‘Ignoring the Roots’

One gets awfully tired of reading Times’ editorials when it is always the same unending rhetoric about gun control, sometimes squeezed in the middle of other topics.

Before you criticize President Bush’s anti-crime package (“Ignoring the Roots,” May 16), I would like to see anti-crime ideas and suggestions in your editorials for a change. What do you think can be done about revolving-door justice (responsible for escalating crime figures)? The state’s criminal punishments should be more in line with the federal system.

California residents tend to feel sorry for the wrong party after a crime has been committed; that’s where plea bargaining comes in. That explains how a man can buy weapons and then go and shoot schoolchildren in Stockton. All the crimes he committed in the past were reduced from felonies to misdemeanors, so he had no felony record to make him ineligible to possess firearms in California.

We need to send criminals a message that plainly says that when the gavel falls and a judge sentences them to 10 years in prison, they can be sure that they won’t see daylight for a decade, period. It’s a little hypocritical to give prisoners time-off credit for “good behavior.” If they had behaved well in the first place, they wouldn’t be in prison.

Well, I wonder how much of a blood supply does The Times have, because after bleeding all these years, that heart of yours should be dry by now. Let’s hear some constructive suggestions on crime fighting instead of crying foul and running behind the Constitution’s robes. The Founding Fathers sure as hell didn’t have our present judicial circus in mind some 200 years ago.

ANDRE BELOTTO

Westchester