Letter: Suggestions for teen violence on the money

Sunday, Oct. 8, 2006 | 7:42 a.m.

I just simply had to write about two items from the opinion section of Friday's Las Vegas Sun.

First and most important on my mind is the letter written by Ricky Kendall headlined, "Suggestions to curb gang violence in schools." I wish I could somehow congratulate him on his way of thinking, even if his methods are not accepted in their entirety or at all, but the main thing is that we should all agree that some actions should be taken to solve the problem of gang violence and discipline by some young people.

I most wholeheartedly agree with him that more school police is not the answer. Our society should get to the root of the problem before it develops into a catastrophic mess. It seems to me that since the Supreme Court ill-advisedly decided that a teen cannot be assigned the death penalty below a certain age that violence has increased.

Anybody else have different suggestions that might work?

Second, the column by Dale McFeatters, "Border fences have extensive history of failure," was very funny in a tongue-in-cheek method of writing a sarcastic essay, and it hit the nail on the head. For a long time now, in my family we have discussed very similar scenarios, but Mr. McFeatters described the futility of fences in such a funny way.

What worries our family is that so many people are using border security to hide their feelings of racism and after they achieve their goal of locking down the border (they refer to the Mexican border only), they can start discriminating against all "brown" people or whose last names are of Spanish origin regardless of how we got here.

Our families predate many of those folks claiming border security as American ancestry! And we speak of discrimination from the standpoint of experience in that regard.

Esmael E. Candelaria, Henderson