Bill of Rights and Crime

In response to “A ‘Constitutional Moment’?” by Robert Weisberg, Opinion, April 24:

The crime problem is unique. Never before have people killed just for the sake of killing. Ask the old-timers in jail, who say that in their day if the victims did what they wanted, the criminals would do their deed and be gone, but nowadays even if the victims comply, they are still killed, as exemplified by the two Japanese students who were recently murdered in San Pedro.

I ask you, Mr. Weisberg, what is the point of having a Bill of Rights, when we are allowing a minute minority to infringe upon the rights of a vast majority? I say do anything to get these thugs off the streets, and if we have to take away their constitutional rights to protect the rights of the majority, so be it. I am sick to death of being afraid in my own building and neighborhood, and it is not an imagined fear. I have experienced more crime in the past three years than I have in all the other 29 years I have lived in Southern California, and, oddly enough, I moved from central L.A. to the upscale Encino area.

LINDA M. COTA-KUMAGAI

Encino

If Weisberg thinks these are “ordinary” times, he should think again.

When have children been shot in their beds by drug dealers doing a deal in their alley?

When have grammar-school children been shot by classmates who have brought guns to school?

When have children been gunned down by automatic weapons as they played in their schoolyard?

Let Weisberg live in the projects in Chicago for a month and then let him tell us about the Bill of Rights. Whose rights is he talking about anyway?

Criminals get their right to due process, social visits when they are incarcerated, gyms for physical exercise to ensure they are in peak physical shape when they are released so they can go out and commit another crime using force, education, extensive appeals to their sentences, well-rounded meals, etc., at taxpayers’ expense. Victims have no rights. They get murdered, maimed, robbed, traumatized, their families shattered, their potential lost.

Singapore is a clean, safe country. Citizens can venture out at all hours of the day or night without fear. Until Weisberg can say that about this country he should stop throwing stones.

Maybe the threat of caning would prevent the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage done to public and private property caused by taggers. Instead, we send taggers to art school at taxpayers’ expense!

I hope a “constitutional moment” is at hand. I think the people in the Chicago projects hope so too.

PAULINE SHEA

El Segundo

Lars-Erik Nelson (Column Left, April 21) seems to understand the issues, but misses the point. The problem with President Clinton’s proposed gun sweeps in Chicago’s (and L.A., New York, Detroit, etc.) housing project is unlawful search and seizure.

Living in the projects is not the same as living in Sarajevo. There is no full-scale military operation going on in our inner cities. There are no tanks rumbling down Florence and Normandie. Artillery shells are not destroying buildings. The “War on Drugs” is a myth!

What Clinton asks us to do is to lay aside our constitutional freedoms. He asks us to allow police officers to stop us and search us virtually at random, based on only their “articulable suspicion,” which is arguably nothing more than a whim.

Nelson suggests that since we already have gotten used to the idea of metal detectors in airports it won’t be any big deal. But there is significant difference between these: Flying on an airplane is privilege, one we may opt never to exercise. But we should consider it an unalienable right to go home.

DAVID SPIGELMAN

Los Angeles