STOP USING SIMPLISTIC APPROACH TO VIOLENCE

The Nov. 12 article "Children killed with guns a mind-numbing reality"
dishonors the dead by grasping for the convenient scapegoat of drugs as the
cause of violence. To speculate that if you could snap your fingers and
eliminate drugs, the crime rate would drop by 70% to 80%, is unrealistic
and misleading. The real culprit here is drug prohibition.

The homicide rate today rivals that at the height of Prohibition. Eliminate
the obscene profits to be gained by drug dealing, and you eliminate the
violence associated with turf wars and drug deals gone sour.

While we are engaged in wishful thinking that drugs or the drug war will
simply vanish, why stop there? If we could just snap our fingers and
eliminate guns, alcohol, poverty, unemployment, hunger, discrimination,
educational disadvantages or injustice, wouldn't there be a general decline
in violence, too?

We need to take a cold, hard look at the war on drugs, the booming prison
population, the increasing racial disparity in who goes to prison and the
violence engendered by drug prohibition and shift the paradigm from the
simplistic "blame it on drugs" approach to a comprehensive, sober, mature
analysis of all of the factors contributing to violence in our city.

Paul Mozina

Milwaukee