12
Tuesday, April 3, 2001
Concerns or
our coverage?
Contact the
leaders’ advocate at
anthuikmanieunc.edu
or call 933-4611.
Jonathan Chaney
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
Kim Minugh
uNivEßsrrv editor
Ginny Sciabbarrasi
cite editor
Board Editorials
Livin’ It Up
A rental licensing program provides benefits for both renters and
neighbors. The Chapel Hill Town Council should lend its approval.
The world would be ideal if we could all
get along. Fortunately, the local Rental
Licensing Task Force is attempting to make
that possible - at least with student housing.
On March 26, the Rental Licensing Task
Force presented the Chapel Hill town man
ager with recommendations to implement a
proposed licensing program for landlords
and renters. It is an effort to make both par
ties more accountable.
The task force is attempting to relieve the
flurry of complaints that residents have
lodged through the years in near-campus
neighborhoods about problems with noise,
garbage and parking around student rentals.
A city-run database will be created, pro
viding renters with information from the
applications of the landlord. It lists the
address of rental properties, the number of
tenants living there, the amount of parking
available and contact information of the
landlord. Noise ordinance information,
garbage management, parking regulations
and expected tenant conduct also will be
included in the application.
That information will give students a
heads up of the rules of a rental before they
enter irito a contract. And it will give neigh
bors recourse when they have to deal with
bad renters. They can contact landlords
Troubling Trends
President George W. Bush has made another environmental misstep
in abandoning the Kyoto accord instead of trying to make it work.
In recent weeks, President George W.
Bush has continued on a disturbing trend.
After breaking campaign promises on cut
ting arsenic levels in drinking water and car
bon dioxide emissions by power plants, the
new president has announced that the
United States will back out of the Kyoto
accord.
It is a decision that wrongly sacrifices the
environment for economic concerns.
The Kyoto accord is an international
agreement that aims to fight global warming
and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
President Clinton had signed the treaty, but
the Senate has yet to ratify it.
The United States already lacks credibili
ty within the international community when
it comes to environmental issues, particular
ly with regards to air pollution.
In a March 6 memo to Bush,
Environmental Protection Agency head
Christine Todd Whitman wrote “Mr.
President, this is a credibility issue for the
U.S. in the international community. It is also
an issue that is resonating here at home. We
need to appear engaged.”
However, with his decision to reject the
treaty, Bush’s stance on global warming and
the environment hardly appears engaged.
Though the United States only contains 4
percent of the world’s population, it releas
es about 25 percent of the world’s green
house gases.
The international community has called
on the United States to take responsibility for
Readers' Forum
Matt Dees’ Op-ed Piece
‘A Sermonizing Whine,’
Full of Paternalistic Ideas
TO THE EDITOR:
I am deeply disappointed by Matt Dees,
the editor of The Daily Tar Heel, for the
paternalistic view he chose to take in the
midst of the David Horowitz controversy,
so disappointed, I, in fact, feel betrayed.
Asa 1996 alumnus of UNC, I keep
abreast of what is going on around the
Triangle by regularly perusing local news
papers through the Internet, including the
DTH. When I learned of the uproar the
Horowitz ad caused at Duke, I knew that
UNC would not be able to avoid this dis
pute.
On April 2, when the DTH gave exten
sive coverage to the issue, I thought the first
three columns I read (those of Moore and
Taylor, Chancellor Moeser and even
Horowitz) were expressions of respect for
the intelligence of die campus community.
The authors put forth their opinions and
allowed us all to think, or think more
Matt Df.es
EDITOR
Office Hours Friday 2 p.m. -3 p.m.
Alex Kaplun
STATE & NATIONAL EDITOR
Rachel Carter
SPORTS EDITOR
Jermaine Caldwell
FEATURES EDITOR
about negligent tenants so that they can deal
with problems instead of police.
Some on the Town Council have concerns,
including the cost and improper use of the
database.
But costs of the license would be nominal
for landlords. And the system is simple to set
up, so that cost will be limited for the town as
well.
