Violence overshadows Pennsylvania vote

Senator Hillary Clinton's new proposals on crime have put the issue on the agenda in next week's primary in Pennsylvania. But for families devastated by violence, the issue reaches well beyond politics.

Pennsylvania's largest city, Philadelphia, is one of America's most violent, with 391 murders last year. Particularly troubling to people who live here is that black murder victims outnumbered whites by more than four to one, and there were five times as many murders committed by blacks as whites.

Donna Giddings knows the pain behind the police statistics. Three years after her mother and son were murdered by the same man, she struggles to deal with the aftermath of the crime.

Richard Singletary, 18, shot Andre Giddings, 20, once in the back of the head with an illegal semi-automatic pistol on February 18, 2005, after they argued over a $1,000 debt Mr Singletary owed Andre but which his mother says Andre had forgiven.

In an attempt to leave no witnesses, Mr Singletary then fatally shot Andre's friend Kenneth Best, 17, and then turned his gun on Andre's 67-year-old grandmother, Willie Mae Alston, with whom Andre was living at the time.

Mr Singletary was arrested four days later and is serving three consecutive life sentences. The murders shared common features with others that help give the United States one of the highest murder rates in the industrialised world.

Andre Giddings didn't have a gun but sold cocaine and marijuana and was in and out of juvenile detention because of truancy and drug dealing.

"If these young men had good-paying jobs, it would make a significant difference," she said. "Most of these young boys just want to be part of something. They just want to belong."

She also blames lax gun laws in a state where lawmakers have repeatedly rejected modest gun-control initiatives such as limiting handgun purchases to one a month per person, and, most recently, requiring owners to report lost or stolen weapons.