Help police win the battle for the streets
Heartfelt congratulations to city police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier, a very in-touch Judge Andre Davis and our front-line troops, the police officers.
It is so healing to see a police chief who supports his men and a mayor and judge who openly support them.
The Greenmount Avenue-East 20th Street area has been a parent's worst nightmare for years. I lived there as a child, so I know first-hand the decline of the area.
Hooray and God bless the community people who have showed great character and guts in becoming involved, as opposed to having seen nothing when terrible things happen to their own.
The police have the "manpower," but we in our neighborhoods really have the "power" to stop the brutality and turn things around.
We now have people who will work with us to stop the degradation of our streets.
Let all judges take note of Judge Davis' action. Keep Mr. Frazier informed, and tell Mayor Kurt Schmoke we appreciate his support in saving our neighborhoods.
Local police officers deserve our admiration and respect.
Yes, on occasion they don't show the judgment we feel they should. But if we were under fire all day, every day, as they are, what would we do?
The incidents of possible over-reaction, when measured by the histories on the rap sheets of the criminals they must deal with, if not justified are definitely understandable.
They must not only get us home safely to our families, they'd like to get home to theirs, after working a shift in an armed camp.
We must stop being Us and Them. We need to become Ours. We're all fighting the same battle. Fighting it together will give us strength in unity.
Merlyn D. Wilson
Baltimore
Off target
On March 13 I read absolutely the most foolish words which I've ever seen committed to paper, in Scott Shane's article "Once-legal guns fill killers' arsenals."
After describing, in sickening, excruciating detail, the execution of a Baltimore inner-city crack dealer by another crack dealer named Warren Stuckey, and after telling the reader that Warren Stuckey has been charged in two other murders and suspected by police of committing three more, Scott Shane tells us that "the inescapable fact is that America's two gun cultures, the legal and the illegal, combined to kill Larry Erickson [the murder victim]".
Hold it! If that's the case, then the killer, Warren Stuckey, who has been convicted of one murder and is in the process of being convicted of five more, should go free.
What's he doing in jail, if it's those evil, inanimate pieces of steel who are actually at fault for killing all of those people.
And that's just what Scott Shane tells us by saying that it's the "legal gun culture" which killed those people.
What about individual responsibility? What about a person being held responsible for his actions? What about laws which prohibit murder and, for that matter, carrying a gun, unlicensed, on the street?
Why blame a piece of steel for the actions of an evil human being? Or don't you believe that some people are evil? Probably not, as it's so much easier for you to blame a gun for society's troubles.
No, Mr. Shane is foolish to present such an illogical argument. The common man sees through anti-gun dogma. Firearms did not corrupt the convicted murderer Warren Stuckey.
If criminals didn't have firearms, they would murder each other with knives, clubs, or their bare hands.
Or don't you read your own paper? Didn't you read about the tragic stabbing at Morgan State? Or do you believe in cutlery control, too?
If you are true to your logic, you will blame knives, cars, or any inanimate object for evil crimes committed by people, with those objects.
What's sad is the fact that with our corrupt criminal justice system, in which criminals receive a pat on the wrist for the most heinous crimes, the convicted murder Warren Stuckey will probably be out walking the streets and preying on society in 10 years.
Punishing criminals for breaking existing laws will reduce crime, not futilely attempting to regulate firearms more strictly.
William Banks
Ft. Meade
Deserved immunity
Amid the Whitewater media frenzy and Republican witch-hunting of late, I find myself examining the level of legal and judicial privilege that is and should be allotted to the presidency.
The inevitable conclusion is that the chief executive deserves and requires a measure of immunity far exceeding that given him today.
This goes for any president, no matter what the party affiliation.
In order to function, the executive branch must have the attention of the Congress on political issues, and the freedom to maneuver without being shadowed by special investigators, a scavenger press and opposition muckrakers.
The presidency also demands a better respect from the nation, as the closest thing to an incarnation of government and the republic we have in this country.
By no means should the president be above the law. But whoever throws around any so-called evidence short of a smoking gun should be scorned and punished for slander and obstruction of government.
Tyler P. Roylance
Baltimore
Selective indignation
I am deeply troubled over your Other Voices page piece March 8 by Sharif S. Elmusa and Judith E. Tucker, senior Fulbright fellows who produced for your readers one of the shoddiest bits of scholarship and so-called journalism I have seen in some time.
They seem to relish their role as experts on the "mini massacres" of Arabs by Israelis, listing a number of such acts in the opening portion of their article.
But they are careful, in making 1980 their point of departure in this Kafka-esque journey through recent history, not to mention that the so-called "mini massacre" was, in reality, an invention of the Arabs who, back in 1929, massacred Jews at will in the holy city of Hebron, forcing the handful of survivors to flee, the result being that Hebron in that period became virtually Judenrein. Jews were forbidden by Arabs ever to return.
The present circumstances must be very upsetting to later generations of these Arabs, who now call themselves Palestinians.
With "mini massacres" in vogue up until the time Israel rightly decided enough was enough, it is no difficult task for scholars like Tucker and Elmusa, or non-scholars like myself, to recall children from Maailot, infants yet, machine gunned to death in their cribs by Arabs.
If that doesn't suffice, perhaps our historians on Middle East terrorist trivia will want to search their memories and recall the raft full of Arabs that landed on a beach in Tel Aviv and the "mini masacres" that took place there before order was restored.
Then there was the American photographer killed, and there was the bus hijacked and the passengers slaughtered, and let us not forget the inventive Arab who flew down in a glider to introduce his unique brand of havoc to innocent Israeli civilians.
Bombs in store incidents are myriad, as are bombs in train stations and airports, perhaps most notably the explosions that happened almost simultaneously in Rome's and Vienna's airports, slaughtering civilians in numbers that make the Hebron incident a mere footnote in "mini massacres" by comparison.
You might ask: What do Israelis know about "mini massacres?" They have had so little practice, after all, compared to their peace-seeking neighbors extolled for taking the moral high ground by Tucker and Elmusa.
Then there was the well-publicized "mini massacre" in the kosher restaurant in Paris that took many lives. And the Jews killed in the slaughter in the synagogue in Turkey.
Keeping score on "mini massacres" and on who is ahead is not difficult. The reaction of Arabs who throw stones and live in glass houses is.
It is obvious that in the world of precisely documented and accurately researched scholarship, anyone who hasn't had Rip Van Winkle's disease over the past 20 or so years would have to conclude that Tucker and Elmusa are an embarrassment.
There are opinions and there are facts. What these two have done doesn't even qualify in the category of honest, even moderately objective, opinion sharing . . .
Tucker and Elmusa have tragically misrepresented Middle East history.
Readers willing to buy your paper every day have a right to expect and to receive honest journalism for the price of the publication. In the case of the ramblings of Tucker and Elmusa, your readers were badly short-changed.
Harry Cohen
Baltimore