Two of every five U.S. teenagers surveyed say it would be easy to get hold of a handgun, according to a national poll conducted by Teenage Research Unlimited. By a 3-to-1 margin, teens said there are too many guns available. More than a third--36 percent--knew someone who had been shot, and 28 percent said there was a gun in their home, garage or barn. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta says 14 children under age 19 are killed by guns each day and another 56 wounded.

Strapped to the electric chair and wired with electrodes, he goes to his death with a defiant snarl. Jaws clenched, knuckles white, his body jolts under the bolt of electricity. His eyes glow red. "That's the best you can do, you pansies," he roars.

Meet "Death Row Marv," a six-inch tall plastic figure that is the creation of Arizona firm McFarlane Toys.

For $24, batteries not included, children (recommended age 13 and over) can experience the horrors of the death chamber in the role of executioner.

Marv, part hero, part loser, comes straight from the pages of the Frank Miller cartoon strip, "Sin City" and its gallery of freaks and weirdos. In the cartoon strip, Marv is sentenced to death for the revenge murder of a cannibal psychopath who ate his sweetheart, a prostitute named Goldie.

The toy version of Marv is a big hit, with 65,000 sold since its launch at the beginning of July with toy outlets now running waiting lists for avid buyers.

The sale of "Death Row Marv" has sparked an outcry in some quarters, with the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children saying the toy goes beyond the bounds of the acceptable. "Is this the type of toy we want our children playing with?" the group said in a statement.  "What will they come up with next: a rape doll, complete with bottles of blood ? How about an incest doll?"

Robert Schachter, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York is outraged. "It's terrible, it's disgusting. Toys have a tremendous effect on children. This is not something a child should be experiencing," he said.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, an independent group that monitors capital punishment, said Marv was "totally inappropriate. It tends to dehumanize people, to make the taking of human life, the very value of human life, a trivial issue, an issue for game," he said.

A 30-year-old man was found dead in his Washington apartment last Thursday night. He had been strangled. Save for the fact that it was not carried out with a gun, it seems like an unremarkable little death in the shadowy world of Washington's undergrowth. You may even be wondering why I'm telling you about it. Well, it so happens that Jagnesh Vinueshai Shah was my next-door neighbor, although I never knew him.

[Scottish] friends had warned me about the perils of Washington before I started my watch here. It's the murder capital of America, they said (in fact, it is in a race to the wire with several other cities for that distinction). But I put the ribbing down to envy. They weren't going to Washington; I was.

So it was a bit of a stunner when two detectives arrived at my door on Good Friday morning to bring the news and quiz me on what I knew of the newly late Mr. Shah. It was shocking because, first, it happened next door and, second, the neighborhood I live in is not the mythical inner city Wild West of non-Americans' imagination. It is a leafy, residential, high-rent area inhabited by mostly youngish middle-class professionals.

What was a momentous event in my mundane existence warranted a mere three-sentence brief in the Washington Post the following day. Other local deaths—the stabbing to death of a boy of eight, the accidental fatal shooting of a 13-year-old boy—merited greater attention. It led me to the conclusion that life can be very cheap in America.

On Easter Monday, there was an outbreak of mayhem at the city's National Zoo. In a hail of gunfire which brought terror to a normally tranquil neighborhood, six children, aged between 11 and 16, were injured. The deadly violence had been provoked by a running feud between two gangs of youths.

Washington National Zoo is 15 minutes' walk from my door and in an area I frequent on an almost daily basis. It was merely by chance that I was not around at the time of the shootings. The setting of this carnage, and its proximity to my daily routine, reminded me again that in America life is sometimes very cheap.

Washington is home to the movers and shakers of American public life. Its corridors of power, exclusive intellectual think-tanks and ever-burgeoning army of powerful lobbying organizations play host to influential men and women convinced that their nation has been chosen by destiny to lead the rest of mankind to a shining new vista of freedom.

