Letters to the editor Aug. 5

Gun violence

A Friday morning shooting in an Arkansas grocery store left three dead and eleven wounded, including the suspect and two law enforcement officers.  Two days previously seven people were injured in Pennsylvania. The day before in California two were killed and two injured. These senseless killings go on and on. 

The numbers are staggering. It is time we face reality that this problem is not going away. We can all work together to help solve this devastating problem or we can just worry that our grandchildren might be the next victims of gun violence.

We all have a right to feel safe anywhere in our country. Other countries have regulations that have made their citizens much safer, but all we do is let the gun manufacturers put fear in our hearts. 

I am not suggesting that all guns be taken away.  In my 80 years of living in Montana, my family has hunted deer, elk, moose and antelope. We all took hunter safety classes to learn how to be safe when hunting. 

Now we have weapons used in wars that can kill many people in a very short time. In 2017 Stephen Paddock fired more than 1,000 rounds at a crowd on concert goers, killing 60 people and wounding 413 in 10 minutes with a bump stock on his gun. 

I will only be voting for candidates willing to work on legislation that makes our country a safer and saner place to live. I challenge you to help make a difference. no Montanan should possess guns of war to kill more children in classrooms, shoppers in grocery stores, or people praying in churches or synagogues. 

— Dianne Grove, Whitefish

Crime against humanity

We want to thank the U.S. House of Representatives, which unanimously passed H.R. 4132, the Falun Gong Protection Act, on June 25, which aims to end forced organ harvesting and the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China. This resolution will also protect U.S. citizens, institutions, the transplant community and American medical centers from unknowingly supporting this crime against humanity.

In July 1999, then-Chinese Communist Party head Jiang Zemin, decided that Falun Gong’s popularity and spiritual tenets threatened the atheist party’s power. He banned Falun Gong, a self-improvement practice with gentle exercises that benefit health and well-being, and launched a brutal campaign to eradicate it. According to reports from Amnesty International, Freedom House, and others, Falun Gong practitioners have been arrested on a large scale, tortured, and killed for the past 25 years.

The state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience has been going on since 2006. Independent investigations by Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas, human rights activist David Kilgour, and journalist Ethan Gutmann first exposed these crimes.

In 2018, The China Tribunal, led by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, was organized to further investigate these allegations. After examining evidence and hearing personal accounts, a full judgment was released in March 2020 concluding that, “Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale and that Falun Gong practitioners have been one — and probably the main — source of organ supply.” Similar conclusions were also stated in Freedom House reports.

We ask Sens. Jon Tester and Steve Daines to support this bill, which would impose sanctions on foreign persons who have taken part in the involuntary harvesting of organs from prisoners of conscience. It will save innocent lives, curtail forced organ harvesting, and help prevent American medical centers and patients from becoming complicit in these heinous crimes.

The people of Montana can help to end these atrocities by writing or calling Tester and Daines’ offices and telling them to support H.R. 4132, the Falun Gong Protection Act.

— Katherine Combes, Kalispell