Violent Gun-Toters Should be Sent to War
Metropolis Newspaper Group, Commentary,
Jarrette Fellows, Jr., Mar 31, 2005
The problem with America's criminal justice system is, it is too easy on crime - especially murder. Judges and juries routinely hand out sentences for harsh crimes that are laughable.
In Los Angeles in 2003, the Los Angeles Police Department recorded more than 600 homicides. Half were committed in South Los Angeles by young street gang members who harbor powerful illegal and unregistered weapons like 45. caliber and 357. caliber handguns, sawed off shotguns, and automatic assault rifles like Uzis and AK-47s.
Judging from the numbers killed by guns in 2003 and in prior years - in the tens of thousands - the police and county sheriff's departments are hard-pressed to "protect and serve." Good people are sitting ducks.
It also means that young urban thugs have little fear of the judicial gavel, which provides for a weak deterrent to murder. For one thing, California is not nearly as notorious as Texas in laying down the hammer of capital punishment. Murder someone here and you won't die in the gas chamber or by lethal injection, but you will get a long sentence, probably life, depending on the circumstances of the crime.
What's wrong with this picture? Clearly it is ineffective as a deterrent to murder. Remember, 600 persons in L.A. were murdered, most likely shot to death in 2003.
The judicial system should allow for more creativity in meting out punishment for violent crimes augmented by guns. If vicious murderers will not be handed a death sentence, then they should be sent to a war zone, for instance, where U.S. military forces are present, if they want to shoot, especially young urban terrorists with their finger perpetually on the trigger.
The killing fields of Iraq would be a good place to drop off urban gunslingers convicted of murder. It makes little sense to continue sending these violent perpetrators to prison; that's where they hone their morbid tendencies funded by public taxes – yours and mine.
Okay, sure the American Civil Liberties Union will shout that this is a violation of their civil liberties. But what about the civil liberties they took from the people they murdered? How about the increasing numbers of small children and babies who are being killed in the errant cross-fire of rival gang sets? What about their civil liberties?
If it's mayhem that these killers lust for, then a system should be devised whereby perpetrators of violent crimes like drive-by shootings and robberies - once convicted - should be (1) drafted into the U.S. Army or Marine Corps, and carted off to war, or (2) dropped off as "special civilian units" into hot zones of U.S. military campaigns, outfitted with rations and ammo, to fend for themselves for a pre-determined period of time, possibly a 12-month period equal to a soldier's tour of duty. Those who survive the year would be permitted to return to the U.S. under certain conditions similar to those given by the parole board. A return to urban violence, for instance, would mean a return to the war zone.
Street violence is easy for urban gun-totters when no one is armed but Them, when victims are incapable of shooting back. That's cowardly. But in a war zone like the highly dangerous cities, towns and small hamlets of Iraq, where people routinely fire automatic weapons, shoulder-held missile launchers and grenade launchers, I'm not so sure these urban thugs would fare so well. It's a different story when someone's firing back.
The ACLU might consider it cruel to send urban war mongers to a war zone, but is it really cruel? Is it cruel to send a street gangster to a war zone who was convicted of firing into a crowd of people, killing a toddler when his bullet lodged into her cranial, entering through her right eye, as was the case in 2001 near Chesterfield Park in South L.A.?
Is it cruel to send gang thugs to a war zone who murder their victims with armor-piercing bullets loaded into their automatic assault rifles targeted only to soft flesh?
The callousness of real war may serve to shock these gun-totters to their senses - that violence is insane, indeed, and that fratricide perpetrated against themselves defies all description. |