In response to Ms. Nevers’ letter in the July 1 edition of the Mirror:
Ms. Nevers makes several wrong assumptions.
The first is about throwing money at the homeless problem. Let me take you back 30 years.
PACCAR had a huge rail car shop in Renton. Leckenby Co. had a big steel shop on Harbor Island and Lockheed Shipbuilding had two huge shipyards in Seattle.
MARCO Shipyard was running two shipyards, building over 80 percent of the Bering Sea fleet. Isaacson Structural Steel Co. was busy building bridges, office towers and big skid modules for the North Slope oil fields. These companies employed tens of thousands of people and paid millions of dollars in property, B&O and inventory taxes every year. They also paid family-wage jobs. In 1980, my wage benefit package was well over $35 an hour.
Those companies are gone now, and forever.
A far better option than throwing money down the homeless rat hole problem would be to encourage companies to come to Washington and employ the homeless, wouldn’t it? Retail jobs that employ people 20-30 hours a week don’t feed a family unless a person has three of them.
Forget about Boeing: In case readers haven’t figured it out, Boeing is leaving.
Now, to Ms. Nevers’ claim the National Rifle Association bullies politicians: That’s completely false. The NRA does exactly what the American Medical Association, the fishing industry and many other groups do. The NRA contributes only to politicians that vote in a manner friendly to the organization.
It does not get money from the firearms industry (unless you count their advertising in the monthly journals). Why would any shooting sports company give money to Mother Jones, Oprah, Rosie, or another anti-NRA publication or organization?
The NRA tried like hell to get mental health records in the Clinton crime bill that created the National Instant Criminal Check System a long time ago.
Guess who fought that idea? It was the American Medical Association, citing doctor-patient privilege. Look at the mass killings in the last five years: Sandy Hook, the Navy Yard, the Aurora Theatre and Tucson.
All those killers were nuts; goofy as a bucket of squirrel turds. Now look at San Bernardino and Orlando: Muslim terrorists. Were any of them NRA members? I think not.
As a shooter and lifelong NRA member, I’m sick of being labeled the bad guy when I didn’t do anything wrong.
Now let’s look at crime. Washington voters overwhelmingly passed “Three Strikes” and “Hard Time for Armed Crime” laws. I was deeply involved in both.
If you look at what has happened over the last 20 years, prosecutors use both only as tools for plea bargains. Maybe some reader can explain to me why taxpayers are paying over $70,000 dollars a year to keep animals like Gary Ridgeway alive. Why did Mitchell Rupe get thousands in taxpayer-funded medical care for over 20 years on death row, only to eat himself to death?
Look at the gang-bangers. Twenty years ago they weren’t given the life sentences or a trip up 13 steps to the trapdoor.
Those guys are getting out now. Free again to rob, rape and murder.
Guns are not the problem. The liberal left is the problem.
Mike Silvers, Federal Way
