Hurricane response has improved in election year
Our daughter is on travel nurse assignment in LaFayette, La. It is her first hurricane, but the other nurses experienced Katrina. Thankfully, it is an election year. The president and vice president even cancelled speeches at the convention due to the hurricane ó more likely, due to reminding people and news reporters of the fiasco during the last one.
This time, National Guard troops are there helping with evacuation, patrolling the cities and are assigned to the two hospitals still left open in LaFayette and other cities. Emergency vehicles and transportation have been brought in from six states.
Now, if they will just get busy and repair the damage from the last hurricane as well as the damage from this one, and rebuild the levies the way they should be rebuilt, maybe this area of the country could return to a normal and safer existence.
ó Janet Dennis
China Grove
A bias in assault charges?
I noticed a report about someone who is known to me in this past Saturday’s paper.
I am going to stir some feathers with my next few comments.
Assault is wrong. Male to male, female to female, female to male or male to female, assault is assault.
Why we do have special laws against males that may have commited assault against a female?
While I was not born in the South, I was raised in the South, and I have no problems in being held to a higher standard.
But the question must be brought up as to whether this is discrimination based upon one’s sex.
I refer you to the relevant statute:
Misdemeanor Assaults (14-33)
a. Any person who commits a simple assault or a simple assault and battery … [is] punishable …
b. … any person who commits any assault, assault and battery, … [is] punishable … if:
Inflicts or attempts to inflict serious injury … or uses a deadly weapon; or
Assaults a female, he being a male … at least 18 years of age; or
Assaults a child under … 12 years; or
Assaults a law-enforcement officer, … or
Assaults an officer of the … Court …
Assaults a school administrator, school teacher, substitute teacher, teacher’s aide …
Classification: a) Class 2 Misdemeanor ($50 or 30 days); b) Misdemeanor (two years and/or fine).
We never read about a female being charged with “assault upon a female.” It is always just plain “assault.”
Assault is assault.
ó Bill McCranie
Salisbury