Recent referendums in Waterboro and Lyman on sex offender buffer zones got me thinking. The votes show hype wins over fact, again.

In June 2006, the Iowa County Attorneys Association stated: “Research does not support the belief that children are more likely to be victimized by strangers at the covered locations than at other places.”

Do people realize that only 7 percent of child molesters are strangers? Ninety-three percent know the child, and the majority are relatives.

Many offenders are not pedophiles, but few people know the clinical definition. Nationally, sex crimes account for less than one percent of all crime. On television though, stranger predators are everywhere. This suggests in your world they are too, thus causing politicians and citizens to enact laws that protect no one. In turn, offenders go underground where we can’t find them.

Maine currently has a program that claims a 3 percent recidivism rate. Then there’s the registry. Any law that helps people get executed in their homes is flawed. One of the men killed in April was 19 when he dated a younger teen – not exactly a death-penalty crime. The killer committed suicide on the bus; later the traumatized bus driver did so also.

Victims need justice, not vigilantism and a custom-made secondary class of citizens. Even one death over this is one too many. Time will prove we have this wrong.

Michael Milbury, Windham