Support Relay for Life

It’s time again for what is arguably Barstow’s biggest community fund-raising event. Relay for Life events take place across the country in the spring and summer to help raise money for the American Cancer Society. Barstow’s Relay for Life takes place this weekend.

The Desert Dispatch this week has been profiling Barstow residents whose lives have been changed by cancer. Readers can see that people of every age and background in our community have had to face this struggle. As we wrote in an editorial last year prior to Relay for Life: “You'd be hard-pressed to find any adult in America who hasn't had cancer affect his or her life, either personally or through loved ones. And in a town like Barstow, where so many people know each other, there are few barriers that distance folks from those who are living with or have survived cancer.”

We encourage Barstow residents to once again get involved this year. The money raised by Relay for Life comes back to Barstow in assistance for families who need help battling the many different kinds of cancers that threaten local lives.
Scott Shackford

Beware emotion-based ordinances

County supervisors voted unanimously this week passing an ordinance prohibiting convicted sex offenders from operating ice cream trucks.

This is another example of a fairly pointless ordinance that makes people feel safer by fighting a problem that doesn’t actually exist. There aren’t any sex offenders operating ice cream trucks in San Bernardino County. They’ve managed to track down one in all of Riverside Country.

But doesn’t it make you feel safer? Doesn’t it make you feel like the county is doing something? We worry about parents developing a false sense of security. Children were never at any real risk of becoming victims of assault by the ice cream man. Therefore, the risk of a child being sexual assaulted remains exactly the same as it did before this ordinance. Vigilance by a child’s family is and always will be the only real successful preventative of child sexual assault by strangers.

On a lesser level, we’re also concerned about the broad scope of the ordinance. Not all sex offenders are convicted of crimes involving children, yet anybody convicted of a sex offense will be prohibited from getting a business license to operate an ice cream truck. We know it’s really hard to care about the fate of anybody convicted of any sex offense, but it’s wrong to automatically legally prohibit people whose crimes had nothing to do with children from jobs connected to children.