Due to continued general lawlessness, many Mexicans are supporting a return to the death penalty.
Recent polls showed support for the death penalty surging to as much as two-thirds of the surveyed population.
Considering how bad the situation really is south of the border, I can only echo the old advertisement: Try it. You’ll like it.
Liberals, of course, are opposed to the idea. For one, Mexico has signed an international pact under which they are not allowed to reinstate the death penalty once it has been eliminated. (Yet another reason we should simply withdraw from the U.N., as our national sovereignty trumps any possible outside interest.) One law professor even states,
…the state cannot fall into the same criminal behavior as the criminals.
Statement like this betray the lack of underlying moral foundation on the far left. Every moral person agrees that governments can’t (or shouldn’t, at least) behave in a criminal manner. There are, however, crimes for which execution is morally justified. In such cases, it is less moral to allow the criminal to live than to mete out just punishment in the form of death. Unfortunately it is not likely that Mexico will return to rationality in this matter. It’s equally unlikely that the extreme violence that racks the nation will end anytime soon.
After studying famous cases of genocide, some geniuses have come to a startling conclusion: humans all have a dark side. Stunner! A cursory examination of human history yields the same obvious conclusion, but apparently this is news to some folks. (It wouldn’t surprise me if there were government funds somewhere behind this brilliant work.) Some of the statements would be comical if only they weren’t so widely believed. For example,
“You don’t have to be mentally ill or even innately evil or criminal. You can be ordinary, no better or worse than you or me, and commit killing or genocide,” said Harvard psychiatrist Robert Lifton, who has studied Nazi doctors.
This “expert” lumps killing and genocide together, not recognizing the fact that there are numerous situations in which killing is perfectly, morally justifiable. The two simply cannot be equated. But worse than this is the bald statement that those committing genocide are not “innately evil or criminal.” They are both. Genocide is universally recognized by all normative moral systems as both evil and criminal. Further, the Judaeo-Christian moral system upon which all of Western civilization, and our nation in particular, is based teaches us that we are all inherently evil. (This, too, comes as no big surprise to anyone who has children. The little beasts must be taught every bit of morality they ever learn—it isn’t built in.) Unfortunately we far too often fail to acknowledge this fact and, worse, fail to pass it on to each succeeding generation so it comes as a surprise when it is rediscovered.
In an interesting development, a group of India’s wealthy have filed a lawsuit against the government for failing to protect them from the terrorists in Mumbai.
It charged that the government had lagged in its constitutional duty to protect its citizens’ right to life, and it pressed the state to modernize and upgrade its security forces.
According to some reports (like this one), there were armed police forces in the area who simply cowered during the attack and refused to challenge the terrorists. So it does seem some, ahem, improvements are certainly in order. But the real problem is that the citizens of India have abrogated all responsibility for their protectiion to the government. Government police forces cannot, however, be omnipresent and so can’t prevent or protect from all such attacks. Individuals must be capable of defending themselves and must have the mindset to do so instilled within. A disarmed populace is nothing but a herd of sheep with no defense against the wolves that will inevitably attack.
The United Nations Commission on Human Rights has adopted a resolution to purportedly combat defamation of religion. The problem is, if you read the entire text, the only religion mentioned is Islam. Apparently we aren’t supposed to be able to discuss Islam in any but the most glowing terms despite the irrefutable fact that the majority of terrorism is carried out by Muslims specifically in the name of Islam. Fortunately for us here in America, we have something called the First Amendment.
The U.N. has become an increasingly useless organization. Rather than sending it significantly more of our tax dollars, as Obama would like to do, we should withdraw our membership and kick them out of our country.
A Philadelphia man was sentenced to life last week for the murder of Jason Shephard. You probably didn’t hear about it in the news, though. Why? The murderer, William Smithson, is gay. He kidnapped Shephard, drugged him, and tried to rape him. When Shephard fought back Smithson killed him.
Where’s the media outrage over this senseless murder? You won’t hear any because the liberal media only care about such crimes when the victim—not the perpetrator—is gay. This was a true hate crime. The perp should have received the death penalty.
What happens when you swing a chair at a police officer? You risk being shot and killed. The only really disturbing aspect of the incident is how much space the article takes up trying to paint the assailant as a wonderful, innocent soul. Yes, an innocent soul that happened to be swinging a chair at an officer. (The Times’ original article re the incident covered the facts without the beatification.)
A few hours after the shooting, at 12:45 p.m. on Nov. 13, the police said that the shooting appeared to be within the department’s guidelines. While the man did not have a gun or knife, the department said the officer was at risk of being killed or seriously hurt with the chair, the key criterion justifying the use of lethal force.
It’s really simple. Don’t assault cops.
Score: Good Guys 1, Bad Guys 0
Despite “expert” security the hotels in Mumbai were an easy target for terrorists. Why is this so, when hotels have increasingly come under attack, particularly in Asia? The experts seem to be throwing their hands up.
P.R.S. Oberoi, the chairman of the Oberoi Group, said at a news conference over the weekend that he had directed his company’s hotels to step up security after the Islamabad bombing. The Oberoi banned anyone from parking in front of its hotel here for fear that a car bomb could destroy the glass wall at the front of the lobby, a risk at many hotels.
But those protections did not deter the attackers, who entered the Oberoi on foot.
Mr. Oberoi questioned whether any hotel could defend against such an assault.
Well, certainly not the Oberoi. Their “security” officers are unarmed! Now how does Mr. Oberoi expect his staff to protect his customers if they aren’t even armed? By the time the government could respond, the situation was already completely out of hand. All they could do is clean up the mess and count bodies.
There really is a simple solution: trust ordinary people. Fortunately, here in the U.S., most states do. The principle is enshrined in the Second Amendment and lived out by those of us who choose to carry arms (and further choose to live in states that allow concealed carry). A disarmed populace is nothing but a nation of victims. Would the attacks have been thwarted if there had been armed security officers and citizens? Not necessarily, of course, but it could have made a significant difference. An armed civilian may not survive such an attack, but it’s certain at this point that a couple hundred unarmed victims did not.
The officer was about to clean his gun after giving his daughter a safety lesson! Apparently he skipped class when they covered the first rule of gun safety: treat every gun as if it loaded (until you personally verify that it is not). Good grief! Now the gun grabbers are going to yammer away again about how unsafe guns are.
After a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death by a mob during yesterday’s Black Friday frenzy, police are trying to identify individuals from the store’s security tapes. I, for one, hope they’re able to do so and prosecute. I also hope the man’s family will sue Wal-Mart for a crippling sum. What has become of our society when retailers hype a sale to the point that saving a few buck is worth more than a man’s life?
Other workers were trampled as they tried to rescue the man, and customers stepped over him and became irate when officials said the store was closing because of the death, police and witnesses said.
You’ve got to be kidding! People were actually upset because they couldn’t keep shopping? How unbelievably self-centered our society is becoming. What’s the value of a human life? “Uh, yeah, we just trampled that guy to death so we could save $10 on a Wii for Christmas. I mean, come one, I’ve been waiting in line all night and he was in the way.”
They should’ve just rounded up everyone in the store and ID’d them to make hanging prosecuting them easier.
After four days it appears the carnage is finally over, with a couple hundred killed and many more wounded in terrorist attacks on ten different sites in Mumbai. How is this kind of attack possible? If you’ve been following the news for the last few years, you already know that India has the second largest Muslim population in the world and is also the location of a very large percentage of Islamist terror attacks. What you may not know is that India is also an almost entirely disarmed society. Their citizens and foreign travelers are completely at the mercy of fanatics like those who perpetrated this atrocity.