Readers' Comments

WE NEED TO GET THOSE PEOPLE OUT OF WASHINGTON AND CLAIM THAT THEY ARE CONSPIRING TREASON AGAINST THE PRESIDENT AND BREAKING THE LAWS OF THE CONSTUTION 10 AMENDMENT TO BE EXACT.

Wherever you got your "a man with a concealed firearm confronted the gunman" information is COMPLETELY FALSE! I live in Portland about 5 miles from that mall. Early and subsequently confirmed reports say, he stole the gun, and randomly massacred two innocent people. I'm sure he would have tried for more, but the size and scope of the terrain is most likely what hindered his attempts. No one knows why, and NO ONE came forward to explain that he 'confronted the gunman'... he was found in a back room stairwell gunshot to the head, fully (in my opinion) intending to commit these crimes and end his life as well, regardless of whether your mythical hero intimidated him. I call BS on your claim.

If you will do your homework, you will find that the pharmaceuticals, chemicals and other toxins are of man made origins and not part of the network you described. You need to do some homework before you pollute with bad information.

Wisc. resident: please refer to response below regarding Australia. The prime minister at the time said (paraphrase) we will not allow this American disease to infect us.
If "Social Laws cannot fix this problem." (sic) why have any laws at all?

It's a little to easy to express sadness over the innocent children and adults without expressing a need to address the problem.

You haven't really thought this through, have you?

The way I see it you're a moron. The only excuse for making such an idiotic argument would be an adolescent revenge fantasy. Guns kill people, more guns, more dead people. grow up.

"I'm not pro gun" Whatever else you may be you are certainly no great thinker. To ignore the proliferation of military weapons and large clips since the mid 60's in an attempt to blame gun violence on psychotropic drugs is a shallow, thoughtless enterprise.
Video games, movies,television,drugs,comic books, the emasculation of single white males, may all be problematic to some degree or other ( and have all been sighted recently as causing violence) but none of these cause gun violence. GUNS CAUSE GUN VIOLENCE.
More than 10,000 people die in the U.S. every year from gun violence and the direct cause is the wide availability of GUNS. The absurd argument that more guns will make us safer makes as much sense as the idea that more cigarettes will prevent lung cancer. It is an empty argument, absurd on its face and universally disproved by data.
Until we are willing to recognize that guns of all kinds are too easily available to anyone who wants them we cannot solve the problem, which is TOO DAMN MANY GUNS.
Any discussion of "underlying issues" merely deflects focus from the obvious cause/effect relationship between a the wholesale availability of guns and death.

When we open the discussion about mental health and guns, it must include a chapter about a unique climate of fear and rage our commercial (in this case gun) culture finds lucrative to prey upon. The bluster of primal-instinct, with the dumb-down all-pictures NRA thinking to help make the power-point, is a sign of social failure to thrive gone viral, and public. An effective immune system fights parasites, it doesn't make them role-models. Throw out the tranquilizers and chemical lobotomy kits, then go find a bullet and bite it. For those who dream of an exciting retirement of aggression and violence in the State of Nature, I suggest they be given free airfare— one way, outbound. Don't forget to take all your guns with you.

Anonymous is misleading readers about sewage sludge and the regulatory agencies that continue to defend the rules governing using sludge as fertilizer:

FIRST: sewage sludge is NOT human manure or night soil. It is a complex and unpredictable mixture of human waste and thousands of man-made industrial chemicals which didn't even exist fifty years ago and some of which are highly toxic and persistent. The Federal Clean Water Act defines sludge or biosolids as a pollutant. Every entity that is connected to a sewage treatment plant is permitted, every month, to discharge 33 pounds of hazardous waste into this system. Here these, and other pollutants are REMOVED from the waste water and end up, by necessity, in the resulting sludge.

SECOND: treatment does not remove most of these contaminants. In fact, some processes used to treat sludge actually encourage the growth of antibiotic resistant pathogens.

THIRD: EPA and USDA, who wrote the current unprotective rules, continue to cover up the many reported problems linked to sludge-exposure; they ignore or silence scientists who document problems. Most of the researchers who get grants to study sludge, are those who promote land application. EPA and USDA worked with University of Georgia faculty to publish a paper that used fudged and fraudulent data, claiming that hundreds of prize-winning dairy cattle could not have died after ingesting forage grown on land treated with sludge. The courts ruled otherwise. Yet the paper was never retracted.

FOURTH: A National Academy of Sciences biosolids panel warned that sludge is such a complex and unpredictable mixture of biological and chemical agents that it is impossible to assess its risks when applied on land. The panel also emphasized the need to address the health affects of exposure to interactions of pathogens and chemicals in complex mixtures, such as sludge.

FIFTH: : the trace-element- argument is meaningless, since endocrine disrupters --sludge is full of them- can damage developing organisms in very small amounts: in parts per trillion.

