Letters to the Editor | Sept. 12, 2024

Gun violence is an epidemic in America and Pennsylvania. While the vast majority of people support commonsense gun violence prevention legislation, nothing seems to happen. While we probably cannot totally eliminate gun violence, we need to do something, and not resign ourselves to gun violence just being “a fact of life,” as JD Vance says, or “just get over it,” as Donald Trump seems to accept.

Pennsylvania House Democrats have passed some legislation (the vote was almost completely along party lines), but that legislation is stalled in the Senate in a Republican-controlled committee led by State Sen. Lisa Baker — who receives her marching orders from Republican Senate leadership, Kim Ward and Joe Pittman, meaning it cannot come up for a floor vote in the entire Senate. The NRA doesn’t stall gun violence prevention legislation, the GOP does. They care more about the rights of gun owners than the rights of children to feel safe going outside to play or go to school. If you truly care about gun violence, you need to get out and vote against the party that won’t even try to do something.

Kent Kingan, Malvern

Shame on The Inquirer for printing a Donald Trump ad disguised as a letter to the editor by a former administration official. We are certainly better off than we were four years ago at the beginning of the pandemic, with Trump claiming COVID-19 would be gone by May and was curable by useless or harmful measures. Ask the families who lost loved ones because of Trump’s incompetence if they were better off then. The letter continues the false claim that inflation was Joe Biden’s doing, when the pandemic caused inflation worldwide. Grocery prices have not doubled. And how could Biden possibly make the cost of Phillies tickets go up? The letter writer should take another look at Trump’s misguided tariff plan, which will absolutely cause inflation because he doesn’t know how tariffs work. As a 40-year subscriber, I believe you owe your readers an apology.

Jean A. Kozel, West Norriton

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The former Trump administration official who wrote a letter to the editor asks whether we are better off now than we were four years ago while using 2019 as the base year for his economic arguments. I should remind him that 2020 was four years ago, not 2019. In 2020, we were immersed in a pandemic that Donald Trump knew was coming and then proceeded to mismanage. The inflation he cites was largely generated by the disruption of supply and demand that came about because of the pandemic. Inflation has now returned to normal levels, and wage growth is outpacing inflation. Some prices are still high and will not decrease absent a deep recession, which no one should want.

One can debate the extent to which the former president was responsible for the positive economic conditions that preceded the pandemic, though anyone crediting Trump’s business acumen, which itself is questionable, should understand that a businessman wants consumers to pay as much as the market will bear. Regardless, a president should be judged first and foremost by how he handled the worst crisis during his time in office. On that score, Trump failed miserably. In 2017, Trump inherited a robust economy from President Barack Obama. Trump did not return the favor to the Biden/Harris administration.

Bill Fanshel, Bryn Mawr

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