Government's announcement on Friday that it is considering a raft of new measures to deal with the issues of youth violence is welcome news, although some look like they are aimed more at grabbing headlines than getting real substance.

Among the ideas are the use of an American-style SWAT team to deal with violent crime, holding parents liable when their children break the law and tougher discipline in schools. Others include a review of laws dealing with violent crime and a gun amnesty.

The most concrete decisions were to expand and make permanent the Mirrors programme, possibly on an island, and for the Police to launch a crackdown on drug dealing and weapons.

These demonstrate that Government has finally acknowledged the problem.

That's a far cry from just eight months ago during the General Election campaign when Government was claiming it had reduced crime, that the prison population had fallen and that measures, including preventive detention and three strikes and you're out laws, being proposed by the United Bermuda Party were "draconian".

Some of the ideas mooted this week are worthwhile and rightly should be adopted right away. Others are likely to be controversial and will take some time to get right, if at all. And some are not worth getting started on.

A gun amnesty falls into the latter category. They have been tried with varying degrees of success, and the last one was an outright failure.

Everyone who now possesses weapons in Bermuda knows full well that they are in serious breach of the law, and it seems unlikely that they will give them up. Instead, the gun laws, which are tough already, need to be enforced right away, not months down the road.

The "SWAT team" falls into the headline-grabbing category and the idea needs a lot more flesh put on it before it can even be debated. Bermuda already has a well trained and armed Emergency Response Team (ERT) and it is not clear if a SWAT team would be a reinforced and better equipped unit or something else entirely. Nor is it clear how it would be used.

While any review of criminal law is welcome, and the Criminal Code needs a long overdue overhaul, the reality is that the Island's laws with regard to violent crime are already comprehensive and tough. It is not the law that is the problem.

It is the enforcement of the law, sentencing practices of the courts and, most importantly, naïve early release policies in the prisons that have made a mockery of the law as a deterrent. Even when a person receives a prison sentence, they won't be serving much more than a third of their time.

And while this enabled the PLP to say that it had reduced the prison population in the last General Election campaign, it did nothing to either deter crime or to reduce recidivism. The real deterrent is to arrest wrongdoers, successfully prosecute and then have them serve out their sentences.

That does not mean that rehabilitation is not important. Rehabilitation is critical, as is early intervention for young people who are judged to be "at risk". That's why this newspaper has consistently supported the Mirrors programme and backs its expansion now.

However, this programme, or something like it, needs to be extended to young teenagers and even to "tweens" who may otherwise fall into bad behaviour. Both political parties appear to be keen on the idea of holding parents responsible for the illegal activity of their children. There is some irony in this, given the number of admittedly adult children of MPs who have faced or are facing difficulties with the law.

Suffice to say, this is a legal and moral minefield and no one should expect it to happen any time soon. What is good policy is the proposal to "look to" add parenting instruction as a condition of receiving financial assistance from the Government.

This might be seen as a punishment for less well off parents when financially secure parents can still be terrible at raising children, but it is just about the only inducement Government has in this area, and something is better than nothing in this case.

All in all, it is important that the Government, and Government House, which has lent its support to this initiative, concentrate on initiatives and ideas that can show tangible results. Longer term programmes require community-based support and should be entered into carefully.