Playing Safe
Welcome to the modern day, when kids are bragging about school shootings on one app and reporting active shooters on another. Utah government, health and education leaders are once again encouraging use of the SafeUT app after a string of too-close-for-comfort incidents involving guns and children. The app was originally meant to combat bullying and suicide, but this is the United States, where the freedom to harm and perhaps kill is a deeply held belief. That's also true of the anti-vaxxers spreading the joy of COVID far and wide, but school shootings are a different animal, somehow becoming "dope" through TikTok videos and the fleeting fame of teenage gunmen, as Fox13 and others reported. Apparently it was "American School Shooting Day." Celebrate! At least two Utah students in different schools here were arrested—pretty mild compared to 90 in Detroit. As well-known "Commie Columnist" Gail Collins notes, we could at least require guns to be locked up. Instead, we have an app.
No Bueno
What you see from the government is angst. What you see from developers is glee. Get ready for the onslaught of people coming to Utah, they say. But the planning piece is less than obvious. Throughout the state, housing projects are peppering almost any vacant piece of land, typically against the frustrations of neighbors, who tend to lose the fight. Bueno Avenue was the latest to go, as the Salt Lake City Council approved demolition of older, affordable homes for a higher-density micro housing project on 10 lots, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. Neighborhood advocates and the tenant-friendly Wasatch Tenants United protested in the halls, as they have for more than a year. "Few projects in the capital city's recent construction boom have framed the challenges of its ongoing housing crisis more starkly," the Trib reported.
Wedded Bliss
You have to hand it to Lois Collins of the Deseret News—she knows her beat and her beat is marriage. Almost weekly, the newspaper comes out with yet another story on how marriage is good, marriage and religion go hand-in-hand and divorce is a product of family trauma and premarital sex. Of course, this laser-focus on marriage and family is not unusual for the church-owned Deseret. Collins researches a lot of studies—some national, some local. But some of the findings are just head-scratchers. For instance, the premarital partner count. Researchers "found the highest link to divorce among those with six or more premarital partners, then next highest among those with one or two premarital partners. Having three to five partners was far less linked to divorce, which puzzled them." But she did note that marriages in a person's early teens or 20s are those most likely to fail. Listen up, Utahns.
About The Author
Katharine Biele
A City Weekly contributor since 1992, Katharine Biele is the informed voice behind our Hits & Misses column. When not writing, you can catch her working to empower voters and defend democracy alongside the League of Women Voters.
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