MSD

The scenarios of an abused woman killing an abusive husband and a supremacist killing a member of another race are not comparable in my mind. One one hand, I see a person in fear for her life defending against an attacker, and on the other I see a random, unprovoked act. I would certainly consider the abused woman's situation a legally unjustifiable escalation of force, and while sympathetic, I would not let her go free, but an act of desparation is hardly on the same level as premeditated murder against a random victim.

If I were to drive around my town and shoot the first person I see walking along the side of the road who isn't walking with a group that can get my license plate number, would it be any better than putting a cut-up pillowcase on my head and doing the same to the first black person I saw? What if I slapped on a few "America: love it or leave it" bumper stickers, changed into my "God Bless America" shirt and shot the first person I saw with Che Guevara shirt? What if I spread the classefieds of a local clothing store across my wall, threw a dart, and killed the first person wearing the piece of clothing it hit? What if a fast food employees have fucked up my order this morning and I whacked the first guy I saw walking out of McDonalds with a company shirt? How about reacting to the people who constantly attacked my group of friends in high school and getting the first guy I saw with khakis and a popped collar.

I look at my list and see six identical crimes, six premeditated acts of violence against members of a specific group. Are they all hate crimes, is there a difference because of the target? Is there difference because of the motive? What is it about one premeditated murder that makes ithe perpetrator more deserving of a long sentence than another? I'm an middle-class white male, what if I resent the existence of the racial and social class I was born into and shoot someone in a nearby neighborhood because he's just like me, is that a hate crime?

What if I killed a black man running in my direction on the sidewalk in my neighborhood (suburban, all-white,) because he gave me a strange look and made me uncomfortable? What if I did the same in front of a black friend's apartment building in the inner city, where the neighborhood is multiracial? In the first situation would you assume that I was a racist and call it a hate crime? Would you assume that I just overreacted in front of my friend's apartment? I know that the gut reaction is to claim that they look like the same thing on paper, but I guarantee that if one were printed in the newspaper wihtout the other for comparison, that anyone, myself included, would look at the first and assume racial motivation, and look at the second and assume it was a paranoid, jumpy person wiht a gun.

At what point is it acceptable to bump up my sentence because the reason I deprived a person of their life, and a lot of other people of a father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, friend, student, teacher, or whoever they were, was an unacceptable way of thinking rather than a typical motive. No matter what the reason for it was, I would still be ripping a hole in the fabric of society, and leaving it there for others to deal with. Regardless of motive, someone is dead who probably doesn't deserve to be, and that should be the deciding factor.