GUN SAFETY

Any way to train students is helpful

I commend Dennis Anderson for his July 5 article on the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources’ youth firearm safety program (“Can gun safety be taught — and learned — online?”), the original classroom version and the online/hybrid option. I’ve been a volunteer firearm safety instructor for nearly 30 years in the metro area. There is a place and need for both. More now than ever. While hunting continues to lose favor, the youth clay target shooting sports competition continues to grow. It’s a wonderful competitive sport. But more untrained children will find firearms in poor storage. And a child can learn to fluently handle firearms in any class setting. It will be taught by a mentor.

Rural areas have been able to hang on to classroom options due to more accessible facilities and great volunteers.

Here in the metro area, we have limited facilities, and I can attest to the fact the children just can’t squeeze in the time between all of the other options. We could not attract volunteer instructors competing with work and golf leagues, either. Also, we discovered the hybrid option sticks to the curriculum better than many adult instructors.

Hats off to the DNR! We need these classes to help people enjoy our great outdoor heritage sports of hunting and competitive shooting. Firearms aren’t going away. And yes, we could use some commonsense gun controls passed.
DAVID LARSON, Minneapolis

HENNEPIN ENERGY RECOVERY CENTER

It’s really just landfill vs. landfill

Ask about the 38-year-old garbage burner in downtown Minneapolis, and you will frequently end up in a debate between incinerators and landfills. The problem is that’s a false dichotomy.

In truth, incinerators are another road to the dump. The Hennepin Energy Recovery Center (HERC) converts 365,000 tons of municipal waste per year into 80,000 tons of ash. That ash goes to landfills. And it’s toxic. Fine particles of incinerator ash are packed with heavy metals like arsenic, cadmium, mercury and lead. They contain new hazards, including dioxins and furans, formed during incineration. The European Union classifies this ash as hazardous waste because its toxins cause kidney damage, cardiovascular disease and neurological and reproductive harm, often at low levels of exposure.

Recognizing these risks, Minnesota law directs counties that use waste burners to make the ash less toxic. There are many ways to do this. Hennepin County could apply chemical treatments to bind heavy metals in place. It could solidify ash into hardened blocks the metals can’t escape. It could use vitrification to destroy the dioxins outright.

Which of these ash treatment strategies — commonly deployed worldwide — has Hennepin County considered to satisfy the law? The public doesn’t know. That’s because Hennepin County has never addressed ash treatment strategies in any of its waste plans, dating back to 2012. As far as the public can tell, the county has never considered modern methods for immobilizing or destroying ash contaminants. That must change. Incinerator ash is just one concerning output of the HERC, which also adds to unacceptable air quality burdens faced by environmental justice communities in north Minneapolis.

While many have called on Hennepin County to implement the HERC closure plan it drafted in 2024, there is no indication of if or when the county will do so.

In the meantime, the county should, at a minimum, adopt and implement best waste practices for the burner it operates downtown. That could mean complying with the incinerator pollution limits previously proposed by former President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency. It could mean deploying modern pollution monitoring systems to track and disclose pollutant levels.

And it unequivocally means following the law and using modern methods to reduce the risks of landfilling toxic ash.

Minnesota residents who live near the HERC — and its ash landfill — deserve no less.
LUKE NORQUIST, St. Paul

The writer works for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, an environmental law organization that recently filed a lawsuit challenging Hennepin County over its ash management practices.

POLITICAL PARTIES

The Democrats need some boundaries

What would Hubert H. Humphrey have done in response to the apparent or threatened takeover of several Democratic congressional districts and city races in New York, Washington state, Colorado, California, D.C., etc., by so-called “democratic socialists,” who are about as “democratic” as was East Germany’s “Democratic” Republic? As a historian of this period, I think I can say that his history gives us a pretty good answer. He would have “thrown them the hell out,” as his ally Philip Murray, Congress of Industrial Organizations union president, said about the expulsion of the Communists from the CIO unions about the same time.

Humphrey led the expulsion of the Communists from the newly formed and merged Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in 1948. (Humphrey also fought the segregationists in his party, as well, another chapter in his “no extremists” policy.) Humphrey knew that a major U.S. political party could not and should not tolerate the Marxist-Leninists in its organization, let alone in its leadership or elected representatives, because, among other reasons, if they took over, they wouldn’t tolerate anyone else!

This is a lesson today’s Democrats seem to have forgotten in their zeal to win elections. The victories of the Marxists have generally been applauded, welcomed or tolerated, at least, by most Democrats with few exceptions. This has been the case despite the anti-free-enterprise, antisemitic, anti-white and even anti-American and anti-Western-civilization statements and actions of these candidates. Where is Humphrey’s spirit when it’s needed? What do Minnesota DFL leaders say, or are the “Democratic” socialists already in charge in Minnesota?
DOUGLAS P. SEATON, Edina

• • •

I want to address the commentary “Is the DFL overconfident?” (Strib Voices, July 8). As a Democrat, I would agree that the Walz administration was negligent in overlooking fraud.

But, it does not compare to the fraud we are seeing in the members of the Trump administration, who are deliberately using their powers to enrich themselves. In Minnesota, supervisors regrettably told workers to ignore some signs of misappropriation, because they did not want to appear racist. They were wrong to have ignored warnings. But, let’s not equate this with Republicans supporting President Donald Trump. No one is holding them accountable.
JANET MERRILL, Edina

AMERICA’S FOUNDING

If we don’t get straightened out, it’s over

Two interesting and salient articles appeared on the same page of the July 3 Strib Voices section, one titled, “What did the founders mean by the pursuit of happiness?” and the other, “What the founders knew about executive power and accountability.”

In the former, the article describes the founders’ claim that happiness can only be achieved out of personal virtue and morality. Then, in the second-to-last sentence, the author writes, “But the lodestar of such discussions is that people have a ‘self-evident’ and ‘unalienable’ right to pursue their own concept of their own happiness.” Our “own concept” is a relative thing. But virtuous and moral relativity is not at all what the founders described, and without virtue and moral absolutes, the happiness the founders hoped for cannot be achieved.

In the latter article there is much anguish regarding the power of the executive and that Congress is not predominant, as it was meant to be. This is indeed a great concern. However, for all the danger described by the author, the body politic can still, once every four years, solve the problem of an overreaching president. A much greater problem is that Congress has essentially given over its legislative control to an army of unelected bureaucrats. The bureaucracy has usurped the power of all three branches of government in that it makes rules and regulations, which become de facto law; it then adjudicates that law and executes it.

It has been written that in the last biennium, about 4,800 pages of law was written by Congress, while at the same time, the bureaucracy gave us 150,000 pages. We have become an administrative state. The republic that Benjamin Franklin said we have “if you can keep it” is gone; we did not keep it. If we cannot restore the republic the founders created, we should not expect much else to go well for America.
EARL FAULKNER SR., Edina