No reason needed to exercise rights

Editor:

Regarding your Sept. 13 editorial, we can all agree that more should be done to improve the background check system so that the mentally unstable cannot buy a firearm from a licensed firearms retailer.

However, your commentary goes awry in suggesting that ownership of certain firearms, "hunters with their shotguns" is acceptable while citizens' rights to have other firearms constitutes a "strange craving" and an "obsession."

Luckily, we have a Second Amendment in this country that does not require a citizen exercising a fundamental civil liberty to provide a reason, any more then the First Amendment requires that you have a reason for printing an editorial that brushed aside the fact that even the Obama administration did not support the U.N. treaty you cited. Nor would most Americans look to Russia, with its continuing history of citizen oppression, to provide us with an example of how to do anything.

Lawrence G. Keane

Senior vice president and general counsel

National Shooting Sports Foundation

Newtown, Conn.

Phase out coal to prevent catastrophe

Editor:

I applaud your editorial "Evidence: More warming facts," which you published on Aug. 18, and have these comments.

While coal is too ingrained in our culture to expect our state to be a leader in addressing climate change, we can hope that a core of science-based, rational opinion on the subject can grow here and accomplish two things:

First, telling fellow West Virginians the truth: that humanity, in fact almost every species, faces a difficult future coping with a progressively unstable and dangerous climate, the beginnings of which we have hardly begun to sample.

Second, advocating for the following admittedly painful changes that are necessary to avoid the worst of the long-term consequences - phasing out fossil fuel use, most especially coal, as quickly and humanely as possible.

In saying this I mean no disrespect to deep coal miners who risk their lives every workday in order to mine coal. From the beginning their labors have been heroic.

Scott Howle Thompson

Beckley

Denial of campaign funds is troubling

Editor:

I was troubled to read the state Supreme Court's decision to deny Allen Loughry matching funds promised to him by the public campaign financing pilot program.

Matching funds were to be available in state Supreme court races when a privately financed candidate exceeded a spending threshold. These funds were to ensure that a publicly funded candidate could counter excessive donations and to improve the perception of undue influence over the court by campaign contributors.

But the ruling is not all bad. The court reaffirmed that public funding without matching funds continues to be constitutional.

At a time when unlimited money is flowing into campaigns, we need public funding more than ever. As long as candidates can still receive money to run a viable campaign against their more moneyed competitors, democracy is bettered. Accepting public funding also creates publicity, as Loughry learned, and voters can see that a "voter-owned" candidate is not just a shill for wealthy special interests.

The pilot program seems like a good start to fixing our broken court system. Hopefully the Legislature will extend the program for the next state Supreme Court election and more candidates will sign on, opting out of the corporate wealthy donor system.

Dan Taylor

Huntington

Is Iran ever going to have the bomb?

Editor:

1992: Israeli Member of Parliament Benjamin Netanyahu predicts that Iran was "three to five years" from having a nuclear weapon.

1992: Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres predicts an Iranian nuclear warhead by 1999 to French TV.

1995: The New York Times quotes U.S. and Israeli officials saying that Iran would have the bomb by 2000.

1998: Donald Rumsfeld tells Congress that Iran could have an intercontinental ballistic missile that could hit the United States by 2003.

'Nuff said?

David N. Ryan

Spencer