CITY WATCH : Victim of Evil
Amalia C. Sison, a resident of a central city retirement home, used to travel across town by bus to work as a volunteer at the Foundation for the Junior Blind in Windsor Hills. No longer. On Tuesday the 69-year-old foster-grandmother hovered near death, the victim of two teen-age attackers who shot her in the eye as she waited at a bus stop behind the foundation.
If we had stronger gun control, would the two youngsters who attacked Sison merely have stabbed her?
The Times favors much tighter limits on private gun ownership, but gun control is hardly the whole of the answer, of course, just a crucial part. Because for some lawbreakers there is no technical fix, no change in law or regulation or practical arrangements, that will suffice. It is the criminals’ own fault; they are a huge part of the problem.
If this generous, courageous woman survives, she will survive blinded and traumatized. Will her fellow volunteers now fear for their own safety? How can they not? Even if her young attackers have not killed her, they have surely done their bit to kill the spirit of people who, like her, are willing to take risks to help the young, the handicapped, the vulnerable, particularly in parts of town for which not enough people volunteer.
The two youths arrested in the case are from Inglewood and Santa Monica, not from Windsor Hills itself, but does that help?
Our neighborhoods are not medieval walled cities. Or they haven’t become that yet. But we’re getting there. We’re getting there.
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