Class warfare
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing while watching the evening news and learned that a 16-year-old boy in Texas, who was responsible for killing four people in a car accident while his blood alcohol content was .24, was only sentenced to probation because he was rich.
His lawyer said he suffered from ” affluenza.” Because he was used to living such a lavish lifestyle and was never punished by his parents for any of his wrongdoings, the judge agreed with his lawyer and let him off with probation. He will spend time at a rehab center at the cost of $450,000 a year. Any right-wingers out there want to talk about class warfare?
Michael A. Avery Sr.
Milford
Guns and safety
Since the Sandy Hook tragedy in Newtown, Conn., Republicans and Democrats in Congress have been attempting to come to an agreement on how to prevent calamities such as this from occurring again. The ideas proposed consist of many gun control laws, such as banning large ammunition clips. Other ideas proposed include universal background checks and supplying teachers, in schools of children, with guns. The latter of the proposals is just outrageous.
Giving weapons to every teacher in the country is not only impractical in protecting schools, it is also impractical in the sense that it will only cost billions of government dollars that we don’t have. Offering teachers weapons or even the ability to carry weapons of their own acquiring is absurd.
In addition, more guns can never equate to more safety. If guns are present, the risk of gun violence is present. If there are no guns in a classroom, there is zero chance of gun-related classroom violence from either the teacher or the students.
If guns were in the building, and students had the potential to get their hands on one, maybe through overpowering a teacher, or through a teacher’s negligence, many of these violent crimes could easily become homicides. Let’s face it, teenagers get their hands on things, and sooner or later one will find a way to get their hands on a firearm if available.
Avery Gates
Orono
Elver correction
A key sentence in Bucky Owen’s Dec. 14 BDN OpEd piece, “Elvers are a resource in crisis,” is incorrect. Owen said, “Fisheries scientists don’t even know if the elvers ascending the Penobscot are the younger generation of adult eels from that river, or if they are a random group of elvers from adults up and down the Atlantic coast.”
Scientists from Laval University, the Province of Quebec and Fisheries and Oceans Canada published in 2013 the most comprehensive study of the DNA of the American eel, testing 2,142 specimens from 32 locations from Florida to Newfoundland. They conclusively demonstrated what most eel scientists already accepted, that there is “no evidence for significant spatial or temporal genetic differentiation. The panmixia hypothesis [one randomly mating population for the species] should be accepted for this species.”
It is difficult to imagine a male and female from the Penobscot finding each other in the Sargasso Sea a thousand miles away, mating, and the resulting larvae somehow drifting to the Penobscot. We need to shed our unconscious salmon-centric thinking about eels; there is no homing in eels.
Knowing that actually strengthens Owen’s argument for a precautionary principle because, as other Laval scientists wrote about the eel, “panmictic species pose particular problems for conservation because their welfare can be addressed effectively only on a global scale.” What Maine does for eel management has the potential to affect the population in Quebec or Virginia or Haiti and vice versa.
James McCleave
Emeritus professor of Marine Sciences, University of Maine
Bangor