It also will not be possible to misuse the
site because it will only allow documented
violation reports to be posted for open view
ing, not simply a bulletin board for renters’
venting.
This complaint-driven program does not
call for anew town employee. The building
inspector would investigate only after com
plaints were lodged, then contact tenants or
property owners to mitigate any problems.
So the program will not be burdensome on
the town.
For the 15,000 to 16,000 students not
housed on campus, the thought is that this
will add to steadiness and help maintain
community fife in area neighborhoods.
The University and the town will improve
because of this ingenious, yet simple plan. It
would be in the best interests of all involved
to implement this rental licensing program as
soon as possible.
its pollution -and the Kyoto accord is a step
in the right direction.
But now, if President Bush retains his cur
rent position and essentially abandons a
treaty that has taken more than three years to
craft, the United States might irreversibly
harm the success of future international
agreements on the environment.
Rather than abandon the Kyoto accord,
President Bush should actively seek to
amend the treaty to make it more palatable
to the United States’ economy.
Progress in that area had already been
made by the Clinton administration.
Emissions trading among countries is one
such proposal that would ease the financial
burdens of the treaty.
By ignoring the problem rather than
accepting responsibility and working towards
a solution, President Bush is making his com
mitment to big business at the expense of the
environment all too clear.
If the Kyoto accord is truly flawed, the
Bush administration should strive to make it
better rather than give up and put the entire
issue on the back burner.
Because greenhouse gases have such a
detrimental -some would argue a potential
ly catastrophic - effect on the environment,
the Bush administration should hasten to
work with the international community and
solve this problem.
Future generations should not be forced to
live in an unsafe environment because of
sluggish action by the current generation.
deeply, about free speech, the nature of
intellectual discourse and respect for self
and others.
Dees’ column, on the other hand, is a
sermonizing whine from the DTH bully
pulpit full of paternalistic phrases: “giving
them the opportunity,” “privilege given”
and “good faith effort we made to be sen
sitive to the black community’s concerns.”
Interspersed are insults that call the beliefs
and interests of those who did not want the
DTH to publish the ad “ridiculous” and
“inconsequential.” As Dees informs us that
the DTH edit board is “considerably liber
al” I could not help but think, “How
mighty white of you!”
Dees need be concerned that oppressed
communities will more than likely find the
tone, intent, and content of his writings to
be offensive. As we should have all learned
throughout this debate, free speech, includ
ing speech that we consider “ridiculous,” is
a right in America, not a “privilege” that
can be “given.” To use such terms when
addressing the opinions and concerns of
people of color and women is to place one
self in assumed position of power over oth-
Opinion
(Thr HktUij <lar
Established 1893 • 108 Years of Editorial Freedom
www.dailytarheel.com
Ashley Atkinson
ACTS & ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR
Carolyn Haynes
COPY DESK EDITOR
Sefton Ipock
PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR
Gun Control Costs Innocent Lives
As the baseball bats shattered the front
door, she locked herself in the bed
room. But soon the thugs attacked the
bedroom door. It started to crack. Finally, three
shots from her 9mm sent the predators fleeing.
The “million” moms marching would have
you believe this Oregon woman’s
Independence Day story is a rare event.
They’re right. Studies show that anywhere
from 70 percent to 97 percent of the time a
gun is used to prevent or terminate a criminal
attack, no shots are fired.
So when an illegally armed teenager
robbed Mike Nisi’s family-run jewelry store,
Mike’s wife had only to aim her handgun to
get the criminal to scream and flee.
The U.S. Census Bureau conducts the
National Crime and Violence Survey and
reports that scenes like these, which they call
“defensive gun uses” (DGUs), happen more
than 80,000 times a year in the United States.
The gun-nuts claim 2 million DGUs a year
based on survey data from scientific literature.
Either way, law-abiding Americans use a
gun in self-defense hundreds of times a day.
School shootings are so rare you remember
the names: Columbine, Edinboro. Yet politi
cians exploit such scenes to construct gun pol
icy, always “for the children.”
