IT'S ELEMENTARY

The Trib's photograph of Sandra Lynch, a recovering addict grieving at a
vigil for her nephew, Carl Burley, 20, and Mark Hunter, 23, days after they
were gunned down on the North Side, is evidence more potent than the
powerful and cheap heroin befouling the city's streets that drugs pave the
road to perdition.

Respectfully, and with all sympathy due, we do suggest that the candlelight
vigils and public expressions of heartache do not substitute for the nuts
and bolts of building two-parent families; boys and girls need strong,
moral women and men in their lives - constant sources of love, parental
authority and example.

Nor do these gatherings build and sustain the churches and other
institutions allied in promoting spiritual and civic health; nor do they
substitute for full cooperation with the police.

Pittsburgh police Chief Robert W. McNeilly Jr. explains: "It's an old
saying. It takes a village." This, we recall, is a phrase invented long
before Hillary Clinton stumbled onto it and by weight of her socialist
larding crushed its meaning.

The chief also says wisely, "There's also the commonly held belief that the
only crime that will happen in a community is the crime the community accepts."

Most of the success in defeating crime in Lawrenceville and the Bluff, for
example, belongs to the people who decided enough was enough, Chief
McNeilly humbly reminds.

It's elementary. Private action, as in the effective rearing of children
toward constructive lives, is the irreducible feature of civilization. If
that's what we want, we know what to do.