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No one should ever be fair game. Killing is the failure to maintain the understanding that the life of another person is sacrosanct. You are responsible for your life and your life alone and the second that you take the life of another person is the moment you've crossed a terrible, terrible line. I don't know why the thought that murder and killing is under some circumstances okay has been permitted by an intelligent species to continue, but it has to stop and it has to stop soon. We're living in a time when there are nations and organizations and individuals impossible to please with the ability to kill thousands to millions with little more than the push of a button. This is insanity.
To Awlaki I would propose a very simple moral lesson: killing a killer is not justice and killing a killer will not necessarily end the killing, in fact it may simply continue the terrible cycle you wish to halt. My country (not meaning the general population, because most of us are against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and who knows where else, but rather the chickenhawks and their military/corporate sponsors) has done terrible things and will continue to do terrible things unless we can come together and make them stop not by continuing the cycle of bloodshed but by using our minds. To respond to a brute with violence is to become a brute yourself. I propose you and I demonstrate we are not just more brutes, but that we are people of peace, people of progress, and people deserving of the world we seek to build.
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