Editor, News-Register:

Once Republican West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey and Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine sent our states’ National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., as part of President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown in the nation’s capital, I felt it was my duty to speak out.

President Trump has long associated urban crime with the distressed street corners home to low-income American inner-city youth. Dating back to the time he was a private businessman in New York City. The debate is now raging about whether someone has juiced the statistics on D.C., with both sides pointing fingers.

An online news site has reported that the guardsmen and women have been pulled from duty to qualify with sidearm training so they will shortly be deployed with guns on the Capitol streets.

I have had my own close encounters with street thugs more than once and have spent many nights visiting crumbling inner-city neighborhoods, meeting such notorious characters as Bucky Davis, former USA Boxing National Team v. Ireland “Get Down or Lay Down” and leader of The Junior Black Mafia. The JBM terrorized the greater Philadelphia area for more than a decade. He laughed at me and later died in a drug-related murder, being killed in West Philadelphia, execution style.

I’ve been in locker rooms where English was not the first language spoken by the majority, met young boxers like Arkon’s Todd Hickman on the USA Boxing National Team against the USSR, with a million-dollar smile, and the promise of being tomorrow’s Gold Medal winner or world champion, who unfortunately fell victim to the street drugs execution style murder victim.

Like a scene from the female music group TLC’s video “Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls.”

The thing is, you meet many of these young athletes in sports competitions where great camaraderie is established, then read that a short time later, they have been killed in a senseless drive-by shooting, not always in Big Cities but in towns like Steubenville and Wheeling.

We need safe neighborhoods for everyone to live in and to walk in communities without fear of street violence.

I guess I fear that another Kent State May 4, 1970, is on the horizon. I do not feel this will end well. I have way too much experience to not recognize a clash of cultures.

Michael Traubert

Wellsburg