And yet there is, I think, a refusal to recognize the inconvenient, to view themselves as the rest of the world sees them.

I can tell that from my, albeit limited, experience, the casual bumping off of one's next door neighbor and the mass shooting of children on a holiday outing to their local neighborhood zoo are—together with a host of other images of random, violent deaths I can conjure up from recent times—things I associate primarily with life in the United States of America.

BUENOS AIRES—An increase in illicit drug use in Latin America has become increasingly apparent as traffickers create markets at home for inexpensive and abundant drugs.

Although the region has long cultivated and exported illicit drugs, local consumption is rising. Now, in big cities such as Buenos Aires, where about 4 percent of the population acknowledges having used drugs, the percentage of users has begun to rival that in the U.S.

Nations here are facing not only increased drug-related violence, but also higher transmission rates for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, among intravenous drug users, as well as the disintegration of families forced to cope with addiction.

"I think we’re all waking up to the reality that drug use is no longer just something that’s happening in the United States," said Eduardo Amadeo, president of the Argentine Planning Secretariat for Counternarcotics and Drug Prevention. "Drugs are now being sold on the corner near the schools my children attend, near our [social] clubs and [soccer] fields."

Consumption of illicit drugs in Latin America still does not approach levels in the United States, which remains the world’s biggest consumer by far. But the percentage of drug users here is growing fast. In Buenos Aires, a city of 12 million, the first official government poll on drug use showed consumption at 4.1 percent of the population, similar to levels in Washington, Chicago and New York. Nationwide, the number was 3 percent. Although that is half the U.S. rate, local authorities compared it with estimates of only 1 percent here early in the decade.

"We in Argentina are becoming more like Europe and the United States, but not in the way we once wanted," said Leonardo Perelis, director of Program Renewal, one of dozens of nonprofit private rehabilitation clinics that have sprung up here.

Life in the occupied territories has mentally damaged Palestinian children, with 90 percent having experienced several traumatic events, UN special rapporteur Giorgio Giacomelli said.

The experiences include imprisonment, inhaling tear gas, nighttime attacks on their homes, Israeli soldiers brutalizing their parents in their presence and Israeli authorities demolishing their homes, Giacomelli told the UN Human Rights Commission when presenting his report.

According to his investigation, four Palestinian children were killed last year and 102 were injured, of which 82 were wounded by Israeli soldiers, 19 by Jewish settlers and one by soldiers and settlers at the same time. Most were hit by rubber bullets or beaten.

Giacomelli added that 220 children aged between 14 and 17 were arrested last year in violation of the convention on children’s rights, which Israel has signed. "Children as young as 14 have had to sit outside in the rain at night blindfolded at the Beit El military investigation center," Giacomelli said.

Almost three-quarters of Colombians are frightened to go out at night and most avoid talking to strangers because of a rising wave of violent crime, according to a recent poll. Most of those polled believed the situation was getting worse in this Andean nation, which is torn by a three-decade-old guerrilla war and already has the dubious distinction of being one of the most violent countries in the hemisphere.

Colombia, with some 40 million inhabitants, is widely recognized as the kidnap capital of the world, with 2,787 abductions last year. It also has one of the highest murder rates in the hemisphere, with 23,172 homicides last year. In 1998, the U.S., with a population of about 270 million, had 16,914 murders.

"Going out on the street is an odyssey. Citizens of Bogota are hounded by the fear of suffering express kidnappings in a taxi, being robbed on the bus, attacked in the street, of being mugged," El Tiempo newspaper said. "And if you go out in your own car, you could also be robbed of the vehicle or your belongings," it added.

In a poll entitled, "Fear On The Street," 71.75 percent of those surveyed in Colombia’s five largest cities said they were now frightened to go out at night as often as before because of rising crime. More than 85 percent of those polled said they no longer talked to strangers, while about half said they had put bars on the doors and windows of their houses and apartments to reduce the risk of break-ins.