The Oregon college shooting is the 45th school shooting in the U.S. for this year alone, and the 142nd since the attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, according to the Guardian newspaper in England.

President Barack Obama said, “Our thoughts and prayers are not enough” before asking, once again, for voters to demand changes to the nation’s gun laws while he continues to bomb seven countries.

I would say, thoughts and prayers, and changes to U.S. gun laws, are not enough either. The U.S. needs to end its addiction to violence, including war. You can’t keep invading country after country, dropping bombs, initiating regime changes, transforming local police into paramilitary units gunning down people in our streets, and not expect such violence to be repeated in our schools and churches. The chickens are coming home to roost. Violence is as American as apple pie.

As individuals, communities and nations, we need to embrace nonviolence. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said decades ago in very prophetic words: “It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence.”

Jim Albertini
Malu ‘Aina Center For Nonviolent Education & Action
Kurtistown, Hawaii island

VW debacle showed self-testing doesn’t work

Oh, I get it now. Just like Volkswagen, which was responsible to self-test its vehicle emissions and report the findings to the proper authority, I am sure that the self-testing and verification will work just fine with our president’s deal with Iran’s nuclear plants.

Mike Gallagher
Kailua

U.S. economy actually doing rather poorly

Naive citizens can write letters on the economy with little understanding (“Economy is doing well so topic didn’t come up,” Star-Advertiser, Letters, Sept. 26).

The calculation of the consumer price index and unemployment rates have been changed by our government to underestimate the rate of inflation and decrease the unemployment rate by simply decreasing the unemployment participation rate and not counting those discouraged workers not looking for work.

Our rate of investment in our businesses has fallen every year that President Barack Obama has been in office, and stock prices and portfolios are up because companies have used the low interest rates to borrow money to buy back shares.

Add nearly $10 trillion to our national debt and see that Obama has simply borrowed money to bolster the economy.

That happened in Japan, and now the Japanese yen has sunk from 78 to 119 per dollar, thus decreasing every Japanese citizen’s savings and ability to buy products.

Gary R. Johnson
Kaneohe

Here’s how DOE could finally get back on track

The state Department of Education spends millions of dollars annually on excessive headcount and consultants in central administration.

Eliminate the bloat positions through retirement attrition and progressively channel those monies toward eliminating the $600 million school facility repair backlog; hiring more teachers to reduce classroom sizes; buying new books for children; installing HVAC cooling systems in all the public schools; installing PV systems to help power the air conditioners; and building new classroom buildings and new schools.

Along the way, eliminate extraneous assessment testing and return all that class time to actual classroom learning. Dump Common Core and instead let the teachers simplify their curricula so they can just teach and not have to worry about three different methods to execute long division.

Von Kenric Kaneshiro
Liliha