Banning straws and other objects of mass destruction

Plastic straws are hollow and rigid and objects move through them. They are also a lot safer topic to write about than guns. This editorial on plastic straws is way overdue. It was conceived following the Town Council banning plastic bags in July. Then other seemingly more urgent topics took precedent.

The elections are over, but gun murders continue. In the month since three people were murdered in Las Vegas on Oct. 14, there have been four mass shooting where at least three people were killed. The 11 deaths at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue and the 13 assassinated at the Thousand Oaks club are the marquee killings, but 49 people have been killed by guns in this period.

The weapons being used are just that: implements of war meant to kill large numbers of people in a short amount of time. They are not the arms envisioned to be used under the auspices of a well-regulated militia. We are failing the Second Amendment, which calls for “a well-regulated militia.”

Then there are straws. We are killing ourselves slowly, if significantly, in so many ways.

Since La Conner’s town council ban on plastic bags in stores the news on plastics has been full of municipalities and jurisdictions banning straws. California is the first state with a ban. It follows Seattle’s ordinance passed last summer.

The good news is that in the mellow, simple days of last summer, local bar counter talk voluntarily turned to banning plastic straws. In La Conner. Here, in the first municipality in Skagit County to ban plastic bags, there are residents discussing getting rid of straws. Best if the town’s restauranteurs took the lead on this. At least one owner is looking into substitutes. There is a marketing advantage as chic tourists learn in 2019 that the most forward looking eating establishments have dropped plastic straws from their inventories.

That’s a small step to fill the void left by crushing of the I -1631 measure by the fossil fuel industry. Can you say $31.55 million dollars?

Dinosaurs, after all, are oil’s, and thus plastics’, ancestors.