The recent incident of teens with guns at Greenway Farms in Hixson is just one more situation to make the case for responsible gun storage. About 4.6 million American children live in homes with guns that are both loaded and unlocked. And, every year, nearly 600 children, 17 and under, die by suicide with a gun.
In the first six months of 2019, Tennessee led the entire country in the number of kids – 15 – who unintentionally shot themselves or someone else with an unsecured gun.
Be SMART is a campaign designed to help parents and adults normalize conversations about gun safety and take responsible actions that can prevent child gun deaths and injuries. The campaign raises awareness that responsible gun storage can save children’s lives. Be SMART emphasizes that it’s an adult responsibility to keep kids from accessing guns, and that every adult can play a role in keeping kids and communities safer.
There are nearly 3,000 Be SMART volunteers delivering this message across the country, and several here in Hamilton County. For more information, visit besmartforkids.org.
Judy Gallagher, Chattanooga Be SMART
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Eat a burger, lose a planet
Do your conservative readers ever read or look into anything beyond a sound bite, or is it just garbage in, garbage out? You must have stacks of letters from them worried about hamburgers and cows so that one is published every month or so.
The New Green Deal is a proposal to save the planet from many angles, including agriculture, decomposition and yes, livestock, but since it takes a little time to understand (like the Mueller report), it is lost on many. So much easier to remain clueless.
No problem, your grandchildren will thank you for their ability to eat a burger atop the stinking, rotting, polluted planet you are arranging to leave them with.
Sandra Rice, Sewanee
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Baltimore blight is Trump’s fault?
Buried in the editorial reprinted on July 30 from The Baltimore Sun (“Better to Have a Few Rats Than To Be One”) is a statement which may be more telling than any of the nonsense in the Trump v. Cummings squabble.
While asserting that the president has more power to effect change in Baltimore than does Congressman Cummings, the writer declares that “if there are problems here, rodents included, they are as much his [Trump’s] responsibility as anyone’s, perhaps more because he holds the most powerful office in the land.”
No doubt the problems in Baltimore, as in every major city, run much deeper than mountains of trash, rows of boarded-up buildings, and thousands of rats, but these visual images suggest a rot which only those on the scene can truly address. To suggest that somehow a president is responsible for this mess is not only ludicrous but ultimately self-defeating.
It is self-defeating because our cherished freedom to do as we please is tenable only in the context of personal responsibility, each of us taking care as we’re able of those things which belong to us and to no other.
Gary Lindley, Lookout Mountain, Ga.
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Just you wait, horse abusers
First, thank you so much TFP for your continued excellent coverage of the horse soring problem (July 24).
Let’s just face it, this is nothing but animal abuse. And, even if it were true that the “Tennessee Walking Horse industry plays a vital role in our state’s agricultural economy,” as some politicians would like you to believe, it is past time to turn to something else.
Stop making money off of abusing innocent animals. It’s disgusting.
I have lived in Tennessee my entire life and love it, but this practice is shameful. Whether it is using chemicals, platforms or chains, it is all abuse!
Just remember, if you condone these practices, what goes around, comes around. Karma’s a witch!
K.D. Hopper, Soddy-Daisy