L.A. Murder Rate and Gun Availability

Re “The Puzzle of Murder Statistics: A Search for Cause and Effect,” Opinion, Sept. 3: Professor Eric H. Monkkonen says, “What can we say is feeding this current, scattered rise in the murder rate?” Since he teaches at UCLA, he must watch the evening news and read The Times. The murders in Los Angeles could be profiled and categorized geographically, but that is not politically correct.

If Monkkonen analyzed the facts he would be able to ruminate about the causes and effects and perhaps offer some concrete suggestions on how academia might solve the intertribal warfare that goes on. Strangely, melting-pot cities, foretold as the cities of the future in the U.S., don’t find one group shooting other groups. Mostly it’s the folks within these ethnic groups that shoot each other. Must be the water.

RICHARD JENNINGS

Bakersfield

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* Monkkonen, on the recent rise in the number of murders in Los Angeles, notes that the “current increase . . . can hardly be due to more guns,” but states that “gun availability probably makes a huge difference.” He notes that cities and the nation “took a turn for the worse in the late 1950s.” This cannot have been due to an increase in the availability of guns.

Anyone old enough to remember the 1950s knows that guns were far more available then than now. There were no waiting periods, no background checks and guns could be received by mail order. Whatever has changed between then and now to cause a higher rate of homicides has to do with society, not availability of guns. Monkkonen is right in his conclusion that making the United States as safe as other nations would require a sacrifice of liberty that is not in our nature.

JIM MENTZER

Los Angeles