During the coronavirus pandemic, when the New Mexico Legislature offered videoconferencing as a way for the public to attend hearings without the risk of illness, participation soared. It is crucial that this practice continues. While the House is providing a virtual option for all committee meetings, procedures in the Senate vary from committee to committee, forcing New Mexicans to check on each one. This seems neither transparent nor democratic.
Issues being discussed, whether guns, health care or education, concern us all. Videoconferencing allows people from all over the state, no matter their circumstances, to take part. We at Indivisible SOS Santa Fe, and many others who are working for change, need easy access in order to be well-informed citizens.
Dottie Indyke
Santa Fe
Staggering carnage
We woke up Jan. 7 to learn a 6-year-old had shot his teacher in a first grade classroom. While seriously wounded, the teacher got her students out safely, staggered to the office to say, “Call 911,” and collapsed. The boy’s mother legally bought the 9 mm handgun. It came to school in his backpack; he purposely shot the teacher’s hand and chest. This problem can’t be solved by niggling steps; the public must be disarmed. This might never happen, but it’s time to call out supporters of our firearm sickness. The average daily firearm fatalities is over 90; fewer than 2% are mass shootings. The majority are suicides. In 2022, there were almost two mass shootings per day. The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting 10 years ago killed 20 students and six staff members. After that massacre, when nothing was done to limit firearms, my wife and I said probably nothing would ever be done. The U.S. has 13 times the firearms per capita as the world average. Hunters use shotguns and rifles to provide additional family food. They don’t use semi-automatic or automatic rifles. The Supreme Court ruling on the Second Amendment must be changed or ignored. I find hope in recent articles on the need to reduce the terrible toll caused by our insane number and love of firearms.
Douglas Reilly
Los Alamos
A movie with a message
In response to April Fair’s letter about the film EO (“A word of warning,” Letters to the Editor, Jan. 13) — yes, the lives of too many animals are a “horror” due, as you note, to “the lowest of human tendencies.” However, most people never give this a thought or simply don’t want to be reminded of it. EO is a film with a message, the full impact of which is missed if you walked out before the end.
Eileen Blau
Santa Fe
No more Shanahan
The New Mexican needs to retire Kim Shanahan to his Costa Rican paradise and get on board a fair and balanced real estate and land-use columnist. His views on the Old Pecos Trail corridor are repulsive. Sure, Kim, 25 homes on Old Pecos Trail will cure the housing crisis in Santa Fe. And now he has coined “housing denier,” more pejorative than his previously favored NIMBY. Face it: For him, density never had limits. He applied this bias as a contractor, as a member of the Planning Commission and now in the newspaper. Time to end his platform and move on.
Bernard Kolbor
Santa Fe
Sex wars?
So some Republicans are gearing up for yet another attack on women’s abortion rights once they get into full power. Perhaps American women should take a lesson from the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes. In this play, set during the Peloponnesian wars, the wives of the warring soldiers on both sides agree to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands and lovers until the men agree to a peace. Perhaps American women should agree to some such arrangement until the politicians, mostly men, agree to stop attacking women, legislatively and physically, over abortion rights.
And to maybe extend the peace between the sexes, men, once they reach the age of puberty, should undergo a vasectomy. Then later, when they are older and less irresponsible (perhaps), the vasectomies could be reversed to allow them to start a family. There should then be far fewer unwanted pregnancies, leading to less need for abortions. Sounds unreasonable? Not really, not any more unreasonable than the current vicious sexist attacks and restrictions on women being “legalized” and carried out by many Republicans.
