When I read the other day about a guy who shot up a car because the alarm was ringing incessantly outside his apartment building, I had to laugh. the perp was arrested and charged with a variety of crimes and hauled off to jail.

The victim, a young guy who also lived in the building, said he was very surprised his neighbor had lost his cool and shot his car. He said he saw the shooter in the hallway walking through with a guy and was afraid to say anything to him.

My sympathy goes to the shooter.

He was only trying to get some sleep and the darned car alarm was incessantly blaring. The owner of the car was blithely unaware of the noise. But the shooter couldn't stand it.

The owner said something like "If he's willing to shoot a car, what would happen if he didn't like the noise a bunch of kids were making!?"

The melodramatic question overlooks the possibility that the shooter might TALK to (or YELL AT) the kids and tell them to shut their pie holes. You can't talk to a car alarm, unless you are high on drugs, and then they still won't answer.

The kid who put that alarm in his car has a responsibility to pay attention to the possibility that his car alarm might actually function and when it does, turn it off in a timely manner.

The poor guy with the gun, only trying to get some sleep, must have reach a flash point and decided the best way to turn off that alarm would be to render it useless with a couple of rounds from a 9mm automatic.

Unfortunately, he had to shoot through the skin of the car. But I'll bet if you asked him, he would say he regretted that part and only want to shoot the alarm itself and not the car body.

The modern world, with its mechanical contrivances and material things that we use to set ourselves apart from our neighbors, in some cases, come to own us when we have to alarm them against theft. And then the alarm might go off in a stiff wind with no thief in sight, in the middle of the night.

This is not nice. The science of alarming cars is a fairly crude one by modern standards and seem to have all the reliability of a voting machine. You can't be sure when it might malfunction.

Add to that the disadvantages of living in an apartment complex with a lot of other souls-random noises and you have a formula for meltdown.

So when the guy with the gun, lying on a cot in a wife-beater T-shirt and a fine coat of perspiration, could no longer stand the blaring horn squalling from under the hood of a neighbor's car, he did what some of us might want to do but are restrained by convention, fear of admonishment or the police. He tried to kill the alarm with a gun. And did.

I hope the judge is sympathetic and allows for a temporary insanity plea. People who have committed far greater crimes have used this plea to get leniency.

Now, here's a subject area where there should be no leniency: car theft.

In the same paper where I read about the murder of the car alarm, there was a story about a car theft sting whereby cops were putting out decoy cars and catching thieves.

I think this is a wonderful idea.

Punks who steal cars deserve to have their fingernails pulled out with pliers because of the high annoyance factor is causes for the vehicle owner, not to mention the expense. But it's sort of ironic. When a guy robs a bank, and the cops are hot on his trail, they might shoot him dead. If they catch him and don't shoot him, he might get a long prison term.

But let's say the robber grabbed $5,000 from a bank and fled. He could lose his life over this handful of paper. Steal a car, which might have a value of $30,000 or $40,000, and a first-time thief might get no jail time at all.

Here's an old statistic that may not be reliable but if not, I think it is close. A car thief has to be convicted of stealing a car seven times before he goes to jail. If that is the law, then it needs legislative action to change it. The courts are only doing what the law says.

And these creeps walk. Then they steal another car and another one.

Why should they have any leniency? If they walked into a bank and grabbed $30,000, we would pull their legs off in court.

This is a problem that needs attention because the number of cars stolen in Snohomish and King Counties is in the thousands. Many of the cars are quickly stripped and sold for parts, or repainted and sold as used, or repainted and the VIN numbers changed and driven by thieves.

One guy caught last week had been using a stolen car for weeks because he enjoyed driving it. I think he should be put in jail for 10 year for that crime.

We can hope that one of our legislators has the gumption to introduce a much more painful punishment for car thievery during the next legislative session.

In towns where this newspaper circulates, there are far more car thefts than ever get reported in the press (and far more crimes in many categories, for that matter, including rape, assault and domestic violence) The dailies do a 'P' for Poor job on crime reporting, recounting only the big and odd ones, preferring to devote space to bus accidents in Nicaragua rather than crimes stats here at home that might require a little editorial digging.