Slogans tease, “If guns are oudawed, only
outlaws will have children who shoot their
brother.” CDC reports that 121 American
children under 15 died in accidental shootings
in 1998. But 2,791 were killed by cars, 1,346
in fires and 1,003 drowned. Bathtub locks
could save more children than trigger locks.
To prevent drowning, wise parents teach
children to swim. To prevent accidental shoot
ings, what should a parent do?
Last year President Clinton lobbied for trig
ger locks after a six-year-old Michigan boy
shot a classmate. This after his dad went back
to jail and his mom trashed the apartment,
getting them evicted. Sleeping on a couch in
his uncle’s crackhouse, he found the stolen
gun. Mandatory trigger locks were the missing
element in this child’s life?
Trigger locks and other so-called “sensible”
gun restrictions are a shell game, a distraction
from real issues of violence politicos can’t or
won’t solve. Gangs wage drive-by shootings
over prohibition profits. A gay teenager com-
ers, “granting” these others the “gift” to
express their views at the white male whim.
It might not be racism, but that certainly is
paternalism.
Dees resents being called a racist. Asa
woman of color I resent being treated as a
subordinate in a community of equals.
Michelle L. fohnson
Class of 1996
Horowitz’s Point of View
Was a ‘Slap’ to UNC’s
Entire Black Community
TO THE EDITOR:
In his Monday April 2 Point of View in
The Daily Tar Heel, David Horowitz
writes, “ blacks now living in America
are the freest and most prosperous black
people on earth. The average descendant
of African slaves in America earns between
20 and 50 times as much as the average
black person in Africa, whose ancestors
were not kidnapped and enslaved.”
Wow, I never realized descendants of
Beth Buchholz
DESIGN EDITOR
Jason Cooper
GRAPHICS EDITOR
Josh Williams
ONLINE EDITOR
LJkJ
RUSS HELMS
HEALING OUR WORLD
mits suicide after months of verbal abuse in
government schools. An abusive husband
shoots his wife in the heat of the nightly beat
ing. Blame the guns? Treating symptoms, new
gun laws fail, an excuse for more laws. The
result? Ever increasing violence and more
than 20,000 American gun laws.
Here at Carolina, such laws seem popular.
How easy to abandon a right we never exer
cise, since we have a private police force to
keep our campus safe. “Name That Caliber”
isn’t as popular a Saturday night recreation for
us as it is in parts of Durham. If we wanted to
be armed, most of us could afford the addi
tional costs of most “sensible” gun restrictions
without resorting to the black market.
Yet many innocents, trapped in our inner
city war zones, depend on their Second
Amendment right to self-defense for daily sur
vival. They don’t share our luxuries, and “sen
sible” gun laws disarm these poor and needy
first. Their rights are not ours to surrender.
Several-hour waiting periods can save a life
by allowing angry folk to calm, but “sensible”
several-day waits leave victims vulnerable.
Rayna Ross, a 22-year-old Marine, awoke
to find her ex in her Virginia apartment, this
time armed with a bayonet. She’d survived a
previous attack and gotten a restraining order
and a gun. The gun worked, the predator
died. What if he’d hunted on day six of the
seven-day waiting period? Even a trained
Marine like Ross needed a firearm to over
come the predator’s size advantage.
Gun-control nuts note that in England,
guns are rare and the murder rate lower. Gun
nuts note Switzerland, where guns are more
common and the murder rate lower. Australia
offers a controlled experiment. In 1999, the
previously enacted “sensible” law requiring
slaves should actually be grateful for the
opportunity the slave traders afforded
them. Perhaps someone should go out to
the protesters in the Pit and ask them to
sign a giant thank-you card?
Seriously, though, the reparations issue
is a complicated one, but this comment
belongs nowhere in the debate.
And to the DTH - did you guys really
have to slap the campus’ African-American
community in the face for a publicity stunt?
You didn’t even make Horowitz pay for his
racism. You guys gave him the column for
free.
