Opinion
The University Daily Kansan
Laura Roddy, *Editor*
Sarah Hale, *Managing editor*
Kristi Elliott, *Managing editor*
Tom Eblen, *General manager, news adviser*
Shaunte Blue, Business manager
Brad Badyron, Retail sales manager
Matt Fisher, Sales and marketing adviser
Scott Valler, Technology coordinator
Wednesday, March 29, 2000
Steve Sack / TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES
Editorials
Kansan report card
PASS
Pope — He's more than just an another old guy riding in a motorized, glass-encased rickshaw. This pope means business. His visit to the Holy Land gives hope for a new era of religious tolerance.
We still like like — House Speaker Dennis Hastert appoints Kansas Reps. Dennis Moore and Jerry Moran to a committee charged with planning a national memorial for Abilene's favorite son, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Men's basketball squad — It was a rocky season, punctuated by arrests and mystery illnesses, but in the NCAA tournament, this team proved it had heart. Next year, though, let's prove we have talent.
Smith & Wesson — Big-time gun maker breaks ranks with the rest of the firearm industry and institutes sweeping self-reform. Shoot, will Phillip Morris voluntarily stop selling smokes to kiddies?
FAIL
Fake ID poster campaign — Turns out, using a fake ID is illegal. Apparently, so is underage drinking. Good news: Absence of 'Just Say No to Drugs' signs must mean drugs are OK!
Census invasiveness — How much money do you make? Is your stove gas or electric? How much time do you spend filling out censuses? For one out of 16 of us, the answer is way too much.
New transplant rules benefit more
The procedure for determining who receives organ transplants soon will be changing. New federal rules from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services require the nation's organ transplant network to adopt a new system that would send organs to the most needy patients, regardless of where they are in the country. As of now, organs are distributed within the region in which they are donated.
The State of Wisconsin has challenged the new rules, arguing that they will hurt states with high donation rates by sending organs to places where donation rates are lower. While the concern to protect local patients is understandable, the new
Organs should go to patients most in need; state boundaries should not be consideration
system will be better overran.
It is important to remember that when a situation of life and death arises, state lines should not matter. The goal of health care professionals is to save lives, and if that means sending a liver or kidney to a different state to help someone who needs it more than a patient in the home state, that is what needs to be done.
system will be better overall.
Center performs organ transplants. Opponents of the new rules argue that patients in areas with high donation rates who have received operations relatively quickly now will have to wait longer because local organs likely will be shipped to other parts of the country for sicker patients.
This issue hits close to home because the University of Kansas Medical
In an ideal world, this wouldn't happen because people would donate all across the country. Patients here may have to wait longer, but it's not right to value one life more than another. The bottom line is that, as Americans, we should be concerned with helping everyone, and that means getting desperately needed organs to those who need them the most.
Kursten Phelps for the editorial board
Kansan staff
Seth Hoffman ... Editorial
Nadia Mustafa ... Editorial
Melody Ard ... News/Special sections
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Broaden your mind: Today's quote
"God not only plays dice, he also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen." — Stephen William Hawking
How to submit letters and guest columns
Letters: Should be double-spaced typed and fewer than 200 words. Letters must include the author's signature, name, address and telephone number plus class and hometown if a University student. Faculty or staff must identify their positions.
Guest columns: Should be double-spaced typed with fewer than 700 words. The writer must be willing to be photographed for the column to run.
All letters and guest columns should be e-mailed to opinion@kansan.com or submitted to the Kansan newsroom, 111 Stauffer-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit, cut to length or reject all submissions. For any questions, call Nadia Mustafa or Seth Hoffman at 864-4924.
If you have general questions or comments, e-mail the page staff (opinion@kansan.com) or call 864-4924
G un rhetoric has been heating up lately on both sides of the issue. Maybe it's because it's an election year. Maybe it's because mass shootings, especially by or against children, seem to be showing up on the news with disturbing regularity.
Perspective
NRA's stance on guns is more miss than hit
change on how we use and view guns. High noon is approaching in Congress, with both sides lining up and fingering their weapons. I suspect this decade will see some major legislation.
One reason I think this is that there's a group out there that seems dedicated to repealing the Second Amendment. Highly organized, highly financed, with a radical agenda and a small army of lobbyists, this group is doing everything it possi-
Something's going to happen soon; a great sea-
Loader columnist
opinion@kansan.com
my can to take guns — all guns — out of the hands of responsible citizens.
The Democrats? Nope. Jim Brady's crowd? Fraid not. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms? Sorry.
No, it's the National Rifle Association
No, it is a sound. Yeah, I know that sounds insane — but so does NRA leader Wayne LaPierre, these days. And that, in the long run, is posing a far greater danger to hunters and sportsmen than a whole army of gun-control fanatics.
A lot of Americans hunt. Others enjoy target shooting. And there used to be a time when the NRA was a fine service organization for those purposes: teaching gun safety, maintenance and responsible gun ownership.
Things change.
The NRA hates trigger locks, too. With a passion.
Carrying a gun is a serious business. You're
accepting the power to kill, quickly and easily,
and that is no small thing. It is a cherished right,
but it also requires responsibility. True conservatives understand the importance of responsibility. The NRA, alas, no longer seems to.
weapon, stolen guns being used in crimes, etc. In fact, most of Mr. Brady's complaints permanently could be laid to rest, all without depriving Americans of the right to bear arms.
Instead, it has been coming off as a group of paranoid, crazy-right, Montana-Militia, Timothy McVeigh-style extremists, refusing even common-sense, nonrestrictive safety measures that actually help the cause of bearing arms. They claim to speak for America's gun owners. And most of the nation believes that.
