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03/12/09
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I'm sure a taser wouldn't do the job? Why the need for the pistol? When dealing with a 12 year old that might get pissed because she wasn't allowed to go to the Britney Spears concert, or the lead cheerleader called her fat...I'd think you'd want the less lethal means of protection.
03/12/09
with proper training at an early age, I'd trust a 12 year old girl with a pistol more than i would some yahoo who has no discipline or respect for firearms
surely we've all seen the 11 year old assembling the AR-15, SHE seemed more than capable of properly handling a weapon.
I'm not saying start handing out pistols indiscriminately, i'm trying to encourage people to rethink the social norms. If i have children one of these days, they'll learn about firearms very young, and will likely be armed on a regular basis by the time they're 11 or 12.
03/12/09
@Kaiser-Machead:
do you see little girls shiving each other for lack of a pistol, or beating each other with 2x4s? No, a social spat doesn't call for that level of violence. people aren't generally flippant about shooting others, regardless of age. you know that a fist fight won't ruin your life, and so does the other guy.
if there were vastly more stabbings by young girls, i'd be a bit more hesitant to advocate arming them lethally. but even when they call each other fat, they rarely employ weaponry.
03/12/09
with a stun gun you have to get in close, and with a taser you only have one shot.
give her a little .22, she's unlikely to kill anyone with it even if she tries.
03/12/09
Kick the stoners out and make room for these monsters.
03/12/09
03/12/09
I know this guy is awful and terrible and all, but this also just sounds like some really bad parenting.
03/12/09
It says "On her way home from Wal-Mart" - nothing about her working there so... ???
Anyways 12 or 13 SHOULD be old enough to walk home alone safely, so long as one can expect NOT to encounter a GPS anklet wearing child rapist. 99.999% of the time, the most dangerous thing to a kid is the kid himself. Watch the episode of "Bullshit!" on "Stranger Danger" and you'll find that the parents were more negligent in not coating her with shark repellent - the odds of being abducted by a stranger are really very low for kids, something like 90% of child kidnappings/molestation/rape involve someone the family knows.
03/12/09
oh and it looks like the 'from work' thing must have been a typo - it's not like that in the article anymore.
03/12/09
On another note, WTF? It says that her aunt was raped twice and her grandmother was kidnapped. Multiple rapists with ankle bracelets roaming freely around and "a field popular with transients"? Is this a post-apocalyptic movie? What the fuck?
03/12/09
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Imprisonment as a deterrent does not have a substantial utilitarian benefit as the cost of imprisonment, compounded with a growing prison population, is greater than the preventive benefit from imprisonment. We simply cannot imprison every offender forever. Nor can we imprison people on what they might do.
We are a nation of laws, not of men. The criminal justice system does not exist to put victims back to where they were. It does not exist to predict and prevent future crimes. It exists to dispense punishment on offenders for crimes they have committed.
Leave the policing to the police, not the courts. It is a shame that a woman was killed by a convicted criminal. But this is not a failure of the penal system. If anything, it is a failure of the police.
03/12/09
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03/12/09
With regards to the criminal justice system, I partly agree and disagree with you, depending on what your definition of the criminal justice system is. If it is just the courts and penal system, then yes, it is separate from law enforcement. However, if it includes law-making, then it does influence the frequency of future crimes; if there was a mandatory death sentence for rapists, you can bet that there would be fewer rapes.
03/12/09
Obviously, having laws on the books which are reasonably calculated to achieve both punitive and utilitarian goals and enacted through representative democracy with informed debate is necessary. And yes, I have problems with direct democracy through referendum (like in California) because it is frequently abused and does not allow for an actual informed debate as to efficacy and constitutionality.
Mandatory minimums, which sound tempting, are fraught with potential for abuse. The federal sentencing guidelines where the perfect example of this. A judge was largely bound by the guidelines as to what sentence to deliver. This meant that the power to sentence lay in no small part with the prosecutor. By selecting the charge, the prosecution was selecting the sentence. It was an improper usurpation of the power of the judiciary by the executive.
Another example is California's Three Strikes law, which still contains no exception for minor and non-violent offenses. While we emotionally crave the security of knowing the results of actions, a system designed to give some sense of justice for human behavior is no place for bright lines. Judges must be given the latitude to judge - not merely referee. It is why we have an independent judiciary.
Mandatory sentences and inflated sentences do not increase deterrence. For example, if rape carried a mandatory death sentence, where would be the incentive to not kill the woman afterward? After all, she is just a witness who can convict you (and have you executed). Why not shoot the police who come after you? Why not take hostages?
Mandatory death sentences would not result in fewer rapes; they would result in more murders.
03/12/09
Anyway, I don't see how GPS would have helped at all as the watcher wouldn't be able to tell if it was an abandoned building either. Maybe if they had some way of listening in on what's going on as well that could help. If Shazam on the iPhone can recognize every damn song ever made through the microphone then maybe the same can be done to recognize people screaming for their lives in which someone would at least be notified on the other end.
Or hey, maybe even an algorithim to see if the sick fuck had driven near a school or something similar.
03/12/09
Maybe for some it's not that big of a deal. Some guy who goes to jail for smoking crack goes back to his habit, whatever, sucks to be him. But when some one who rapes little girls gets out to just go rape MORE girls there is something wrong. Sick fucks like this need to be killed on site.
03/12/09
03/12/09
second, castration won't work... I've seen many a vicious dog castrated with little to no improvement.
the only way to correct this behavior is incarceration for ever or death.
that is the only way...
03/12/09
03/12/09
life is FULL of hard choices ;)
03/12/09
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03/12/09
Sick and wrong? I don't care. Fuck this guy.
03/12/09
'Do not kill, do not rape, do not steal, these are principles which every man of every faith can embrace.'~best line from Boondock Saints (watched it last night)
03/12/09
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03/12/09
Everybody is all for torturing "potential" terrorists to get questionable intel?
Screw that. The real purpose of torture is not to get information. It should be used to PUNISH scumbags like this one. Operant conditioning. "Clockwork Orange" the guy so he becomes nauseated and wants to die at the slightest hint of violence.
03/12/09
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@gadam07: I'd say that this is a rather off chance. You can't rely on removing sex organs to reduce violent slayings, even if they are sexual in nature. This sounds more like a crime of rage, not of sex. He didn't have sex with the child, but rather beat her to death. I doubt that removing anything would've prevented that.