As soon as Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R) signed a harmful immigration bill into law last year, farmers saw an immediate exodus of thousands of skilled immigrant farm workers. Without enough workers, millions of dollars in crops rotted in the fields because there was no one to harvest them. Officials suggested that farmers could turn to the H2A guest worker program to hire temporary pickers, but that has not worked out for many farmers.

Now, as Vidalia onion farmers begin to harvest their crops, they face the same concerns again this year about not having enough workers to harvest their crops:

For years, Stanley had depended on mostly Hispanic migrant workers to harvest onions. Last year, Stanley says, many of those workers left Georgia following the state’s passage of a tough new immigration law. This is the first harvest since that law took effect.

This year, Stanley and other onion farmers began using a federal guest worker program called H2A. It basically imports workers from countries like Mexico, and then sends them back when the work is finished.

“I had ordered 60 people (via H2A) with the paperwork and everything,” Stanley said. But he said the government botched that request.

“And now I’ve only got 17 people when I’m supposed to have 60. The excuse they gave me was, they lost my paperwork,” Stanley said.

Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black (R) suggested the H2A program last year could be a way to replace lost workers, but told a congressional subcommittee that improving the program to reduce the red tape would help farmers. And the Georgia Senate unanimously passed a resolution asking Congress to expand the guest worker program so that farmers could hire more workers.

Reforming the guest worker program would not be an immediate panacea for the nation’s broken immigration system, but it could help offer farmers a stable, legal workforce while protecting these foreign workers from exploitation.

But if Deal and Georgia Republicans had stopped to consider how the state’s anti-immigrant law would affect workers and employers before they approved it, then the state could have avoided more than $800 million in estimated farm losses last year. So far, it looks as if Georgia’s farmers could lose just as much this year.

On April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 fellow members of the Virginia Tech community and wounded 17 others before taking his own life. Cho obtained the weapons he used in this killing spree despite the fact that he had a long history of mental illness, and he was able to kill so many people so quickly because he was able to purchase multiple high-capacity magazines.

Nothing can bring back the many innocent lives that were lost in this tragedy, and they will always be the greatest cost of this terrible day. Unfortunately, lawmakers have generally not responded to this event — or to similar killing sprees such as the 2011 Tucson shooting that killed six people and nearly killed Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) — by tightening down laws intended to prevent the mentally ill from obtaining firearms or by banning the kind of high-capacity magazines that helped make both killing sprees so deadly. The goal of preserving human life should be all that is necessary to inspire lawmakers to enact common sense reforms.

Perhaps, however, this lawmakers will be motivated by a different concern — the need to save money in a time of tight state budgets. As a new Center for American Progress report explains, Seung-Hui Cho’s fifteen minute killing spree imposed steep costs on the taxpayers:

In Oklahoma, state lawmakers are poised to enact an “open carry” law which would allow residents with a permit to display their guns in grocery stores, libraries, and anywhere else in public. The measure is expected to be passed by the legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Mary Fallin.

Oklahoma law currently requires that people must generally conceal their handguns. In 2010, then-Gov. Brad Henry (D) vetoed an open carry bill because state police expressed concern that it would make it hard for them “to distinguish criminals from law-abiding citizens.” Keith Barenberg, the president of the Oklahoma State Troopers Association, maintains his concern: “Law-enforcement officers will be that much more jumpy and nervous if they see a gun.” And such confrontations could lead to loss of innocent life. As Norman McNickle, president of the Oklahoma Association of Police Chiefs, put it: “How does the first arriving officers know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are? It makes their job exponentially harder.”

Proponents of the “open carry” legislation, like Tim Gillespie, director of the Oklahoma 2nd Amendment Association, claim the measure is necessary because “we live in a dangerous world.” So dangerous, according to Republican state Senator Ralph Shortey, that people need the open display of guns to help fend off attacks from wild turkeys:

During committee discussions, Shortey argued that he shouldn’t be required to pay fees and get a license to carry a weapon. Here’s how he justified that:

“I was in oil and gas,” Shortey said. “I was out on a lease at one time and I got attacked by a turkey. Wait until you get attacked by a turkey. You will know the fear that a turkey can invoke in a person. And so I beat it with a club. That was all I could do.

“I wish that I had a gun with me,” he said. “And I started carrying a gun in my truck after that without a license because I didn’t want to get attacked by a mountain lion. Turkeys are bad enough.”

The Tulsa World opined, “Open-carry is needed to protect us from enraged turkeys? Seriously?” The editoral joked, “Maybe Oklahoma’s stand your ground law covers turkey attacks.”

Sen. Shortey is full of “asinine” ideas. As ThinkProgress noted earlier this year, Shortey introduced a ludicrous and unnecessary bill that would prohibit the manufacturing and sale of food “which contains aborted human fetuses.” He also has proposed legislation to “abolish the state Court of Criminal Appeals and…to eliminate the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s power to review the constitutionality of laws.”