I was deeply offended at your insinuation that Crocs are anything less than the finest advancement in footwear since the invention of the cushion insole [“Clog Wild,” April]. Have you ever worn a Croc? I suspect not, because if you had you would be aware of their superior support, breathability, comfort, and engineering. These are no mere Jellies! Recant, blasphemer! Lest more strongly worded letters should find their way to your inbox!
Kristyn Meyer,
Normail, IL
Thanks for your excellent piece by Tom Bartel, “Guns in the City” [April]. It’s great to read a balanced, level-headed article about gun ownership in our city—one that dispels the myth of the slack-jawed, chew-spitting, ignorant “gun nut.” People who are anti-gun either by choice or by default often view a gun owner as some kind of leper; hopefully articles like this one can help bridge the gap and show that we’re regular citizens too.
–Alex Barnes,
Minneapolis
This was a great article on the gun culture of the area. The overwhelming majority of firearms enthusiasts are not crazed nuts just hoping for some punk to “make their day.” We just want to protect our house and family from the worst that could happen. Thanks.
–Adam Houtkooper,
Burnsville
The article about handguns by Tom Bartel is an interesting piece to find in a magazine that claims on its website to favor “contrarian” viewpoints. Bartel acts as a marketing mouthpiece for the nine-billion-dollar firearms and ammunition industry—hardly a contrarian thing to do. I might have found it more contrarian if Bartel had investigated whether the gun shops in the area actually would refuse to make a sale to an obvious “straw” buyer (illegal), or if they would sell fifty or one hundred handguns to a single customer (legal but unethical). It is these types of purchases that are key to the supply of illegal guns on our streets.
Bartel makes it look attractive to buy a handgun, but that’s because he didn’t talk to anyone who might have given him some facts. Like the fact that the single most important risk factor for being killed by a gun is owning one. Or the fact that on average, one gun is reported stolen every day in Hennepin County. Or the fact that the handgun that killed a Minnetonka man downtown in March was stolen from someone carrying it for protection. Or the fact that an American is nearly seven times likelier to be struck by lightning than to kill someone justifiably with a handgun.
Bartel notes that Bill’s Gun Shop and Range in Robbinsdale was identified by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as the source of 373 guns linked to crimes between 1996 and 2000, but “no data has been compiled since then.” That’s not quite right. The data is there—it’s the ATF’s job to compile it. The news is that Congress, at the insistence of the gun lobby, has forbidden the ATF to release the data. The firearms and ammunition industry depends on the criminal market for its profits, so it lobbies to protect dishonest dealers. Which local gun dealers are the suppliers of the street guns used to kill in our neighborhoods? That’s one of the “Secrets of the City.”
–Heather Martens,
Minneapolis
June 2004 — Jane Kempf, Chaska teacher find time to coax a young reader and neighbor, Santiago Rodriguez near Usquil, Peru. Second photo: The Rake translated by Julia Antonsen, Mound, MN in Charat, Peru pronounced (shar ot). Listening from left to right are father-in-law Santos Rodriguez, Chimbote, Peru, neighbor, Jane Kempf, Mound, and a Peruvian cousin.
Paul of Maple Grove (the one in the middle) writes: While on an Hawaiian cruise, we visited Fanning Island, Republic of Kiribati located 1000 miles south Hawaii. Here’s hoping the natives enjoyed your mag as much as I did. (This may be our most remote Red Handed submission yet!)
I crave depth. Sometimes I read the McNews but always thirst for more. Your magazine is a deep drink of cool water in an ADD-media world. I can hardly wait for each issue to come out, and I devour every article (and yes, even the advertisements). Kudos especially for “The Long Walk” [April]. When I was on sabbatical last year, I parked my car (being unable to afford the twelve dollars per day for parking at the University of Minnesota that ordinary folks pay). I took the light rail up from the Nokomis neighborhood, necessitating a one-mile walk to/from the 46th Street Station. It was heaven. I even hiked my groceries three quarters of a mile home in any kind of weather. At one point, I parked my car for a full five weeks (nothing close to Jennifer Vogel’s accomplishment). But walking in the city is a great joy and I recommend it heartily. For heart health, among other reasons.
M. Cecilia Wendler, RN
Minneapolis
What a lovely article Jennifer Vogel wrote about walking in dear old Minneapolis. I’m a complete walking geek myself–walking to work and many other places because I choose to. It grows from a love of the city (whatever that city may be–Seattle now, or Shanghai, Hanoi, and or wherever I’ve lived) and what I can learn from being in it. When I was living in Minneapolis a few years ago, I attended one meeting on precisely the Block E issue; it was a meeting filled with hopeful citizens looking to voice their opinions on that awful, dispiriting building. The meeting was advertised as such an opportunity, yet its facilitator would have none of it and gave no time (what interests were behind this of course I have no idea) for anyone to say a word. That would have to come at another meeting. She presented a picture-perfect, stern, unimaginative, policy-wonk demeanor to those of us with the naive notion that we might have something important to say. It was a fascinating little game to watch the city keep the voices of people at bay, and these were not your problematic minorities and others that Minneapolitans so struggle to come to terms with. It is a very sad thing for a city that does, as you point out, have so much going for it. I was visiting family a few weeks ago and was lamenting that even for a city bent on car myopia, the actual aesthetic experience of driving is much worse than many places I’ve been–no trees or landscaping along much of the freeway system. This too was not always the case, as my mother comments wistfully about the old Highway 100 when it was originally built with lovely elms and lilacs for miles. I’ve come to the conclusion that it comes down to insecurity, and much of that having something to do with masculinity (men must command space, not walk through it) and class (which is obvious, I think). Such problems are very alive in this more vibrant Seattle, as I must justify my eccentric walking ways to friends and colleagues virtually every week. I’m an urban geographer who does work in China and it is there as well that I have had numerous bewildering conversations trying to convince people that professionals in the United States sometimes walk or bicycle to work. Somehow, some way, we must find a way to alter this vision of car driving as the only properly imagined life and I appreciate your attempt to make an alternative seem at least possible.
Brian Hammer
Seattle, WA
I’m sure Santino Fontana will be great as Hamlet. But you’re wrong to suggest that casting him is somehow authentic, rescuing the part from inappropriately “fat, bearded, balding guys.” “The Prince of Denmark is twenty or so years old” says Straight Talk [March]. No, Hamlet is thirty. The gravedigger in Act Five, when asked how long he’s been in the job, replies that he started “the very day that young Hamlet was born.” He goes on to explain that he has been at it “man and boy, thirty years.” When Hamlet is deriding himself for cowardice, he calls to the audience, “Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?/ Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?” And when he’s fighting his duel with Laertes, his mother worries that he’s “fat and scant of breath.” OK, this has been interpreted as meaning “sweaty” or “relatively out of shape.” But elsewhere in Shakespeare, “fat” when used to describe a person generally means … well … “fat.” So Hamlet’s thirty, bearded, and on the pudgy side. The skinny young man of our imaginations is a Victorian invention. Not that it matters in production. What’s needed is an imaginative and versatile actor. But the telling-it-how-it-is tone of Straight Talk grates a bit when the initial premise of the article is wrong.
Bridget Escolme
London, UK