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Eddy’s is essential
I recently learned that Eddy’s Shooting Sports in Mountain View has been ordered to shut down. It has been deemed nonessential. This is a mistake. Eddy’s is essential to our local efforts to maintain calm and ensure firearm safety.
Purchasing firearms in a panic is a horrible and dangerous idea. That is why California has a 10-day waiting period from purchase to pickup. It allows the purchaser time to calm down. Shutting down Eddy’s, a licensed law-abiding dealer, will lead some panicked people to seek out unsafe firearms from the black market. That will make our local area less safe.
Eddy’s is essential in our efforts to get unwanted firearms out of people’s homes. During this time of economic distress, some families will need to sell their unwanted firearms to make ends meet. Eddy’s does a steady business of purchasing unwanted firearms, inspecting them for safety, storing them securely, and then ultimately reselling them to legal and responsible purchasers.
Sadly, some in our local community are susceptible to conspiracy theories and are overly fearful of tyrannical government. Closing a licensed firearms dealer will only help fuel their delusions. We have already seen this group freak out about military vehicles being driven through the streets of Mountain View. Keeping Eddy’s open is essential to our efforts to reason with these people and keep them calm.
Finally, Greg David, the owner of Eddy’s, is a solid and responsible citizen. He is committed to ensuring firearms safety and helping to keep people calm. I have known Greg for nearly 20 years. He has always put firearms safety and responsibility above profit. He upholds both the letter and the spirit of our gun laws. He and his business are essential to our community.
Stuart Eichert
Piazza Drive
Use technology to empower our students
Schools across the world are relying on Mountain View-based Google to do remote teaching via Google Classroom and virtual conferencing tool Google Meet.
There is one notable exception: Mountain View Whisman School District will not be teaching online.
Despite early gestures to get computers in the hands of the students, the district has chosen not to 100% eliminate the digital divide at this time, even though no city in the country is better equipped to attempt this than Mountain View. Why pass two infrastructure bonds if we can’t provide the infrastructure now necessary to continue learning from home? Other districts are deploying Wi-Fi on buses, and moving mountains to get a laptop in the hands of each child.
The implications of this are significant. While some MVWSD teachers may on their own go against district guidance to provide online instruction, the lack of there being Wi-Fi and a computer in each student’s home means that most online school activities will be optional enrichment or socialization. This benefits those who need enrichment or welfare check-ins the least and misses those who need it most. Many more teachers will choose not to plan activities that utilize the full vibrancy of all the online content being made available since they know not all their students have access. The most vulnerable children that need to connect with their teachers will be left out; all the while, those with means will have more access.
Now that it is official that students will not return to campus this term, I urge the community to convince MVWSD to do what no city can do better than Mountain View: Use technology to empower our students, and be a national model in remote learning.
Christopher Chiang, former MVWSD school board trustee
Space Park Way
Feeding those in need
We face a mounting humanitarian crisis in Mountain View. Our seniors, disabled, and homeless are facing hunger now at a rapidly increasing rate. Many are no longer working and have limited or no incomes. Many seniors are isolated at home and afraid to go shopping. Our disabled residents are finding it extremely challenging to get around with limited public transportation.
Our local nonprofits, such as Hope’s Corner, CSA, Reach Potential, and the Day Worker Center, are working overtime trying to meet the surge in demand. Unfortunately, they are limited in their ability to acquire food and prepare and distribute hot meals. Resources for obtaining food are stretching thin. The scale of this crisis is unprecedented.
We ask that corporate and restaurant kitchens participate in an effort to meet this mounting crisis. Can your idled kitchens and staff be used to prepare food? We also need expertise in sourcing and preparing food at scale for existing nonprofit kitchens. Can you help? If so, email us at MVfoodhelp@gmail.com.
Dave Arnone, Middlefield Road; IdaRose Sylvester, Jefferson Drive; and Marilyn Winkleby, View Street
The Voice will publish letters to the editor online every Saturday while the publication of our print edition is suspended. Send letters to letters@mv-voice.com by Thursday at 5 p.m. Letters must be signed and no more than 300 words long.
The Voice will publish letters to the editor online every Saturday while the publication of our print edition is suspended. Send letters to letters@mv-voice.com by Thursday at 5 p.m. Letters must be signed and no more than 300 words long.
