Letters: Reasons to Care About State Assembly Race This Year
To the Editor,
Election Day (Tues, November 3rd) is less than six weeks away. This year, the race at the top of the ticket here in Princeton is for state assembly, a race that many people – even regular voters – don’t pay much attention to. But there are real reasons to care about the assembly races and urgent reasons to vote. Gun control would be one relevant example. Thursday and Friday, there were threats at Riverside Elementary School (the school my children attended) and Princeton High School (again, where my children attended). Although, thankfully, those threats and similar ones last year have turned out to be hoaxes, they are frightening nonetheless. In the wake of Sandy Hook and so many other shootings, I want stricter, sensible controls on firearms in place. Yet our Republican representatives in the State Assembly, Jack Ciattarelli and Donna Simon, don’t share this goal; both of them voted twice (Assembly bill #2006, 5/2014 and A1329 2/2013) against reducing the maximum size of ammunition magazines and in February 2013 they both voted against background checks prior to a firearms purchase. It’s no wonder that the NRA awarded Donna Simon an A+ rating and Ciattarelli a B+ rating. These proposed restrictions are not radical, but are commonsense solutions to a real problem. Simon and Ciattarelli have also failed to support minimum wage increases, spending on women’s health, investigating possible corruption due to Bridgegate, and to prohibit fracking waste from being released into the environment.
But Princeton voters do have an excellent alternative this November in Democrats Andrew Zwicker and Maureen Vella. Zwicker, a physicist at Princeton University, is committed to making decisions based on evidence and science rather than on ideology. Maureen Vella, a former judge and a practicing mediator, is aware of the real impact that laws have on people and works hard to see all sides of an issue. They will bring a progressive perspective to representing our district in Trenton and help to fight against Chris Christie and the Republicans’ misguided priorities. This election is likely to have record low turnout. Your vote matters! Please join me in voting for Zwicker and Vella for State Assembly.
Eve Niedergang
Krystal Knapp is the founding editor of Planet Princeton. Follow her on Twitter @krystalknapp. She can be reached via email at editor AT planetprinceton.com. Send all letters to the editor and press releases to that email address.
Well this is certainly a mother lode of liberal claptrap. In the wake of Sandy Hook you wanted magazine capacity restrictions, a move that would only have affected law-abiding citizens and would not deter crime or reduce gun violence AT ALL, and which anyone who knows anything about the subject realize would not have affected any of these tragic events. Jack and Donna recognize nonsense when they see it.
Adam Lanza had to murder his own mother in order to steal her weapons, perhaps we should make murder illegal as this would be a deterrent to killing people? Nothing common sense at all about this. In order to push this nonsense, Democratic assembly members brought a convicted felon, Neil Heslin, into the New Jersey statehouse to advocate for ‘stricter gun control’ in the state with the strictest (#2 actually) laws. That’s how desperate people can become, when they actually consort with criminals against the law-abiding. How are those laws working in communities like Camden, Paterson, Newark and Trenton? Not so well, actually. What is the common denominator (and in common with Chicago, Baltimore and other problematic areas)??? – Democrats in charge. They have failed at governance and therefore want to restrict the rights of the law-abiding citizens. Nonsense! Trenton is a perfect example – they let > 100 police officers go and elected a criminal for a mayor who was arrested three years ago after being the subject of an FBI investigation into bribery, fraud, extortion and money laundering. He was convicted on all charges. Yet, the sheeple will vote Democrat again.
If you knew anything about the subject matter, you’d know that we already have background checks in New Jersey (again, for the law-abiding, the criminals do whatever they want). We have the NICS system and firearms purchasers must have an FPID (Firearms Purchaser ID) which requires, guess what, a background check! Democrats, in their fantasizing about unlimited regulation and control of the people, proposed embedding this in the NJ drivers license, a move that was estimated to cost > $50,000,000 and which would produce no substantive results in addressing gun crime.
This is the so-called ‘progressive’ agenda, the ‘progressive’ approach that no one seems to ever question (liberals in lock step with a liberal media). This is the Democratic SuperPAC that spent over $2,000,000 smearing Donna Simon (and lost). No one ever points out what this is progressing toward – a heavy-handed controlling government that allows crime to run rampant and spending to spiral ever upwards in an attempt to create some sort of liberal utopia. Well, you have your ‘utopias’ – inner city Baltimore, the south side of Chicago, Detroit and of course, Trenton.
Stick with high quality representatives like Donna Simon and Jack Ciattarelli and don’t fall for the folks who want bigger government, more regulations, more control, fewer rights for the people and more crime.
Amen. The gun control hysteria has lost all touch with reality. Handguns, for all practical purposes, are already illegal in New Jersey–the law allows for only a few, very narrow, exemptions to what is basically a complete ban. This state has many issues, to be sure, but lax gun law is not among them. Jack and Donna have my vote for sure now in an election I’d have ignored prior to reading the frankly silly letter above.
If you believe in the right-wing social policies favored by conservatives and the Governor, please vote the incumbents back in (they have supported the Governor on his every veto). But if you support the progressive policies supported by the majority of NJ voters, please vote for Zwicker and Vella in the Assembly.