Quote:
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Originally Posted by Kahn
They have lost their right to life in my book.
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Who gets to decide that? Who makes the decision of which people are deserving of life and which ones aren't? These are human beings. We don't want to think of them as such, because we want to disassociate ourselves from the kind of creature that could do something like this, but like it or not it's what they are. Despicable, contemptible, evil, but human. What makes them more or less deserving of life? Liberty, no. They have proven better than I could have imagined possible that freedom of action is a burden they're not capable of shouldering and this poor woman has paid the price. But to take away their life?
I know they did horrible things. It makes me sick thinking about it. I'm not outraged though. I'm saddened by this, depressed. Both because it forces me to face the knowledge that this is what my fellow man, my species, my people are capable of, and also because of the reaction.
A woman died. She was subjected to horrible, unimaginable suffering. And while we're not the ones who inflicted this on her, the burden of it is ours. These people, there's something wrong with them. Normal, compassionate people don't do things like this. They're broken in some fundamental way. And we can drag them out back and shoot them like a pack of dogs gone feral, or we can acknowledge that we can learn something from this. We can learn how they're broken, learn to recognize it, maybe even learn to fix it. We can take real steps towards preventing this kind of thing from happening again. That's far more important to me than any lust for vengeance.
I was going to trot out the old 'where do we draw the line' argument regarding capital punishment, but frankly I just don't have it in me. Thinking about this is just too much for me. These are my thoughts, make of them what you will.