The NRA hates it and is fighting the technology tooth and nail.
Is this, people wonder, the kind of person I want carrying a gun around me? The sort of person who makes wild charges against a sitting president? Clinton has all the morals of a tomcat on Viagra, but the notion that he would deliberately murder people for some mythical political gain is just nuts. Just nuts describes a lot of the NRA's positions of late.
Trigger locks. Not a bad idea. If an intruder surprises you with such speed that you were unable to punch in the combination on your gun, well, sorry, but you'd probably be dead anyway. The time when you're most likely to need immediate, unhampered access to your gun for defense purposes is outside of your home, when, the weapon being directly on your person, you wouldn't be using the lock. If the gun is already in a drawer, adding an extra five seconds to the time needed to it is far less likely to result in injury or death than risking a child able to use it.
And if you're really, really paranoid, no one says you have to use the lock.
The crazier they appear, the more they turn people in general against any sort of gun ownership. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
Leader is a Henderson, Nev., junior in journalism.
Kids can't vote or fight, but they can be executed?
In January, Glen McGinnis was executed by lethal injection in Texas despite protests from the American Bar Association, Amnesty International, the European Union, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights and the pope. These protests had nothing to do with whether McGinnis was guilty of the crime he was convicted of. Instead, they stemmed from the fact that McGinnis was 17 years old at the time of the crime — legally still a minor.
International human rights standards prohibit the execution of anyone under the age of 18 at the
Interestingly enough, U.S. policy prohibits the execution of minors in occupied U.S. territories but does not offer the same protection to its citizens. While the crimes minors commit are no less horrible because of their ages, it is wrong to put the
time of his or her offense. Only five countries other than the United States have executed child offenders, and in the past decade, the United States has executed more people than those other countries combined.
Karen
Keith
guest columnist
opinion@karen.com
same level of responsibility on minors. The chance of rehabilitation of a minor is much greater than for an adult. Also, by punishing a minor as we would an adult, our society is refusing to accept any responsibility for circumstances that often lead minors to commit these offenses in the first place.
and McGinnis is a perfect example of this. McGinnis had been living on the streets since the age of 11 after running away from a home where his mother prostituted herself and was addicted to crack cocaine. Child Protective Services repeatedly had taken him away from his home after he was beaten on the head with a baseball bat and raped by his stepfather. Each time, CPS allowed him to go home after treatment, and each time, McGinnis ran away again, only to be caught and returned by the authorities.
While in juvenile detention, McGinnis showed
Despite your opinion about the death penalty as a policy, you should be worried about the way that this policy is being carried out. Opposing the death penalty is not an attempt to excuse these crimes — it is simply a statement that two wrongs do not make a right. Many studies have shown that capital punishment does not deter crime, is racially biased and does not ease the suffering of the families of victims.
Sam Jordan, director of the Program to Abolish the Death Penalty, said on CNN in January before McGinnis' execution, "It's ironic that in the United States we don't permit juveniles to vote, to go to war, to sign contracts. We recognize it, seems that youth are immature and can't be held responsible for decisions made under all circumstances. Yet we do permit youth under the age of 18 to be executed."
Between 1977 and 1993, the death penalty was sought in 63 percent of all cases involving an African-American defendant charged with the murder of a White victim, and in 5 percent of cases involving all other racial combinations of defendant and victim. In total, 76 percent of federal death penalty prosecutions have been against minority defendants.
McGinnis was executed in Texas, where presidential candidate George W. Bush is governor. Despite Bush's claims about being a "compassionate conservative," he certainly showed no compassion toward McGinnis, who never had a fair shot at becoming a productive citizen.
Keith is a Tulsa, Okla., freshman in sociology.
himself to be a prime candidate for rehabilitation. Employees of the center testified that he had a good discipline record, was respectful of staff members and was not aggressive, even when taunted by other juveniles. One staff member even told the jury that she had considered adopting McGinnis after working with him in detention. This does not sound like a person beyond rehabilitation.
Furthermore, McGinnis was an African American, and the woman he killed was White. He had an all-White jury. It has become increasingly evident that the death penalty in the United States is racially biased.
Feedback St. Patrick a Catholic
On March 17, the Kansan identified St. Patrick as a Catholic, a bishop appointed and installed by the bishop of Rome, the Pope. St. Patrick was responsible for ordaining clergy and dispensing the other sacraments of the Catholic Church as outlined in the New Testament. He was dead before the first canon of saints was written, but he was always Catholic, not a Calvinist.
The source for the "Fun Facts"
accompanying the article is a
Protestant, anti-Catholic source.
The Christian Classics Ethereal
Library at Calvin College that maintains a different version of history: "Patrick predates the Roman Catholic Church, and he was considered a saint before the Roman church created its own canon of saints."
St. Patrick no more predated the Catholic Church than Jesus Christ himself. This deliberate misrepresentation of the truth is historical revisionism of the worst kind, wrapped in a legitimate news venue. Did the Kansan investigate this source? Would the Kansan have cited the Klu Klux Klan for an article on Black History Month? What
the Kansan has done is confirmed that anti-Catholicism is the last fashionable prejudice, legitimizing anti-Catholicism. Calvin College is re-writing history to its own end, something an academic paper like the Kansan should abor. What would the Kansan position be on Holocaust revisionism?
Calvin College's Christian Classic Ethereal Library is exactly that: ethereal, made of hot air and lights, not facts.
Michael Bastosch University of Kansas Medical Center 1999 graduate