7 days ago
Letters: Ignition Interlock Device might have saved 10-year-old's life
Regarding ' Father charged with murder after 10-year-old son dies in Wine Country crash ' (Bay Area/Crime, July 23), what a shameful and sad article I woke up to the other day. A man, who had already been convicted of 2 DUIs, was allowed by the state to go out and kill his child.
That's right. The state of California felt that a person with 2 DUIs should be allowed to continue driving.
His child would still be alive today if California made it mandatory that this individual had a Ignition Interlock Device (IDD) installed on his vehicle. The state does force some people with DUIs to install them but apparently not in this case.
My other big problem is why doesn't the state make it mandatory that every car have one? As many as 1,069 people die each year in California each year because of DUI drivers. The cost to install an IDD would be about $400. Seems like such a small amount of money to save so many innocent lives. So, again, why have our political leaders done nothing to solve this problem?
One answer could be the amount of money the state takes in on DUI convictions. I wish I could tell you how much but apparently the state doesn't report how much that is but since there are about 96,000 DUI arrests per year at say $5,000 per conviction (and this I'm sure is a low estimate) that's a half a billion in revenue.
So shameful and sad.
Roger Lema, Castro Valley
Regarding 'Reports: Palestinian activist previously detained at SFO killed in West Bank' (Bay Area/San Francisco, July 28), I never got to meet Awdah Hathaleen. The nonviolent Palestinian teacher, father and filmmaker was murdered last week by an Israeli colonizer while protecting his home from destruction by Jewish 'settlers.'
I had wanted to see him. I bought tickets in June and waited to hear him at an event in Oakland, but the Trump administration wouldn't let him speak. He was held at SFO for over 24 hours, then called a 'security risk' and was returned to Palestine.
Despite undisputed video of the alleged killer's shooting at Palestinians, he was released after a day and will probably face no charges. How striking that America and Israel collude to frame nonviolent Palestinians as terrorists. They deny us the right to hear their voices. They kill them when they try to defend their land.
I beg readers to call Congress and the White House and demand we stop arming and funding Israel's mass slaughter in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Tell your friends to speak out, too.
David Spero, San Francisco
Unreal responses
A liberal from Danville supports Smith's ask to billionaires without challenging the nearly total loss of governmental authority over the privatized concentrated power of our nation's social wealth.
A conservative from Clovis absurdly calls Smith's ideas socialist, though she doesn't even call for enforcing existing capitalism's tax rates on the wealthy and corporations (which most avoid).
A third writer from Livermore finds that taxes are only wasted or sequestered by bureaucrats, so why even bother with having government (even though, for example, the 'bureaucratic' cost of running Medicare is about 2% while that of running private health insurance is upwards of 20%).
While we're on wishful thinking, each of these writers, including Sarah Smith, might sit down and read the Open Forum ' Why Murdoch will cave to Trump ' on the same page above the letters. The realities in Aron Solomon's piece reveal the unreality of each of these letters.
Marc Sapir, Berkeley
Regarding ' S.F. may soon ban natural gas in homes and businesses undergoing major renovations ' (Bay Area/San Francisco, July 26), transitioning San Francisco away from natural gas towards electrified heating is a critical step in bringing our city into 2025 in terms of climate policy.
Though cutting red tape is important and extremely in vogue in the Democratic Party, this is an instance where a little red tape can save a lot of greenhouse gases.
