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passed over to the Senate by a vote of 63-6. I voted in favor of the measure.
• The House also passed HB 1204, 36-32, to require legislative approval before further education "content standards" are adopted by the SD Board of Education. This bill likely will not pass and be signed into law, but it was brought by a former educator who has argued tirelessly for more public input prior to bureaucratic approval of standards pushed by the federal government. Content standards legislation has been considered in other states, as well, the most notable being Indiana where a bill seeks to revoke the state's participation in the "Common Core".
• With that, I will sign off for this week. God bless you all!
• Brock Greenfield

• News of the Newtown massacre brings me, at once, to an odd mixture of thoughts: of horrible gun injuries I've personally seen in the emergency room; of concepts of medical ethics that could give direction to our country on this controversial issue; and of cher

ished memories of hunting pheasants with my Dad.
• Medical ethics teaches four simple and balanced virtues: do good, don't do harm, base treatment on careful scientific study, and respect peoples choices. The last, also known as the autonomy principle, is to value every individual's right to self-direction, free choice, and independence. This, by the way, is the crux of the gun control argument.
• Medical ethicists teach us that we should endeavor to balance all of these virtues, realizing not one is more important than another, and one alone can be dangerous. For example I have prescribed medicine trying to do some good, without enough careful study, and then seen unintended harms.
• Back to the Newtown massacre: currently more than 31,000 US residents die each year from firearms, mostly from suicide, accidents, and in the inner city from gang war. We've made balanced laws about motor vehicle injury prevention that have saved millions of lives; can we do it with guns?
• First we should gather all the facts about gun violence so we don't cause unintended consequences, and all the while respecting people's freedoms. Unfortu

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