Demise of S.F. exaggerated. It’s still a great city to visit – San Francisco Chronicle

To paraphrase a misquoted Mark Twain: The demise of San Francisco is greatly exaggerated. We just spent five glorious days in the city and had the time of our lives.

Fantastic restaurants in the Outer Sunset, on Divisadero, in North Beach. Baseball at Oracle Park. Dear San Francisco one of the best shows Ive seen in years at Club Fugazi. Fun neighborhood bars. We took Muni everywhere. It was clean, it was efficient, it was affordable. It was safe.

No, San Francisco is not the city of my youth, and yes, San Francisco has plenty of issues to deal with, but it is a welcoming, vibrant city still full of promise.

In 1911, President William Howard Taft called San Francisco, The city that knows how, and it has continually shown the world that, indeed, it does. And it still does, today.

Tim Dineen, Beaverton, Ore.

I am appalled that the National Park Service continues to put cattle ranching first over the native tule elk at Point Reyes National Seashore. Tourists like myself do not want to visit Point Reyes to see cattle. Places like a national seashore are meant to protect wildlife, not ranching.

The National Park Service continues to allow preventable deaths of tule elk inside the park. With problems such as having to ship water to these elk and having to cull their numbers, the cheaper option is eliminating ranching at Point Reyes and removing elk fences to stop limiting where they can go. Having free-ranging herds, the elk can find water themselves. I will never visit Point Reyes if the park service continues putting cattle over wildlife.

John Marchwick, Eureka

At the Battle of Yorktown that ended the Revolutionary War, George Washington led an army of 20,000 soldiers against 9,000 British troops. The Brown Bess musket used by the British and American Army could fire three rounds a minute. At that rate, it would take a lone gunman over five days to fire upon every soldier on the Yorktown battlefield.

Modern assault-style weapons like the AR-15 used in this weeks New Mexico mass shooting can fire hundreds of rounds per minute, and the most lethal of modern assault weapons could have killed every soldier at the Battle of Yorktown in under 30 minutes. The authors of the Second Amendment could never have envisioned how firearms would evolve.

If George Washington were to return in 2026 on our nations 250th birthday, he might wonder why our nation had not updated the Second Amendment to preserve the security of a free State by restricting civilian access to military-grade weapons.

John Maa, San Francisco

Regarding the debt ceiling crisis, the elephant in the room is outrageous military spending. Americas annual military spending is now around $900 billion, roughly 40% of the worlds total and greater than the next 10 countries combined!

We need to cut the Pentagon budget.

Ivona Xiezopolski, Hayward

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Demise of S.F. exaggerated. It's still a great city to visit - San Francisco Chronicle