Tolerance and respect
When a gunman killed and wounded a bunch of people at Club Q, a gay-friendly nightclub in Colorado Springs, Joshua Thurman, one of the attendees, said amid tears, "We were just enjoying ourselves. We weren't out harming anyone. We were in our space, our community, our home, enjoying ourselves like everybody else does."
These poignant words should mean something to Arkansans. We Arkansans have long lamented that our state is 49th in everything. We elected our officials to address our many problems and do good things for everyone. We didn't elect them to bog all of us down in their endless culture wars. Yet they're eternally fixed on stigmatizing and punishing many good, innocent citizens whose only crime is that they are different. They have no leftover energy to address our state's real problems.
No wonder we're 49th! The No. 1 priority at the Capitol seems to be to station police in every bedroom, doctor's office, schoolroom, and library in our state. All of this mean-spiritedness only encourages the kind of violence we saw in Colorado Springs.
All of us are entitled to our own opinions and our own safe spaces where we can enjoy ourselves "like everybody else does." Mutual tolerance and respect is our only path to a healthy and prosperous future for all of us. That's not what's being modeled by our state leaders.
SANDY WYLIE
Bella Vista
The power of choice
The shooter in Colorado Springs used an AR-15-type rifle to kill five people, and the shooter at the Virginia Walmart used a handgun with multiple magazines to kill seven people, including himself. Both firearms appear to have operated as designed.
What a great country we live in that gives us the freedom to choose semiautomatic long rifles or handguns as our preferred weapons of mass murder.
STEVE OWEN
Hot Springs Village
App is a security risk
The FCC suggests that TikTok is a national security risk. Federal employees are not allowed to use government-issued phones for TikTok. There are plenty of non-Chinese social media apps out, so why are millions of Americans not heeding the warnings? And why do TV networks promote users every day?
China is not our friend and shouldn't be trusted.
DWIGHT "ROHO" ANDERSON
Little Rock
Psychoanalysis on tap
Just finished reading about the Walmart shooting. In reading the comments from employees concerning the perpetrator, he sounds like a pretty normal guy to me.
I have been a supervisor and have written a few folks up; most didn't appreciate it. I have subtle behavioral changes at times, life-based issues that most everybody else has at times that may cause me to be less communicative some days, shorter-tempered than normal other days. Not every day is sunshine and roses, and not every day is rain and thorns. Life happens and we are all human! Yet the experts in the article say these are "yellow flag" behavioral changes that could indicate someone has the potential to kill and there should be anonymous hotlines so fellow employees can report said behavior, so these folks can get help before resorting to violence.
Subtle changes in behavior was one yellow flag cited; anger issues and increased absenteeism were a couple of others. My workplace has over 800 folks working 24/7--if every employee exhibiting these types of behavior were reported and action taken, we would close our doors tomorrow. Expecting lay people to be expert psychoanalyzers, able to tell normal, everyday "my kid is sick, I didn't sleep" or "my marriage is in trouble" or "my mom or dad is dying" behavioral changes from "I'm upset enough to start shooting people" behavioral changes is just ludicrous.
I can also tell you that anonymous hotlines tend to work opposite of the way these experts think; the people they are intended to identify are the ones using it the most. My expertise comes from working 40-plus years on the front lines as an hourly employee and as a supervisor, from the oil fields to construction to manufacturing, not from some academic aerie. I don't pretend to know what the solution is, but I can tell you what it ain't.
GREG STANFORD
White Hall
Was unprofessional
I have been steaming for a week, and am now joining other letter-writers to this newspaper who commented on the same subject, namely the terrible, unprofessional conduct of the "color commentators" on the sidelines of the Arkansas-Ole Miss game.
They bantered about everything but the game; all small talk about the weather plus other topics, not related to anything that was happening on the field there, but rather what they conjured up as interesting among themselves. Their personal small talk actually detracted from the game and became the main subject of the TV commentary rather than describing the game itself.
My opinion is that the TV producers/editors/whoever determines the content being broadcast should monitor and immediately divert to material appropriate to the game rather than personal small talk, which is so unprofessional.
JOE W. CROW
Little Rock