The News Courier encourages letters to the editor. Submissions should be no more than 400 words and include name, address and telephone number for verification. Submissions that do not meet requirements are subject to editing. Writers are limited to one published letter every 30 days. Send letters to P.O. Box 670, Athens AL 35613 or email to adam@athensnews-courier.com. The deadline for letters is Wednesday at noon.

Numbers don’t add up

Dear Editor:

The real national emergency is not on the southern border. The government’s own statistics tell a very different story.

The United States Government Accountability Office (https://bit.ly/2Er22Dd) indicates 4 percent of 24,000 aliens convicted in 2009 were for firearms or other causes, which comes to 9,600 convictions. Assuming these were all homicides, it would require multiple homicides per conviction to match any of the other death rates.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (https://bit.ly/2XkpVVV) has a chart showing five deaths per 100,000 population due to “commonly prescribed opioids,” plus another nine deaths per 100,000 population due to other synthetic opioids but lumps prescribed with illicit sources.

The U.S. Census (https://bit.ly/2ItN45a) estimates the total population at 326,066,725 as of Dec. 1, 2017. This translates to 16,303 deaths directly attributed to prescribed opioids and another 29,346 to the other synthetic opioids, for a total of 45,649 in one year.

The CDC (https://bit.ly/2mt7fRg) also lists 38,658 firearm deaths in 2015, and 38,748 motor vehicle wreck deaths.

The Congressional Research Office (https://bit.ly/2GV00OO) tallies wartime combat deaths, which haven’t been as high as any of the fatality rates since World War II.

Sincerely,

David Williams

Elkmont

No emergency

Dear Editor:

The president of the United States has declared a national emergency to justify taking money away from where Congress allocated it, and using it instead to build a wall between us and Mexico.

A national emergency implies that there is a threat to our nation of such an immediate nature and magnitude that our normal democratic processes do not have time to address it. In this case, our normal processes have addressed the issue. Congress has failed to fund Trump’s wall for his entire term of office, and the newly elected House of Representatives has clearly and intentionally denied funding.

Trump has not declared an emergency; he has stolen the authority given to Congress by the Constitution of the United States. We cannot allow him to succeed. Doing so will create a totalitarian administrative branch that can ignore or reverse the legislature simply by declaring, unilaterally and without evidence, there is an emergency. That is the government of a third-world dictatorship, not of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.

Even for those who so despise democracy that they might agree to such administrative power, this makes no sense. The only differences between the U.S.-Mexican border now and the border years ago is that fewer people are crossing it illegally today, and more of them are women and children. There is no emergency that did not exist when Trump was elected, and that did not persist through two years of Republican-controlled Congress.

I call upon all Americans, whether Democrat, Republican, independent or other, to make it clear to your senators and representatives that you will not tolerate any hint of legislative collaboration in this power grab.

This is no longer partisan politics. This is a threat to the very existence of the nation.

Sincerely,

Ken Hines, chairperson

Limestone County Democrats