Thank you for printing the opinion piece by Jake Herrera. He did an excellent job researching this topic and, hopefully, your readers will be as outraged as I am that the gun industry, with its how-low-can-you-go desire for profits, shamefully markets these guns to the civilian population.
Ronnie Barrett, head of Barrett Firearms, recently said that .50-calibers are just big toys. These \toys,"" I've been told by shooters who use .50-caliber weapons, can be used to ""roll squirrels,"" where the object of the game is to see who ends up with the smallest pieces of squirrel at the end of the shoot. After the bullet has decimated the squirrel, it continues traveling for approximately another mile.
Whether bonus points are earned for any further destruction occurring along the flight path is a question that perhaps Rep. Mark Pettis, R-La Follette, who just purchased a .50-caliber Armalite and who is authoring a bill protecting the gun industry from lawsuits, would be able to answer.
Jeri Bonavia
executive director
Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort Educational Fund
In September, all the anti-gunners were telling us that ""assault weapons"" were the terrorists weapon of choice. Yet now that they are legal, terrorists haven't gone out and bought them en masse. Now that assault weapons are legal, do terrorists now prefer .50 BMGs?
Either terrorist weapons are like flavors of the week, or the anti-gun groups have spread so many lies they can't keep track of them anymore.
The founding fathers intended the Second Amendment to protect any weapons necessary to defend our freedom and our liberty. If it takes a cannon to protect our liberty, then they would want us to use the cannon.
Just because we don't need that cannon now doesn't mean we won't need it later. Sure, my house isn't on fire now, but that doesn't mean I throw away my fire extinguishers. I may need them someday.
This is about gun control, not national security. And gun control is about taking power away from the people of the United States and threatening their natural rights of life and liberty.
Adrian Andrijasevic
UW-Madison senior
Student Alliance for Firearm Education and Responsibility
Today is the National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers. We should not celebrate; we should mourn. Abortion is not representative of choice, it is a reflection that our society has failed to meet the needs of women. Do not support abortion. Instead, support systematically eliminating the root causes that drive women to abortion.
A practice so destructive to women should not be synonymous with women's rights. More than 1.2 million abortions occur every year. Approximately 10 percent of the women receiving abortions suffer immediate consequences, of which one-fifth are considered life-threatening. After one legal abortion, the chance of premature birth increases three-fold.
If our society has failed to strive for abstinence, programs must be in place to provide women with true options. ""Choice"" does not equate to whether you can murder your fetus. Real ""choice"" refers to adoption and pregnancy crisis centers to provide counseling, shelter and clothing.
I am a woman and I am pro-life. I am not calling to make abortion illegal. Instead, I call to women to unite for the rights of our gender and the betterment of our society to make the need for abortion obsolete. Today we should show our appreciation for the people who make adoption possible, who provide counseling to women and who educate on safe and responsible sex-not the people who claim to risk their lives to take 3,600 lives a day.
Jessica Schober
UW-Madison senior
Secondary education and political science
I read Josh Gildea's eulogy of retiring CBS News anchor Dan Rather (""An unbiased farewell,"" Opinion, March 8) with some skepticism. Left out of Gildea's lionization of the legendary anchor was that Rather was a frequent guest speaker at Democratic Party events and fundraisers-hardly the mark of an ""unbiased"" journalist.
Rather's performance as a reporter even prompted Walter Cronkite to say that he was surprised Rather lasted as long as he did and suggested Rather should have been replaced. Cronkite opined upon his retirement in 1981 that either Roger Mudd or Bob Schieffer of ""Face the Nation"" fame should have been named anchor. In fact, it is Schieffer who took the anchor chair temporarily after Rather's departure.
Lost somewhere in Rather's training was the pursuit of the truth and accuracy in citing sources. Media critics of all political persuasions have become increasingly critical of TV newscasts for using unnamed sources and stating opinions as given facts. When analyzed by bloggers, many of these unnamed sources turn out to have roots in Democratic Party-related publications or materials.
But don't believe my opinion of Rather. A CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll released Tuesday night showed the percentage of people who believe what Rather says has slipped to 23 percent, compared to 34 percent just three years ago, according to the Associated Press.
In an era when re-runs of ""The Simpsons"" are regularly defeating Rather's evening newscasts in New York, and CBS Chairman Les Moonves has publicly considered adding a comedy component to the evening newscast, it is perhaps accurate that Rather is leaving journalism in an era where he proved time and again he was bigger than the stories he covered-and when the public said it was growing increasingly fed up with arrogant, bigger-than-the-story journalists and biased, shoddy reporting.
Christopher Mertes
Sun Prairie, WI
