Apr 8, 2016 4 min read

Editorial voices from newspapers around the United States as compiled by the Associated Press:

Almost as infuriating as Donald Trump’s macho blathering about building a gigantic wall along our border with Mexico is the mindless assent the other two Republican presidential aspirants give to the notion. “Of course, we have to have a border wall,” Ohio Gov. John Kasich said during a recent debate, as if the magnificent U.S.-Mexico borderlands were a flat, featureless tabletop, and dividing the interconnected borderlands would be no more trouble, expense or environmental disruption than setting up a net across a Ping Pong table.

Apparently neither Kasich nor his fellow candidate – a Texan who should know better – has any notion of the spectacular landscape along both sides of the border. The border-wall enthusiasm of the would-be presidents suggests ignorance of the vast region and contempt for all that lives there – plants, animals and people.

Certainly, nations have a right to protect their borders, but a seamless wall stretching from the Gulf to the Pacific, nearly 2,000 miles, would destroy much more than it would protect.

Ecosystems and endangered species aren’t the only ones who would pay a price for such an extravagant boondoggle. So would the American taxpayer (at a time, by the way, when net immigration from Mexico is zero). The New York Times has estimated the cost of building Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” as $16 million per mile for a total of about $20 billion. That may be chump change for a big spender like Trump, but it better fits the definition of his latest catch phrase: “waste, fraud and abuse.”

Depending on which side one stands, the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” movement is either a way to punish Israel through economic and political pressure for its treatment of Palestinians, or it’s an anti-Semitic campaign to demonize America’s only democratic ally in the Middle East.

But one thing the BDS movement is not: a legitimate vehicle for deciding how a public university should spend tax dollars. Universities should not get involved in political battles over how their dollars should be invested and spent. It’s not their money: A sizeable amount of public-university funding comes from taxpayers, either through direct state support or through federal student loans, tuition grants and research dollars.

The decision on whether university dollars should be used to isolate and punish an international ally does not belong on the Oval at Ohio State University. It belongs in the halls of the Congress or state legislature, where elected officials can hold hearings, consider expert testimony and weigh the financial, economic, political and social consequences.

The National Rifle Association has long specialized in fairy tales. Our favorites include “Obama is coming for our guns”; “Universal background checks will lead to a national gun registry”; and the classic “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

Now, however, the NRA has taken this affinity for the fantastic to a whole new level. The New York Times reports that the group is publishing online a series of reimagined fairy tales in which central characters “are now packing heat.” Indeed, the first two in the series – Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun) and Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns) – are available on the NRA Family website, alongside such useful consumer guides as “Nine Concealed-Carry Purses for Summer and Spring.”

But the NRA’s effort does inspire us to indulge in a fairy tale of our own imagining. In this one, the next mass slaughter of innocents by a deranged shooter is followed not by NRA lamentations that it all could have been prevented had the victims only been armed and returned fire, but by a honest conversation about what sensible measures might rein in the reign of terror inflicted by indiscriminate gun violence in America.