To the editor:
We in Massachusetts are fortunate that our Commonwealth has one of the strongest set of gun safety regulations in the country, thanks to a law passed by our legislature in 2014. But one large loophole remains: it is impossible to prevent criminals and gun traffickers from buying or obtaining guns in other states with looser laws and bringing them over the state line to threaten our safety. That is why a group of concerned Lincoln residents have submitted Article 36 for your review at Town Meeting.
Article 36 does not include any specific gun or ammunition restrictions or other elements that might alarm responsible gun owners concerned about self-protection, hunting or sport. It simply asks our elected federal representatives to pass a federal law setting sensible gun safety standards for all states to prevent interstate gun trafficking and protect public health nationwide. Such a law would include elements from the Massachusetts law and/or similar laws passed recently in Connecticut and New York, which already have been judged constitutional by the courts.
I urge you to vote “yes” on Article 36 as one sensible step toward a safer and more civilized nation for us all.
Sincerely,
Joanna Hopkins
7 Linway Rd.
Letters to the editor must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Letters will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Letters containing personal attacks, errors of fact or other inappropriate material will not be published.
I reiterate my comment to Michael Coppock’s letter on Article 36
The gun violence in this country is the result of a complex and complicated set of factors. I continue to believe that social and economic issues underlie a lot of the violence. We simply won’t address those issues. Nobody agrees on the facts of gun violence. Neither side can be trusted to put out undistorted information as to the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of existing gun laws. Certainly there are a set of facts and statistics that can be agreed to be all. Here’s where joint fact-finding comes in.
JFF is part of consensus decision process seeking to integrate facts into effective policy. Disputants, that is participants in a well-designed consensus decision process, decide on an ‘honest broker’ to assemble the facts and statistics that they agree to use as the basis of their discussions. “Because JFF promotes shared learning, it helps to create knowledge that is technically credible, publicly legitimate, and especially relevant to policy and management decisions” (Karl, Susskind, Wallace, A dialogue not a diatribe: Environment, v. 49, n.1, p. 20-34).
Those facts and statistics, however, are open to different interpretations. That’s fine and expected. Community values and priorities are other components of the civil dialogue of a well-designed collaborative problem solving process. Indeed, those values and priorities may be more important than facts and statistics. Let’s though be arguing about the same facts and statistics. Regrettably, neither side will agree to an honest broker to assemble those facts and statistics. Until that is done, in my view, we will never have the debates that illuminate the reasons for and possible solutions to mitigate gun violence.