DEAR EDITOR:

In your editorial of Feb. 15, “Youth crime: Why don’t some kids value life?” you lament the recent violence in our city; sentiments we all share. But you blame “The economic and social shifts of the last 50 years” which “produced some young people who clearly do not value life the way those who came before did.”

You offered no evidence of what those changes might have been, but it seems to me that you overlooked a far more likely, and obvious, factor leading to kids shooting kids:

Estimates are that there are at least 400 million guns in the United States; half of them handguns. Any 18-year-old can get a gun in this country without difficulty.

Neuroscience tells us that the part of the brain that regulates impulse, and associates actions with consequences, doesn’t mature until the mid-20s in young men.

Put those two facts together and it’s no surprise that a beef between two 20-somethings that resulted in a fist fight behind the high school 50 years ago, turns into a drive-by shooting today.

This is the price we’re told we have to pay by those who worship the 2nd Amendment, but either don’t understand, or choose to ignore, the phrase “well regulated militia.”

DENNIS BLANK

Warren