Letters: 48 hours, 20 dead, nothing will change – The Denver Post

Shooting deaths mounting, and nothing happens

Within 48 hours: eleven dead plus the shooter in Monterey Park, Calif.; 2 students dead in a Des Moines, Iowa, school shooting; at least seven dead in shootings in Half Moon Bay, Calif.

Christmas was just a month ago, wasn’t it? Good will toward men, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your AK-47.

It’s time for everyone to turn in their guns, rewrite the Second Amendment, and start over. That will never happen. What will happen is more of the same.

Craig Marshall Smith, Highlands Ranch

Mass shooters have many rationales for their actions, but the only common denominator is the easily obtained weapon used. Yet commentators keep “searching for answers.”

Well, I have an answer for you. When will we stop walking on eggshells around the ignorant, angry, and afraid and take the necessary steps to get assault-styled weapons out of our country?

Full. Stop.

J Brandeis Sperandeo, Denver

Putting a higher price on water waste

The availability of egregiously inexpensive water is a root cause for the worsening crisis impacting the availability and allocation of water from the Colorado River. The largest user of Colorado River water is California. That state’s Imperial Irrigation District (IID) charges $20 per acre-foot for agricultural and municipal customers.

The Central Arizona Project, the primary diversion of Colorado River water for the state, charges $65 an acre-foot for agricultural users and $217 for municipal users. These artificially subsidized rates promote wasteful practices that reduce the availability of water for all other users. By comparison, Denver Water, which relies on the Colorado River for about 50% of its water, charges residential customers about $1,900 per acre-foot.

A more accurate value of the resource is reflected in the price obtained at a 2019 water auction in Colorado: a buyer paid $85,000 for an acre-foot of junior Colorado River water rights, more than 4,000 times what the IID charges its customers. More rationale pricing of an increasingly scarce resource would substantially reduce wasteful practices, making more water available for higher-value uses.

Ronald L. Rudolph, Golden

We need a better exit strategy for administrations

In all cases, neither former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden, nor former Vice President Mike Pence should have had classified documents in their possession. I’m guessing there are more documents out there held by former presidents and members of Congress.

What should be done is to have more control over these documents, including having someone from the National Archive present when a president is leaving office and checking files that are being boxed up.

James Falk, Northglenn

Time to decide ” what sort of nation” we want to be

Re: “How the U.S. amassed $31 trillion in debt,” Jan. 22 news story

The reason that the US has a $31 trillion national debt is that both sides maintain their own magical thinking, which guarantees that the debt will grow. Democrats believe that additional social programs can be created without raising taxes to pay for them. Republicans think that tax cuts will “pay for themselves” so that taxes can be reduced while maintaining the governmental services that people want. Each side persists in the fantasy that if they can only cut the programs that the other side likes, the budget/debt problem will go away.

In effect, both the democrats and the republicans subscribe to the childish notion that the US can have both low taxes and extensive government services.

Low tax and low service systems exist in most developing countries. Most developed nations combine high taxes with high services. So, America, it’s time to decide what sort of nation we want to be and then pay for it accordingly.

Guy Wroble, Denver 

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