I still don't get the logic of people supporting killing people for killing people...

[Silent3]

65. I don't support the death penalty, but I don't see how the logic is hard to see.

You mention the "duty to promote right over wrong", but what you do to promote that depends on how you define "right" and "wrong".

While I don't support the death penalty, that's not because I find any and all killing abhorrent, but because I'd rather the government not have that power. The proper business of the state is protection of the public and deterrence of crime, not revenge. What we allow the state to do in our name needs to be looked at with cooler heads than the emotions stirred up by heinous crimes.

At an emotional level, however -- which for me is a very different thing than what I'd actually want to see enacted as government policy -- I have absolutely no trouble understanding why, say, a parent whose children had been brutally killed would want the killer to die, and suffer before dying. When I think about the people who jumped out of the WTC on 9/11, forced to chose between falling to their deaths and burning to death, I find it very easy to wish their killers had to face that kind of death instead.

To me it's the killing of innocent people which is wrong, not just killing in and of itself. By that standard, there is no contradiction whatsoever in wanting a murderer to die. When a person decides to kill another person because of greed or selfishness, because he considers some mere slight against his own feelings of such great importance that someone else should die for the offense, that person has (by my standards, at least) lowered the value of his own life, has reduced (if not negated) the value his own life has to others.