Young life wasted

Another senseless shooting of a young, innocent person.

A young life was wasted at the hands of a vengeful store owner, Jo Won Kim, who felt it was time to take the law into his own hands and shoot a person.

The person's life Kim ended up snuffing out was that of Brenda Hughes, a teenager, in Highland Park.

Hughes happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

In a letter to the Los Angeles Times, a reader questioned why students were hanging out when they should have been in school.

This is the wrong question. This is the second shooting by a store owner in which the victim was neither the perpetrator of an alleged crime nor was deserving target of such violence.

In this case, the punishment definitely outweighs the crime. Sure, the merchandise in the owner's store is his liveliehood. But is a can of beer worth a human life?

What ever happened to calling the police on suspected thieves? When did vigilante-ism become the normal practice of law enforcement?

Bernard Goetz tried to start a trend by shooting a group of teenagers in a New York subway after they allegedly approached him in a threatening manner.

Then there was the convenience store owner who shot and killed a young teen when that store owner claimed that she was stealing orange juice from her store.

This is the United States. This is not some barbaric nation in which each person decides what sort of punishment should be leveled upon another person.

The shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy has become more prevalent and more acceptable among the police and the public. The woman was not sent to jail. Goetz served some time but many subway riders supported his actions.

This is a dangerous trend.

The solution is not to try and beat the other guy to the trigger.

In Koreatown, a section of Mid-Wilshire, a few residents have gotten together and organized the Special Problem Area Response Team. SPART is an unarmed group which serves as a neighborhood surveillance team.

The participating residents are equipped with ham radios to communicate with police. If there is a problem, the person alerts the police so they can handle the situation.

Crime in this area, and other areas that do this same thing, has gone down.

The vigilante approach can no longer be the answer.