LETTERS: TOUGHTER SENTENCING CAN SAVE LIVES

To the editor:

The latest Speak Out caller to attack one of my letters sounds like the typical liberal: Cannot get anything straight. And he wants to hold my letter to the standards of annotation of a doctoral dissertation while he spouts personal opinion as if it came down from the mount with Moses. I referenced every statistic used in my last letter, what study was used and where it was published to document the caller's contention that more guns mean more people shot. Many of the studies I referred to can be found in 62 Tennessee Law Review 1994, pages 679-757 and can be found on the Internet at www.2ndlawlib.org.

The caller blasted the concept that stiffer prison sentences reduce crime and challenged me to explain the falling crime rate. Funny thing, in the same edition of the paper was an article relating the fact that prisoners are serving more time in prison. But read the article carefully. It notes that the most violent prisoners, those convicted of robbery, aggravated assault, rape and murder, are doing a whopping 49 months in prison or just over four years. That's four years for raping and killing your wives, sisters and mothers. If increasing time serve to a mere four years is helping to lower the crime rate, let's try 15 or 20 years or the death penalty and see what happens. As sentences became softer, crime went up. I have had two friends murdered by thieves who were released from prison within 18 months after killing my friends and after serving only token sentences for their previous crimes. If these individuals had been sentenced to realistic terms, my friends would still be alive. Period.

Another explanation for the national decrease in crime has nothing to do with law, gun bans or punishment. It is call demographics. Due to the structure of the population caused by the baby boom, there are bulges in age groupings of the population as successive age groups are born and grow older. Simply put, right now there is a decreasing number of individuals in the prime crime-committing bracket of the population (males between the ages of 15 and 25). So the crime rate is declining. That is the good news. The bad news is there is yet another bulge on the way, and some articles I've read have predicted an increase in crime as this age bracket comes of age. The articles further predict there is not much that can be done about it. If this is true, the best thing to do is to keep the most violent offenders off the streets longer and be prepared to protect yourself. Vote yes on right-to-carry on April 6.

ROBERT A. CRON

Cape Girardeau