Editor, Times-Union: In 2002, during the four-day Memorial Day holiday weekend, there were 17 traffic deaths in Indiana. Since then, Operation Pull Over's "Click it or Ticket" campaign has been conducted throughout the state of Indiana (2003-2006) and there have been only 16 traffic deaths in four years combined.
Seat belt usage rates in Indiana currently is 82 percent for all vehicles - that's an increase of 10 percent from 2002. For every 1 percent increase in the seat belt usage rate, we can potentially save 10 lives in a year in Indiana. The "Click it or Ticket" campaign is a valuable reminder to motorists to buckle up to save lives.
The Governor's Council on Impaired and Dangerous Driving receives federal money from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to provide overtime enforcement and other traffic safety programs in Indiana to reduce fatalities and injuries in the use of occupant restraints and impaired driving.
Kosciusko County police agencies participating in OPO are Kosciusko County Sheriff's Department, Warsaw Police Department, Syracuse Police Department, Winona Lake Police Department, North Webster Police Department and Pierceton Police Department. Officers working the program are paid overtime to work the programs. Their overtime pay is not paid with county or state tax money - it's paid with federal funds. The officers' responsibility is to the program while being paid by the grant - unless it's an emergency. There have been several incidences in which officers in Kosciusko County have been pulled off their grant detail to assist with emergencies, most notably when a bank robbery occurred in Columbia City and officers working OPO apprehended the suspects entering Warsaw, and another situation where a gun was involved.
The incident mentioned in Friday's Letter to the Editor would not have been one that an officer would have been pulled off to respond to. The information about the hit-and-run semi was broadcast over the police radio, and it's unfortunate that the hit-and-run driver was not apprehended. We have one of the largest counties in the state and it may take an officer 20-30 minutes to drive through traffic on county and city roads to respond to a non-emergency call. The information that is given to the dispatcher is what determines the priority of the response.
In surveys of visitors at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles during the past year, 76 percent support the seat belt law for occupants in all vehicles. Police cannot be there all the time, but they do the best they can. I've been involved in law enforcement for 30 years and would have to say that Kosciusko County is fortunate to have some of the most dedicated and resourceful police officers in the nation. They enforce the laws that are enacted by our elected legislators.
A violator of the seat belt law pays $25 in court. A life costs so much more! Please take the time to buckle up and make sure your child is properly restrained as well.
Lance Grubbs, via e-mail Northeast Region - Law Enforcement Liaison
Governor's Council on Impaired & Dangerous Driving
Conclusion
Editor, Times-Union: This is the fifth and final part of my letter dealing with the subject of freedom of religion. The previous four parts were printed in the Sept. 8, Oct. 14, Jan. 3 and April 26 editions of the Times-Union. Five more sources of information can be added to the 30 sources listed in the previous letters to the editor.
31. "The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity 1919-1945"
32. "The History of Ireland"
33. "The Catholic Church" 34. "Keys for Writers: A Brief Handbook"
35. "Chronicles of the Crusades: Eye-Witness Accounts of the Wars between Christianity and Islam"
Based on all of these sources of information, most of which are available at the Warsaw Community Public Library, I came up with three definitions for the following concepts/principles: Freedoms of religion, separation of church and state and merger of church and state.
1. Freedom of religion - The inalienable right of each person whether alone or with others to peacefully, openly, and freely practice a religion of one's own choosing, or for one to practice no religion at all and for each person to be free from having acts of persecution, forced conversion and the establishment of a universal state church/state religion or militant state atheism inflicted upon them by any part or whole of any local, state, national, continental or world government.
2. Separation of church and state - The moral duty of any government to refrain from using its authority to interfere in the peaceful religious affairs of its citizens by avoiding such acts as the establishment of a theocracy with its compulsory adherence/funding for all to the decrees and tenets of a state church/state religion and its suppression of any dissenting religious views that would challenge the orthodox view or the establishment of a militantly atheistic state that attempts to eradicate any and all forms of expression of religious belief outside of one's own personal thoughts.
3. Merger of church and state - The totalitarian (pure Fascism or Communism) principle that a government whether alone or in league with the institutions of a majority religion, powerful minority religion, or atheism should attempt to achieve religious unity for a community or a country as a whole through state-imposed mass conformity to a single state-controlled church/religion or militant state atheism and engage in the suppression by state agencies of any independent religions that would pose a challenge to the official state church/state religion or compulsory state atheism.
Hopefully, readers of the Times-Union will find these principles of use when evaluating current controversies on church and state.
Alexander Houze Leesburg
Swan Killers
Editor, Times-Union: Oh, I get it. A swan killed by the DNR is less dead than one killed by a hunter.
So the DNR is going to cave into the very people trying to put them out of business, the anti-hunters. So who is it they think is going to pay their salaries once they eliminate the hunters? The whinnies won't.
