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July 4th, 2022
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July 4th, 2022

Open eyes, open minds.

VOTE NOW: Best of the Triangle
  • Opinions
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Letter: Seize this opportunity to push for change

By Walter Okhuysen • May 28, 2022

Editor’s note: In a recent email exchange about guns between the author of this letter and one of his friends, the friend stated that no meaningful gun movement would ever originate in Mississippi. The author wrote the following after reading recent editions of The Dispatch. This letter has been edited for clarity.

I was wrong, and you, my dearest of friends, were also wrong. Today is indeed a New Day. As usual, almost with the reliability of the rising sun, I awaken with boundless eternal optimism.

For, yes, the stars are (unbelievably) lining up. It is now incumbent upon us to capitalize on the opportunity and turn it into an epic event.

I am bringing the nails and we each shall bring our hammers so as to pound these final nails into the coffin of American gun violence.

Why do I blather on about alignment of stars, etc. predicting such a demise?  I find that I am not alone!  Two very powerful editorials:

1) A Columbus, Mississippi-born act of creative sarcasm has been brought to bear on the issue. See their editorial in Thursday’s Starkville/Commercial Dispatch. Yes, a Mississippi-born movement — finally — for a pleasant change.

2.) Columnist Froma Harrop’s more cerebral public shaming of Texas Gov. Abbott, which borders on appropriate bullying, for his “incomprehensible” insistence that he and his ilk be allowed to continue wearing their dunce caps, continuing to wallow eternally in the shameful “third” group, those who never learn. Let us hasten their journey and banishment to their parallel universe. Perhaps they more accurately actually belong to an unmentionable fourth group, those who refuse to learn.

See Wikipedia entry for: “Gun Politics in the U.S.”, subcategory “Security against tyranny.”  A five to ten minute read shall provide those with open and rational minds with appropriate arguments to dispel any remaining naive, romantic notions regarding the Second Amendment allowing appropriate mental self-reconciliation. A very short journey. I traveled it yesterday myself.

Absolutely unbelievable!

And to use a foundry-man’s term: “We must strike while the iron is hot.”

Walter Okhuysen

Starkville

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