Compromising Second-Amendment rights only affects law-abiding citizens. My rights should not be trampled because someone else is an asshole. That’s not what America is supposed to be about.

I have an idea how to partially fix this…not cure it, but treat it.

Make an example.

As the January ‘11 Tucson shootings tell us, if you shoot up a parking lot full of people and act like you’re crazy, nothing really will happen to you. Oh, they’ll lock you up, and they’ll keep indefinitely blowing off your trial, but at the end of the day if you get punished at all it will be grossly disproportionate to the crime you committed.

With Loughner, leaving him to rot in a looney bin is akin to his stealing a $500 TV set and only having to pay $5 restitution.

When there is a death penalty sentence, the justice system drags their feet for decades to carry out the sentence…long past most people’s memories of what the sentenced is being executed for.

With all these factors, where’s the deterrent? Where’s the message? What are we doing to show people that there are consequences to your actions?

What we need to do is hold criminals accountable (and stop accepting twinkie defenses), apply consequences that fit the crime, and allow people to see that these consequences have indeed been applied in a fashion that satisfies justice. Of course my suggestion won’t end mass-murders…but it may give some would-be assassins a moment of pause before committing the next would-be tragedy.

Tragically, somewhere in the last century we lost sight of what the criminal justice system is supposed to do. Some still remember that it is supposed to hold the guilty accountable and punish them. But what far too many of us seem to have forgotten over the years is that it is also supposed to provide justice to the victims, their families and loved ones, and to the community in which the crime occurred. The criminal justice system is also supposed to make an example and provide a deterrent. What we need to do, desperately, is re implement all three of these mandates back into the criminal justice system.

As long as the guilty are caudled like Lougher is right now, expect us to continue down this same path indefinitely.

“Any criminal justice system is an apparatus society uses to enforce the standards of conduct necessary to protect individuals and the community. It operates by apprehending, prosecuting, convicting, and sentencing those members of the community who violate the basic rules of group existence. The action taken against lawbreakers is designed to serve three purposes beyond the immediately punitive one. It removes’dangerous people from the community; it deters others from criminal behavior; and it gives society an opportunity to attempt to transform lawbreakers into law-abiding citizens. What most significantly distinguishes the system of one country from that of another is the extent and the form of the protections it offers individuals in the process of determining guilt and imposing punishment. Our system of justice deliberately sacrifices much in efficiency and even in effectiveness in order to preserve local autonomy and to protect the individual. Sometimes it may seem to sacrifice too much…”

~~~THE CHALLENGE OF CRIME IN A FREE SOCIETY,
A REPORT BY THE PRESIDENT’S COMMISSION ON LAW ENFORCEMENT AND ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE, Feb 1967

Crime prevention doesn’t seem to be part of the criminal justice system….Leaving people to the gentle mercies of the streets, especially if they are mentally ill, probably doesn’t do much to reduce crime.  Loughner is definitely mentally ill, the guy that shot up the campus in Austin all those years ago had a brain tumor, Andrea Yates had post partum depression, and approximately 3% of society are socio- or psychopaths.  I dunno….but, I think the only real deterrence is the death penalty and that only deters the person being penalized.  Everyone else out there thinks they won’t get caught or won’t get convicted or they have virgins waiting in the afterlife.  The Roman Circus didn’t seem to deter people from practicing their illegal faith.
I certainly don’t like the idea of just accepting that this is going to continue to happen in a “free society.”

To get beyond all of that fun for a sec… Thanks, Dylan, for writing this. You spoke for a lot of Tucsonans, and a whole lot of Americans, who understand these tragedies first-had. And how are we supposed to process it all? \

How do we identify the so-called “mentally ill”? We take their word for whatever they say, right? It’s the only way to diagnose whatever is going on in someone’s head. As long as society at large knows that the “mentally ill” get to play by a different set of rules, all accused murderers are gonna play the twinkie defense and say whatever they have to say to get a pass or a reduced sentence.

I say it is long past time to take “mental illness” out of the equation of the criminal justice system, and have the same set or rules-and consequences-apply to everyone.

And, to those who say that the death penalty isn’t a deterrent…well, in it’s current form, maybe not. Those on death row currently get to live off of the taxpayers for a quarter century (or longer in some cases) then they’re put peacefully to sleep. If we brought back the electric chair or gas chamber, and shortened the foot-dragging process to something more reasonable (I say five years is more than enough time to cut through any red tape that needs cutting through) then perhaps that would serve as more of a deterrent.

Our survival instinct is supposed to the the most primal and strongest instinct we possess. If appealing to that instinct isn’t enough to keep someone from shooting up a parking lot or a movie theater, then nothing else you can possibly try is going to work, either.

And, how do we identify the threats based on “mental illness” without violating our rights? I say it can’t be done.

Look, any one of us is “mentally ill” if you try hard enough and dig deep enough. No one has had the perfect life. We’ve all had pain. We all have regrets. We all have issues that either we haven’t made peace with, or it took us a long time and a lot of work to do so. We’ve all had some adversity we’ve had to fight through to overcome. We all have emotional scars. My point is that if you drill deep enough, you can find something in anyone’s past and blow it up to the point where idiots like Larry Burns will call you “mentally incompetent to stand trial”. My point is that the “mental illness” card needs to stop being played, and everyone needs to be held accountable for their actions.

Let’s stop thinking about “mental illness” and just call an asshole an asshole.