stocks been banned —
as they should be — fewer
would have died in the Las
Vegas shooting last month).
Indeed, it’s common in
the aftermath of shootings to
hear pundits and politicians
call for the passage of laws
that already exist. I’ve lost
count of the number of times
people have insisted that
“machine guns” be banned—
they essentially already are.
Others talk about banning
“assault weapons” as if such
a designation describes a
specific kind of weapon. It
doesn’t. Nor would banning
assault weapons, however
defined, put much of a dent
in the problem. Rifles of all
kinds account for just 3 per-
cent of the murder rate.
The slaughter at a Texas
church fits the pattern. Calls
went out for background
checks. But the shooter
passed his; he just lied on the
application. Some argued
that people convicted of
spousal abuse—like the
shooter—should be barred
from getting a gun. That’s
already federal law. (To
be sure, such laws should
be enforced better than the
Trump administration seems
inclined to do.)
More broadly, President
Trump and a GOP-controlled
Congress will not do any-
thing significant to restrict
gun rights in America.
And the experience under
President Obama, particu-
larly in the wake of the
Sandy Hook shooting, dem-
onstrates that even some
Democrats don’t want to
move against their electoral
self-interest.
Indeed, the main reason
for inaction isn’t the “stran-
glehold” of the National
Rifle Association — a rela-
tive piker when it comes to
political spending — but
the fact that millions of gun
owners are likely to vote on
the gun issue, while millions
of gun-control supporters are
not. Also, a supermajority of
Americans (76 percent to 23
percent, according to Gallup)
do not want a ban on private
gun ownership.
These facts probably
help explain why the NRA
has taken a dark turn of late,
releasing ads that have virtu-
ally nothing to do with gun
laws and everything to do
with fueling cultural resent-
ment. It’s hard for a public
policy lobbying outfit to
keep membership dues flow-
ing when they’ve already
won.
Meanwhile, anti-gun
campaigners cling to the
belief that they are a cadre
of dedicated pragmatists
who merely seek sensible
gun-control laws. No doubt
there are some who fit this
description. But given how
the most vocal advocates of
gun control tend to get basic
facts wrong and have a his-
tory of praising countries
such as Australia, which all
but banned guns outright for
normal citizens, it’s easy to
see why gun-rights support-
ers are suspicious about what
their real goal is.
In 2015, the New York
Times ran its first front-page
editorial in 95 years to call
for, in part, the confisca-
tion of millions of guns.
Last month, columnist Bret
Stephens called for out-
right repeal of the Second
Amendment.
It’s a useful thought
experiment to ask what
America would look like if
the gun controllers started
to rack up policy victories,
confiscating guns from law-
abiding gun owners. Aside
from the massive financial
windfall for the NRA, mil-
lions of Americans would
have their darkest suspicions
confirmed, and the deep
resentment already felt in
much of “red state” America
would intensify beyond any-
thing we’ve experienced
lately.
Perhaps there would be
fewer mass murders and
other gun deaths — though
I’m skeptical. I’m sure our
politics would be far uglier
than they already are.
© 2017 Tribune Content
Agency, LLC
Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and
are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.
