Young woman who was shot in head at Lealman church dies

[krispos42]

120. We both know that people born in certain circumstances...

...have a higher chance of becoming violent criminals. Spousal abusers, child abusers, muggers, rapists, robbers, drug dealers, drug abusers, carjackers, gay-bashers, or whatever.

Regardless, all groups of people, every socio-economic combination you can think of, has in it spouse abusers, child abusers, muggers, rapists, robbers, etc. So, no, I don't belong to some elite group that has a zero rate of criminal production. Which is why we need equal justice and fair trials when people are arrested for crimes.

But at no point did I explicitly or implicitly say that "those people" should just be tossed in prison or in a mass grave or ethnically cleansed or whatever.

If a robber or rapist or domestic abuser or home invader gets on the wrong end of their intended victim's weapon, then so be it. Regardless of socio-economic status. It's shitty for everybody involved, but it's the least-shitty outcome in a situation that has deteriorated to that particular point. And remember, when a violent criminal dies, all potential for future crime dies with him. So, of course, does all potential good. But let's face it, if they're at the point where they're wielding weapons to hurt and maim and steal and threaten, the overall future badness will far outweigh the future over goodness.

But that's why, ideally, they'd be jailed and given counseling in prison. That's their chance to turn their life around, to change course, to get help. And some of them will.

Unfortunately, prison is now a part of doing business, a rite of passage, a networking opportunity, an education experience.


[div class="excerpt" style=background:#AFEEEE]I think we should concentrate more on what society can do to discourage the evolution of such people, rather than writing them off as being "so down on the bell curve that they're essentially pure evil". We're better than that. Maybe you had a bad day, but I still think you're OK. I didn't make a Hitler reference, either obliquely or acutely, but when we have thoughts like that, which are tempting at times, we embark on a slippery slope.

I do, too. Regardless of how the bell curve is shaped, though, there will always be the worst of the worst. I think we need to seriously reform our drug laws; I think we need to seriously reform the prison system; I think we need to seriously address the prosperity gap (the gini index); I think we need universal single-payer health insurance that includes mental-health services; I think we need free tuition to state 4-year universities for scientists and engineers and doctors and nurses; I think we need free tuition to state 2-year colleges for all specialties; I think we need to get of the WTO and NAFTA; I think we need to break up the corporate vertically-integrated monopolies; I think we need to reinstate sane tariffs to bring jobs back to America and gut our economic and military rivals; I think we need to repeal Taft-Hartley; I think we need a stock-transaction tax.

I think we need to do a lot of things to make like in America better, so we have more people producing and fewer people preying. So our families can have the single-income middle class lifestyle for a good chunk of the population.

Our incarceration rate is 500 per 100,000 people; these measures would probably drop that number by 80% in a generation. But in the end, there will still be that 100/100k in jail, a good portion of which will fall in the "pure evil" or "irredeemable" catagory. And whether it's arrested, tried, and convicted, or shot dead by a homeowner, we're better off without them in society.

I do care which way they are removed, but I'm not interested in disarming people or putting people who have been forced to defend themselves with deadly force through the legal wringer to pursue a policy of "only through the legal system".

I prefer arrest over lethal force, and that will be the predominate method that the human predators will be removed from society. But it won't be the only method. And I'm not going to equate legitimate self-defense with "summary executions".