Prager on Judgments Under Pressure

Re “Whom Should We Save First?” Commentary, April 26:

The ethical question in the case of the North Hollywood bank robbers is not, “Should innocent people be saved before the guilty?” Rather, it is, “Should we allow people who offend us to die who could have been saved?”

The phrase “who offend us” is innocuous sounding, but where do we stop applying this standard, and who determines guilt? To Dennis Prager’s question, “Is our society really a morally inferior place because a man died of wounds he suffered in his attempt to murder as many innocents as possible?,” the answer has to be yes, it is, because we took his life by not trying in any manner to save him.

Since the decisions about the saving of this life were made by the people charged with protecting and serving us, maybe the question we should be asking ourselves is, “Are we as a nation ready to accept the meting out of street justice?”

STEVE REPASKY, Cerritos

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Prager so eloquently verbalized my frustration. It sickens me when I hear fellow taxpaying, law-abiding citizens “campaigning” for the rights of criminals. What about my right to live without fear?

You bleeding hearts out there--ponder this: My family just buried one of our own who was a victim of a violent, horrific crime. So horrific, the FBI’s help is being sought. You look into the tear-filled, bewildered eyes of my family and tell them this “thing” out there has rights!

CHARMAINE LICCARDI, Pasadena

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Prager’s answer to the eternally vexing questions he raises is, “Sometimes decent people with common sense simply must be left to make decisions.” Since I have never met anybody who did not consider him or herself decent or who didn’t believe that he or she was not imbued with just a little more common sense, I find myself no more enlightened than I was at the beginning of the commentary.

Decent people, believing that they have the monopoly on common sense, have always and will always righteously fight other decent people with common sense to the death (usually in the name of God), while each of them claims that he or she is the only one who is decent and deserving to carry the banner of common sense. I wonder whom Prager considers decent? And when he uses the expression “common sense,” is it defined by what he believes?

RONALD RUBIN, Topanga