The Voice will publish letters to the editor online every Saturday while the publication of our print edition is suspended. Send letters to letters@mv-voice.com by Thursday at 5 p.m. Letters must be signed and no more than 300 words long.
With all the anti-Asian-American hate crimes going on these days, including violent assaults, I am not surprised to read that Asian-Americans are the largest group of first-time gun buyers these days.
Former trustee Christopher Chiang is right to advocate remote learning. It has taken a viral pandemic to draw attention to the advantages. Eventually, it could be that fewer school employees will be needed. Bureaucracies resist change. But here is some good news. Voters approved another round of borrowing ($259 million) by selling bonds. The bond measure on the March 3 ballot did not promise how the money would be spent except broadly. One permitted use would be to focus on remote learning as an ongoing option or even as a new model. Covid-19 is one of an estimated 600,000 viruses in animals that could “jump” to humans with reckless practices around the world. When a virus – ignoring other threats for the moment – can be transmitted by close human-to-human contact, we will often need to learn and work remotely.
Problem with expanding remote learning, which I agree with, is the teachers union will never let that happen.
Another issue, we as a city needs to re-evaluate how dense we want to be, both housing and population.
We can never grow ourselves into lower cost housing by building to the extreme. Do we want to turn into New York with such a over crowed population that a little bug comes along and instantly infects everyone?
I would like to see a building moratorium for 3 years and lets engage the public in many open forum discussions and then develop a plan for the city, then lets vote on it.
Good points. But there is another ongoing development (apart from the pandemic). High tech companies and developers want to build high-density housing in the nicest neighborhoods they can find and ruin. And they are working on STATE LEGISLATION to get their way. Even a city with its own constitution (called a “charter”) cannot legally defy state housing laws under the current state Constitution’s division of powers. That is why I raised 3 years ago and since the importance of proposing and passing a state Constitutional amendment that gives some power to cities (and counties) against the prospect of such far-reaching mandates under state legislation. One of the state power-grabs you surely read about in the last year was numbered Senate Bill (SB) 50. Its chief sponsor, State Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco, is continuing to push legislation to “up-zone” most of California for more expensive, market-rate housing the corporations want for still more employees arriving from elsewhere. Maybe the current pandemic will promote working remotely and reduce the pressure for such high-density most everywhere. I have suggested that corporations be allowed to greatly expand only where there is room for adjacent new housing – but not OVERLOOKING YOUR BACKYARD. If high tech’s agenda is not yours, finds and support candidates at every level that will work in opposition to that agenda. See LivableCalifornia online for discussions.
I am a senior citizen living alone in a rental apartment, without any TV, Internet, WiFi, or mobile phone service. WiFi is my only lifeline to essential services, such as news, communications, healthcare, etc. WiFi was available inside the main building of my apartment complex, but the residents have been locked out of that building and all amenities since March 16. Other places with free WiFi, such as public libraries and the Senior Center, have also been closed.
I request the City of Mountain View to designate free metro WiFi as an essential service and, working with local technology and telecommunications companies, to provide it throughout Mountain View during the COVID-19 crisis, especially in three types of places:
1. In the parking lots and garages of City-owned or managed facilities (like the Senior Center).
2. In the parking lots and garages of shopping centers (like Grant Park Plaza) and health care facilities (like El Camino Hospital and PAMF).
3. In high-density residential neighborhoods, like the block enclosed by Continental Circle and Dale Avenue, where thousands of residents live (in apartments and motor homes or RVs).
Thank you.
Dear the person who posted above, have you checked to see if there’s is Comcast Xfinity which has been open to all during this crisis.
Select the “xfinitywifi” network name in the list of available wifi and then launch a browser.
For a map of Xfinity WiFi hotspots, visit http://www.xfinity.com/wifi
Details: https://corporate.comcast.com/covid-19
As long as any neighbor around you has a Xfinity home router, that router serves as a public access point, unless the customer actively turned it off. I hope MV can encourage all Comcast customers who actively turned off their public access setting to turn it back on during this crisis to help their neighbors (the default setting for customers is it’s on, and it has no impact on your home network’s security or privacy, please help students and senior citizens by keeping this feature on):
Info on turning on public access: https://www.tomsguide.com/us/how-to-disable-xfinity-wifi,news-19036.html
No body wanted this virus including China . To hate some one from China is just wrong . Have we not learned from our past mistakes .