FEW CITY DWELLERS FACE MURDER DANGER

Now that the city of Baltimore has exceeded last year's murder tally,
it is time for The Sun and others to admit that aside from the
relatively few innocent victims caught in the crossfire, the vast
majority of murders in this city are drug-related, and that the
murders are a symptom of a largely unaddressed metropolitan health
problem known as addiction ("277th killing in '07 is grim milestone,"
Dec. 21). In the meantime, the majority of city residents go about
their business in productive, drug-free neighborhoods and are not
really impacted by this spike in violence.

It is a gross distortion, a fraud and a copout for the media to
continually sell newspapers by scaring their largely suburban public
by implying that the average Joe is subject to random killing by just
being within the Baltimore's city limits.

There is nothing random about this killing spree, and the impact of
such articles is bad for commerce, bad for neighborhoods and bad for
the image of the entire region.

Carl Hyman Baltimore

The writer is a former president of the Tuscany-Canterbury
Neighborhood Association.