philip964 wrote:http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/three- ... 6700172461
Here is an Australian newspaper story. Prime Minister wants Australians to avoid the US until they have stricter gun controls. This newspaper also doesn't hold back on photos of the shooters, case you were not sure about the shooters.
I would ask the PM if its true that criminals in Australia don't have guns. They're a second rate nation. What do I care about what they think?
baldeagle wrote:I don't care how young they are. Those three need to be put to death or locked up for the rest of their lives.
Death...... that's my first reaction.....but I honestly have to say that I'm conflicted. I'm not conflicted by what they've done. That deserves death. I don't buy the myth that "society failed them." I don't even buy the myth that their parents failed them....although that is certainly contributory. There is no way on God's green earth that they did not know what they were doing was wrong. They HAD to know.
They just simply didn't care. The knowledge that what they proposed to was grievously wrong was not enough to inhibit the decision to go ahead and do it, because they A) believe themselves to be disconnected from the law, B) disconnected from the laws of consequences, and C) disconnected from the idea that the life of another has any value at all. That makes them complete sociopaths, and sociopaths cannot be redeemed........except by Jesus Christ.
What I'm conflicted about is their ages. The first thought that came to me was William McCarty, AKA Billy the Kid. I just went to his Wiki page to refresh my memory. He shot and killed his first victim when he (McCarty) was just 18. Some witnesses to the event claimed that it was self-defense, as the other man was administering a butt-whoopin' to McCarty when he was shot. The victim, a man named Frank P. "Windy" Cahill, had been bullying McCarty for a long time. On the day of the shooting, he threw McCarty to the ground after a verbal exchange, and McCarty retaliated by shooting him. Thus beginneth the final three years of McCarty's life for which he is most famous.
He is credited with between 15 and 26 murders, depending on who's telling the story. While there is certainly no
real justification for any of Billy the Kid's murders, at least they were committed during the course of events that we can make some kind of sense of and understand. By that, I mean that he did not just randomly kill people; he killed them in the course of some kind of confrontation—either during the commission of some other kind of crime, or in self-defense. In 1881, he was duly convicted in a court of law and sentenced to hang, and was awaiting execution when he escaped, and then was later controversially killed by Pat Garrett. (Interesting side note: then New Mexico governor Lew Wallace refused at the time to pardon McCarty or show him any clemency. Wallace is the author of "
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ," which was described by many as "the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century" and which was later adapted for the screen in the 1958 movie starring Charlton Heston. Small world.)
If Billy the Kid deserved the death penalty for his many murders, committed in the course of other crimes, then surely these teenagers deserve death for the sheer wantonness and purposeless killing of Christopher Lane.
But these kids are just that.....kids. Grown up killers, pretty much sociopathic, and probably irredeemable.....but still just kids. Billy the Kid was 18 when he committed his first murder, and 21 when he died. He was an adult. Should we be executing teenagers below the age of emancipation? I don't know. I don't claim to have the answer to that. I can't even say for certain that it would be wrong to do so, but I am conflicted nonetheless. And if I am not 100%
certain that someone ought to be put to death, then maybe they shouldn't be? Maybe they should be imprisoned with their parents.....in the same cell.
THAT would certainly be poetic justice.
Anyway, I'm not criticizing anyone else's feelings about it. I'm just airing my own.