UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan editional staff. Signed columns represent the views of the editors.
Dole is facing reality
Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., talking about being "realistic"". That IS a switch.
"We've got to be realistic," he said after the polls closed in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary. "We don't have money or management or an organization out there so we're not trying to fool anybody."
The woebegone senator suffered another poor showing in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary. Ronald Reagan, former California governor, won the state's nomination, a percent compared to the second-place finish of George Bush, who picked up 23 percent of the votes.
In the Democratic primary, President Carter cruised to a comfortable, but not too comfortable, victory over Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. The president had hoped for a 20 percent margin and came away with one of only 11 percent, beating Kennedy's 38 with 49 percent.
The candidates made their predictable post primary comments. But Dole, who apparently has a chronic case of White House, made it
some comments that could lead one to think that he finally has been cured—or at least has gone into remission for four more years.
"Obviously, there's not much of a campaign out there," he said. "We've done about all we can do with the money we have."
Dole's poor finish in New Hampshire makes him ineligible for more federal matching funds, which have kept his campaign on the road since January. He says he will enter no more primaries and will decide "soon" whether to stay in or drop out of the presidential race.
But, economically and politically the decision already has been made for him. In fact, the public made it long ago.
Women's basketball deserves recognition
Dole blames his bringing up the rear on his pressing responsibilities as a senator, specifically, his work on the oil windfall taxes tax bill. However, Dole should be counting his senate seat from his position, he manages to secure it for another six years after all the presidential tomfoolery he has engaged in.
Going into its sub-regional tournament, the team is 2-5 and ranked 10th in the nation. Its members include a two-time All-American and a two-time American. Its coach has been nominated coach of the year. The team is fast, talented and determined. And they play damned well.
Yet, when the women Jayhawks look in the stands tonight, during their first game of association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women at North Carolina, they were. The SEU men's basketball team plays in the second round of the Big Eight tournament, they will play before a packed arena.
The most successful basketball team KU has seen in several years not only battles opponents on the court, they must fight their
kate COLUMNIST pound
way through apathy, ignorance and discrimination. It's a tough fight, disruptive to the team and to the KU athletic department.
Attendance at the women's home games is always low. A good night has an audience of up to twenty men and nights when a men's game is scheduled after a women's game. Even then, as one player put it, "come back at the half, and the team are showing up early to get seats.
Residents of the community and alumni fail to attend the games for the same reasons. The women's team is not promoted,篮球队 fans rarely hear of it. The women's team could game if the 'o' gans from the Fail house or the members of the PTA aren't there?
But the 'Hawks lack more than fans. They lack the support of the department of athletics. The team is ignored or slightly by the coaches of other revenue teams, men's sports and by the directors of sports information, counseling and even the department's heads.
STUDENTS DON'T ATTEND the women's games because they don't know about the rules of the game, or because, to them, basketball is a social not a sporting event. Without a crowd, the games are not fun.
THE SLIGHTS are generally small, nothing overt, no one wants to get caught be discriminator. But they are annoying and undermine the team's morale and the unity of the department. They include such things as the 5:15 p.m. start time for women's games when they are doubleheaded with a men's game. The 5:15 p.m. start time for their normal time at 7:35.
The 5:15 starting time is awkward for the whites and for the fans. It too early in the game to make a call, but at least the game. The women's coaching staff has requested that the games be moved to 6 and 7 on Saturday.
THE WOMEN'S practice times are often shifted to accommodate the men; never does the reverse happen. The women must meet and bleachers be set out before games; the men must sports information employee always travels with the men to get game statistics to the press as soon and as accurately as possible. Frequently, no one from sports information travels with the women, including Monday's team in Manhattan, when the team met K-Site.
It is a long list of sights. None individually damn, but collectively, they are irritating and discriminative. Perhaps the worst sight is the habit of many athletic department employees of referring to the woman's "area." Themen" the taunted by the same offices? Don't both teams represent the same University?
OFFICIALS OF the department excuse some of the slights by saying that the women don't trawl the crowd that the men do. However, stronger support from the department, including creative promotion and game times, might increase the crowds.
Another excuse used by the department is that the women's team takes money from the men's team. That excuse is unmitigated because it is usually for state appropriations and the team is operating within its budget, which the men's team isn't doing. Perhaps the men's coaches ought to work more closely with the women's team to develop a winning team and save money.
Despite the lack of support, the women have played the best basketball in the state. They work as hard, probably harder, than the men. They play consistently well and have been impressive teams. They have demonstrated a high level and they deserve some appreciation for being the best representatives of the highly praised KU basketball tradition.