Finally, Whole Foods' argument that they can't have a sludge policy because land application of sludge is legal contradicts their primary mission: Whole Foods sells all sorts of products and produce that do not contain dangerous chemicals--which are perfectly legal--but may cause serious harm to human health and the environment. Why make an exception for sludge? Why not follow the example of dozens of companies, such as Heinz, DelMonte, Kraft, and Western Growers, that do not accept produce grown on fields treated with sewage sludge?

For more information visit www.sludgefacts.org

I totally Agree with both of you....

Couldn't agree more with the above comment. This is an issue of people, not guns. Mexico is a prime example of how an unarmed populous gets overrun by criminals who have access to REAL assault weapons. It is illegal to own an automatic weapon in the US. Those who have them are criminals by default. The AR-15 or AK-47 platforms today are nothing more than an average semi-automatic hunting rifle and that is what they are used for as well as sporting competition and target/range shooting. Assuming the AR-15 is the problem is also assuming that those who own them are potential murderers. That is not the case. I have several handguns and rifles that I used for strictly target shooting and hopefully someday competition. I don't even hunt. I can't kill anything unless it is attacking me or my family and that includes humans. The last thing I'd want to do is shoot someone but I will if someone invades my home in the middle of the night. This is all to say that a vast majority of folks who own firearms are like me, peaceful law abiding citizens. The most important thing to remember is the Mexico example. When only police and military are allowed to have weapons, the country becomes corrupt and very dangerous as is Mexico today. The other point I'd like to make is that these murder stats that are being thrown around have no basis. The proper way to do that is to say "of a population of 330,000,000 people, 30 people a year are killed by guns. It's a per capita stat. So when you compare the US to other smaller countries, the total population should be considered. We are a huge country. Statistically, the more people, the more crime. It's pretty simple and not a stat that is valid. The other issue is that many gun deaths are accidental or suicides. I have not seen any mention of this. It all seems to be bundled in with the "murder" category. How about disclosing all stats.....the total population, death by suicide, deaths by murder, deaths by accidents. 65% of all gun deaths are due to .22 cal firearms. Think about it. 35% are by the above, murder, accident and suicide. If we are going to throw out numbers, let's throw them all out for everyone to see the reality. 30 people a year out of 330,000,000 is equal to .0000000909% of our population (30 / 330,000,000) of people getting killed yearly. For a country as large as we are that is minuscule. Though they are still human beings, were some gang bangers or other types of criminals killing each other? Why is there no mention of that? Lets be fair about this debate. Look at the stats properly and compare to other countries. We are so huge there is going to be murders, rapes, thefts and every other kind of crime known and there will be a lot, but compare it to the size of the country. Use the numbers properly. Don't sway them to make them look like our country is full of murderers. That is just not the case. We also have to consider the incidence of major psychological issues we have in our country. Again, do it per capita to be fair. One more point.....there was an incident in China where a madman stabbed many small children to death with a big knife. If there are no guns, these nutcases will find another way. The US is not alone in this type of mass murder. Again, look at the population size. China is more populous than we are. I guarantee there are a lot of mass murders in China and likely Russia too. Again, look at the numbers of people in these countries and use math....if you have the ability to think logically and look at stats. I honestly think that many of these anti-gun people don't know how to look at things mathematically and also don't want to because they want to sway the numbers in their favor. That is wrong and unfortunately too many others don't know enough to look at this mathematically. All they see is "guns = murders" and can't think past that. Australia has a very small population so it is much easier to deal with issues concerning the population. If they had 330,000,000 people, it would be a completely different story.

I imagine the previous post refers only to fertilizers commercially manufactured from sewage sludge and tested for metal residues. It's good to have standards for traces of heavy metals but I doubt that any of these standards can take into account the long term accumulation of these metals in the soil. Many are chemically reactive and bind to the soil so they don't "go away". Continuous additions of biosolids will just keep increasing their soil concentration.

But heavy metals are not the only dangerous components of biosolids coming from sewage. There are thousands of man-made organic compounds for which screening would be impossible. Research studies have found residues and metabolic products of pharmaceutical compounds that have passed through people using medications, including some radioactive tracers. We know some of these organic residues pose a health risk.

I live in a rural area where pumping out homeowners' septic tanks is a thriving business. When mine was pumped recently I saw the operator add a bag of lime to the sewage being pumped into his tank truck. When I asked him why he did that he said "That will turn it into fertilizer." I said "I thought you would pump this into the sewage plant in town." He said "Oh no. This will all get used as fertilizer." I would guess that this practice is widely spread across the country and represents a significant source of sewage-derived fertilizer to which no processing and no standards apply. And since it is not strictly a biosolid it probably doesn't get reported even in those states that regulate biosolids.