Mayhem

A two-pronged approach -- cops and community -- is central to city leaders' efforts to stop young street criminals from killing each other and anyone who gets in the way. But you would never know this from the predictable outcry against Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton. On Monday, Bratton and Mayor James K. Hahn marshaled a force of federal agencies in his battle against the gangs responsible for half of the city's 639 homicides this year.

Last month, the Senate passed two amendments to a juvenile crime bill that soberly addressed the possible connection between Hollywood and violent teen behavior. The first measure asked the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of violence in movies, video games and other forms of entertainment, while the second authorized antitrust exemptions for entertainment companies to allow them to meet and draw up conduct codes.

It irks me that your very dramatic Jan. 8 article, "One Gun Shatters Many Lives," takes a full page before it gets to the real problem, the criminal. I was the victim of a follow-home, armed robbery. My criminal had a 15-inch blade, drawing blood below my left ribs, aimed right at my heart. Did I feel less threatened because it was not a gun? Forget it. Knives don't kill. People do. CHARLES R. EDELSOHN Los Angeles Your article was a real shocker! To think that there are people like those described running around loose in the city gives one the shivers.

Don't look for Hayden Panettiere to star in a frivolous teen comedy any time soon. The 14-year-old actress prefers angst-ridden characters such as Lizzie Spaulding, the role she played for four years on the CBS daytime soap "The Guiding Light." As Lizzie, she murdered her mother's abuser, was kidnapped, thrown down a well and battled leukemia. Then there was her role in last year's HBO movie "Normal," as a farmer's daughter who learns her father wants a sex-change operation.

The portly little man with the big eyeglasses didn't really want to talk. He didn't really want to say his name. He had a soft voice and a nervous laugh, and seemed uneasy about the opened copy of "The Anarchist Cookbook" in his hands. His real interest, he finally said, wasn't in the Cookbook, with its designs for booby traps and recipes for Molotov cocktails, but in surveillance. He had this friend, see, a private investigator, who "just wanted me to find out a few things."

Re "Diplomatic semantics," editorial, Aug. 8 What I find remarkable is that our government and the media repeatedly portray Hezbollah and Hamas in the Middle East as "non-state" players in the governments being attacked by Israel. Get real. Hamas is the "state" player representing the Palestinians. It was democratically elected by the clear majority of Palestinians. Hezbollah is a "state" player, democratically elected and representing a substantial population in Lebanon. The finest U.S.-supplied precision munitions are raining down on suburbs and apartment buildings, killing four or five noncombatants for every Hezbollah fighter.

Sure, Y2K may have been a breeze, but watch out for 2025. In Caleb Carr's new murder mystery "Killing Time," that year sees a disastrous water shortage in Southern California. Los Angeles is "relatively calm south of the Santa Monica mountains," Carr writes. But "residents of the San Fernando Valley--one of the first places to feel the full effects of the region's water depletion--[are] rioting and engaging the authorities with the same crazed determination that had consumed them for years."

The statisticians calmly tell us that the recent rash of Southern California freeway shootings -- eight, with four people dead -- in the last few weeks is not far off the average, even if they're spaced closer together than usual and the circumstances are harder to explain. Though no regional numbers are available, the city of Los Angeles averages a little more than 40 freeway shootings a year, with one to four fatalities over each of the last four years. This year's 11 incidents so far in L.A.

The article "The Freeways Above Us" (Sept. 26) was misleading and not accurate, implying that all is mayhem in the skies above the Valley and without absolute control or purpose. Nothing could be further from reality. Commercial aircraft landings on Runway 8 at Burbank are restricted above 3,000 feet MSL (altitude above mean sea level), not 2,000 as the article reported, until past Van Nuys. The article says: "Fixed-wing aircraft are restricted to 1,200 feet on takeoff and landing."