Vallejo Bombings

* The news that one of the alleged Vallejo bombers was trying to avoid a third-strike prosecution on another charge (Feb. 4) illustrates vividly how retributive justice and the third-strike frenzy merely escalate the stakes, making life more dangerous for the police and for all the rest of us.

Let’s de-escalate violence rather than contribute to more of it: end the drug war and imprisonment madness, sponsor treatment, reverse the galloping economic inequality, invest in development that works for people most in need, and end the example set by government itself as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” (as true of the United States now as when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said it in 1967).

JOE MAIZLISH

Los Angeles