Allison Pickett
Junior
History and Peace, War and Defense
Abortion Protesters
Should Pay Heed to
Other Social Ills Also
TO THE EDITOR:
I find it distasteful that those people who
purport to hold all human life to be sacro
Lauren Beal & Kathleen Hunter
MANAGING EDITORS
Bria n Frederick
READI IRS’ ADVOCATE
Lai ira Stoehr
SPECIAL AS. SIGNMENTS EDITOR
gun registration was used -as always -to
confiscate tl le guns. Within a year, murders
were up 3.2 percent, assaults up 8.6 percent
and armed i obberies up 44 percent.
Australian g un control increased violent crime
by removing < a primary deterrent.
The Australian crime wave confirms the
largest stud)' done in the United States, Dr.
John Lott’s c: ontroversial (both the science and
conclusions) “More Guns, Less Crime.” He
found that vi< ilent criminals prefer unarmed
victims. If so i ne law-abiding citizens arm them
selves, crimiri als move where citizens are
unarmed or si rbstitute less violent crimes. Even
pacifists (like l ne) benefit - criminals don’t
know who is a irmed and who’s not (oops). Care
to risk your lif e on a guess again today?
In the 196C's, the Orlando, Fla. police
trained 2,500 women to use guns to counter a
rape epidemic . The next year, rape fell 88
percent and bv lrglary by 25 percent.
Australians should feel lucky. Governments
are more dead ly than criminals when abusing
monopoly of ft nee. Libertarians Jefferson,
Washington an and Madison protected gun rights
here, knowing ’ what authoritarians like Stalin,
Hider and Mao > could do to a disarmed peo
ple. More than 50 million victims of last cen
tury’s genocides i whisper warnings of their gun
control experiei ices from mass graves.
Today in the 1 Jnited States, the idea of citi
zens taking up di e family weapons against the
greatest military j lower in the history of the
world seems a little silly. The thought was just
as silly to the first few rebels in the mountains of
Afghanistan and t he jungles of Vietnam. And it
seemed pretty sill y to most in 1776, when
Colonial gun-nuts Washington and Jefferson
risked hanging to ensure your freedom.
The libertarian s who put together our
Constitution unde :rstood the awesome power
of deterrence. Thi; Second Amendment is just
the final check on a heavily checked-and-bal
anced govemmen t, and we should be thankful
that this need rem ains so remote.
But we must alv /ays stay vigilant, for if the
politicians can disable the Second
Amendment, they -can threaten the First.
Russ Helms, a Ph. D. candidate in biostatistics
from Chapel Hill, de fends his home with two
large dogs. E-mail: rt ielms@bios.unc.edu.
sand are often the same people who hold the
most conservative political and ethical views.
How does the “right-to-lifer” who finds
great moral indignity in abortion, not tap
into that same indignity when it comes to
dealing with such issues as poverty, hunger,
the death penalty and other global human
rights violations? That people who tout
themselves as “pro-life” are willing to cam
paign, protest, rally, cry and even kill for a
social issue whose ethical poles are far from
clear, only make it more maddening that
that same vitriol is never directed toward
raising our awareness of the unmistakable
crimes that human beings perpetrate
against other living human beings each day.
The fact that activist groups like the GAP
have chosen instead to champion a firmly
entrenched, rhetorically static and political
ly delineated issue not only makes their out
cry seem all the more disingenuous, it
undermines their credibility by emphasiz
ing an indefensible moral myopia.
David Rinker
Office Assistant
. Department of Pharmacology
Qlljp Saily (Ear Uppl
(S)
A
The Daily Tar Heel wel
comes reader comments
and criticism. Letters to the
editor should be no longer
than 300 words and must
be typed, double-spaced,
dated and signed by no
more than two people.
Students should include
their year, major and phone
number. Faculty and staff
should include their title,
department and phone
number. The DTH reserves
the right to edit letters for
space, clarity and vulgarity.
Publication is not guaran
teed. Bring letters to the
DTH office at Suite 104,
Carolina Union or e-mail
forum: editdesk@unc.edu.