Commentary

The Maryland General Assembly is considering a gun control bill that would absolutely save lives in this state. And it isn’t the one you are probably thinking about. The state Senate is moving forward on a needed revision to the concealed-carry law, in the wake of a Supreme Court decision that struck down a similar law in New York. We believe that measure deserves support to reinstate limits on the ability to carry a gun in many settings to preserve public safety.

While Montgomery County is dominated by elected leaders who are concerned with things like adding bike lanes on Old Georgetown Road, which don’t get used but severely clog traffic, and who promote drag shows for minor children at local libraries, Northern Virginia continues to grow its economic base and generate revenue that will lessen the financial burden on working taxpayers.

Dan Rodricks’ recent column (”Dan Rodricks: Fox45 ignores context on Baltimore’s post-pandemic test scores,” March 3) as well as Roberta E. Sabin’s letter to the editor about Baltimore City Public Schools’ test scores (”This retired teacher wants to help tutor city students. Any takers?” March 10) illustrate a key question: What can community members do to support our city’s future leaders?

Maryland aims to have 300,000 electric vehicles on the road by 2025. As of Dec. 31, 2022, there were 62,744 EVs registered in the state. As the number of EVs in Maryland continues to grow, it is essential that the state’s EV charging infrastructure keeps pace. One crucial aspect of growing the infrastructure is ensuring that the EV charging stations are fully functional.

When one political party is consistently defeated by the other in an area, it tends to inspire childish behavior: If you can’t win at cards, you can at least knock over the table and scatter the deck. What we are seeing in politics is an equivalent partisan approach to elections. Democrats seek policies to convenience voters and maximize turnout.

Maryland has been trying to address the needs of child sex trafficking victims since at least 2007 when the Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force was established. Laws have since passed that define trafficking as a form of child abuse and that impose harsher penalties on traffickers. The Regional Navigator Program, established in 2019, now provides child trafficking victims immediate, specialized care in nearly every county. Yet, despite these advances, the state still has not passed Safe Harbor legislation to protect sex-trafficked children from being charged as prostitutes.

Governor Wes Moore has committed to ending child poverty. Maryland agriculture has a crucial role to play if the state is to achieve this audacious goal. Eliminating food insecurity for the state’s children is vital to the solution. Doing so in a way that restores functioning ecosystems and eliminates disparities should become the driving force for all agriculture policies and practices. Maryland will only end child poverty if it pursues these linked goals concurrently. Food, environmental and social justice thus form agriculture’s “triple aim.”

Baltimore has a wonderful opportunity to make lemonade out of lemons, as my father, James Rouse, used to say. He also used to say, ” Every problem is but a challenge, and a challenge is an opportunity in disguise. And when confronting a problem, start by thinking first of what things would be like if they worked and let reality compromise you later.”