Annoyed with Landers’ ‘ravings’

RE: “Voters, beware of misleading messages”

Rich Landers, The Spokesman-Review 28 Oct 04

Over the years I have become increasingly grated by the political ravings of your outdoors writer Rich Landers. As something of an outdoorsman living under the cloud of three previous heart attacks, I have also objected to his elitist desire to remove more and more hunting country from my access, a la Bill Clinton’s roadless program.

His pooh-poohing of my whole-hearted belief in the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment and his attribution of that right’s greatest defender, the NRA, as being “shameless” outrages me.

Rich Landers breathlessly reported chatting with a Dutch businessman while hiking in British Columbia, and clearly Rich took delight in finding that the Dutchman and he shared the same opinions of America’s leaders.

Rich Landers has every right to have political beliefs, no matter how contrary to the bulk of the outdoors-reading subscribers of The Spokesman-Review. He should be able to dismiss hunters physically unable to follow his wilderness backpacking regime as ethically challenged and pathetic road hunters bent on bulldozing and paving the nation’s forests. He should be able to sneer at supporters of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, and state that the dedication of the 125-year-old NRA to preserving our right is shameless. He should be able to find as much kinship as he likes with Dutch businessmen, who profoundly reinforce Rich Lander’s dislike of our President.

But he should no longer do it in the sports pages of The Spokesman-Review.

Terry Lamb

Sagle, Idaho