KANSAN
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"Don't make the mistake of coming for my guns," a wervet of fereg gun of control to his congressman in May 1978. "I would just as soon kill you as look at you."
Gun control opponents never learn
That month, 200,000 such letters barraged Congress just as it was bracing itself to vote on a new immigration law. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to establish a computerized federal record of gun transactions. The proposed regulations were soundly defended in a shameful 314-80 victory.
The nation's bullying gun lobby, spearheaded by the militant National Rifle Association, had once again flexed its muscles in support of a lawsuit that murdered sensible gun control legislation.
The ATP proposal, aimed at helping police identify and trace firearms used in crimes, required that: all guns made in the U.S. be registered to a character serial number; gun manufacturers, importers and dealers submit quarterly reports on the sale and disposition of firearms; and gun dealers and others who buy firearms may file the theft or loss of any weapon within 24 hours.
"Dictators know this. Therefore, in every country where a dictator has succeeded, the dictator is held accountable and punished. Once they are registered, when the dictator makes his move it is easy for his police and "bully boys" to take the list and go no where everywhere there is a gun and
THE PARANOID GUN LOBY, to whom guns are a morbid symbol of freedom, is the reason for their step toward gun registration, which they consider synonymous with fascism. These swagginggers, modern-day gun肄inger killers who use deadly and tattered material tendencies," denouncing the ATF plan as a "pretty cut scheme" to bypass guns and attain federal gun registration.
PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE John
"As long as free men and women of the United States have guns in their houses, no trouble will ever occur," he country," the infamous William Leeb in his Manchester (New Hampshire) Union
Anderson last week courageously defied this kind of savage sentiment when he braced a crowd of NRA members in New Hampshire to question the question. What would be wrong with asking Americans to register their guns, he cried to the hats,issues and boo's of a hot and angry crowd.
susana
COLUMNIST namnum
The gun lobby's bizarre reasoning hardly nerits a reval. The 1968 federal Gun Control
Act-miraculously passed in the heat of motorway slayings of Robert Kenney and Martin Luther King Jr.$^{1}$—already requires that the name and address of a gun register be registered at the time sale. So a fragmented list has oblique access to a fragmented list of American gun owners—in fact a decentralized form of gun registration.
AND THESE who base their peace of mind and sense of liberty on the falsely unfettered possession of a deadly weapon that by law must be registered are sadly deluded. Although the gun lobby badly waves the constitutional banners at the murder of gun control, it is they not the proponent of sensible gun laws—who are antitradic.
The urgent need for federal gun control in the United States is a recoc of race. And even since the 1980s, the number of American people—and more than half of U.S. gun users—have consistently favored U.S. guns.
Handguns account for about 50 percent of all murders in the United States. They are responsible for the slaying of about 28 people each year, and 100 handguns are bought approximately every 13 seconds. A recent report by the U.S. General Accounting Office concluded that 40 percent of the increase in violent crimes could be caused to the greater availability of handguns.
THE GAO REPORT underscored the inadequacy of the blotted national blanket
"Everyone except the street-crime lobby ought to be for it," said an Illinois congressman, referring to the defunct 1978 grand jury that would have unified sporadic state and local laws.
of state and local gun laws. In New York, which boasts of comparatively stringent handgun regulations, 95 percent of the handguns seized by police were bought out-of-state. In Detroit the figure was 92 percent. In Atlanta and Los Angeles cities with permit restrictions, only 18 percent of the weapons are obtained from out-of-state retail stores.
The St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, speaking out on the same issue, wrote, "We now know street crime doesn't need a lobby." The New York Rifle Association to fight its battles for it.
The bill, which would have applied to 70 percent of the handguns then for sale in the country, was called "horrible" and "diabolical" by its self-irighteous opponents.
In 1976, NRA lobsty Richard Corrigan declared a "great victory" for constitutional rights when Congress shelved a bill banning concealable guns, or枪支， in 45 percent of street crimes involving guns. Although a federal study showed that only 6 percent of the small-barrel weapons had been reported to the FBI as stolen, another NRA lobsty trumpetly said that they have no relevance to crime in this country.*
THE NRA, well endowed by U.S. gun manufacturers, for years has been protecting the rights of thugs and killers.
IS MURDER NOT the most diabolical act a human being can commit? Have the assassinations of President John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Robert Kennedy gone wrong? Robert Kennedy gave painfully unbeaten?
In 1976, after the second assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford in 1785, he was indicted for control. This time Ford's life had been threatened by Sarah Jane Moore, a middle-aged woman who, shortly before, had been kidnapped for carrying a 44 carigator in her purse.
The shocking, irrational tolerance of wide-open gun ownership is illustrated in an officer's comments.
"WE DIDNT BOOK her because you love her," he said. "The laws, he said." It is a citation offense. It felony if you carry brass knuckles, a billy knife or a ice pick—but a gun is not allowed.
But the bitter foes of gun control never learn. Back in 1974, 70-year-old Alberta Williams King, the mother of Martin Luther King was killed when a young assailant stabbed him into the sanctity of Atlanta's Eisenhower Church, where she was playing the organ.
On this occasion the Miami Herald uttered a passionate yet logical plea for gun control—a plea that should have been heeded many years ago.
"PROMINENCE ADDS to the shock of Mrs. King's death," the paper editorialized, "but other useless, insensible violent acts are no less tragic."
"Friday night, a 17-year old boy working in a gas station was robbed, abducted, beaten,盯 and executed by someone who is very angry, fury and sufficient reason to kill—with a gun."
"A young mother, despondent, walked on to the stage after her death in a year-old daughter Friday night. With the gun she had bought, she killed the child, then herself. Life, she felt at that moment."
At 'midnight Saturday a domestic argument ended when a 38 caliber bullet struck the husband in the chest. Who was the enemy?
THE ENEMY there, and the enemy throughout this country, is the easy availability of guns of all sorts.
"Still, the 'patriots' and 'sportsmen' throw up their lobbied defenses at the first mention of strict gun laws. Guns don't kill, they insist; people kill.
"But people kill with guns. Because it is easier, because it is quicker. In the white shirt design or in the anguish of insanity, instant and irreovable mayhem and murder are the by-products of the American people's acceptance of the cruel 'right to bear arms'."
"In the name of human decency—and with murder in the church, in the name of God—isn't time, now, to say stop?"
Kansan pours 'vitriol' on alum Dole
To the Editor:
I read in the Feb. 20 Kansan the story about the usportsmann like conduct of the kUU-skate university students during the KUU-usa winter Olympics and the highly derogatory hammers that were flaunted about. I then turned to the story about the hammers that had loosened an equally derogatory cartoon.
accompanied by a length column in similar style, and whose students—one who participated on two warfare missions in the campus and all but lost his life in defense of his country during WWII. The document was also digitized.
I was surprised that the Kansan would pour out a full column of K-State type vitrol on one of its own. I would appear that Robert Dole's chief sin in the mind of Robert Dole.
columminist Breton R. Schender, was that he defeated a Democrat who thought it was that the bumper stickers bumper sticker们 that he was a "Dr." I've always wondered if the more have we had
Of course, it wouldn't have served Schindler's police slaws to have mentioned the threat of an attack on U.S. Congressman caught up in the recent scandal or in any of the earlier ones.
Thos. C. Ryther Lawrence resident
Field house weights for privileged only
To the Editor:
Keith Kephar is a lucky man. Tomorrow he will be competing in the Arkansas Open Bodybuilding Championships. However, if he fails to qualify as a student, the prospect of even entering a
bodybuilding contest would be unthinkable.
Why? Because students who are aspiring body builders must work out in the weight room at Robinson.
Brian Boyer
Topeka freshman
Unlike the weight room which the variety athletes use, the weight room at Robinson consists of an over-sized cloet with poor lighting and lacks equipment. Even worse is the fact that this will never change because the ad-venture changes time or finances to worry about weights or weightlifters. This means that even the equipment used by athletes will effort never be able to fulfill a dream because he lacks the equipment needed to develop his body to its fullest
So consider yourself lucky Mr. Keppart. I almost give up my first-born child if I would enable me to work out in the gym which you are privileged enough to work out
To the Editor:
Farmers may gain from soft drink tax The Editor
Referring to the editorial "Tax Could Kill Thirst," (Feb. 19) I see that ridiculous editorialism has again appeared in the Kansan.
I favor the excise tax on carbonated soffice drinks. Information I received from home, (in a district adjacent to Rep. Beezerley), makes it possible to reduce property taxes.
Rep. Beezerley is from a farm district. This proposed reduction would benefit farmers, who pay exceptionally heavy property taxes now. I know this because I live on a farm.
To the writer of this editorial, who, it appears, cannot survive the summer heat without soft drinks, I suggest drinking water. Water does a better job of quenching thirst.
David Schifferdecker
Hepler freshman