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I agree. Classical theorist Cesare Beccaria believed that crime is rational and can be deterred, in the most simple form; thus if the punishment outweighed the benefit of crime it could be deterred. I agree somewhat here for the majority of petty criminals. He goes on to say that punishment must be swift, severe, certain. I totally agree here, but it's not the case even for the rational criminal.
Why?
Severe: Judicial discretion and sentencing guidelines
Certain: due process/plea bargain; it is not certain
Celerity: it takes months, if not years for a punishment to be handed down
I like Beccaria's thoughts and classical as well. Back in his day I would assume if the rational committed a crime, it would be eye for an eye (severity), it would be public (certain) and it would happen the next day (celerity).
For an example, in today's world let's say I get a DUI. Pending punishment, lose my DL for a year up to 30 days in jail (severity). Two years later with extensions and appeals (celerity) my time in court finally happens and with a plea bargin I get one year restricted license and 2 days in jail (certain), yet I may have almost killed someone driving drunk.
So yes deterrence is a joke. Not just the death penalty but as a whole. When the punishment is finally handed down and the public does not remember the crime...we have a problem. And if they do remember the crime and it's not severe enough we have a problem. i
But if we have mass-murder suicide, that's irrational right? So take the above and shove it someone's ass!Comment -
Guns aren't the only weapon of destruction. If there were no guns - nut cases would build bombs - lasers - tasers - create fires - go back to catapaults and cross bows - create landslides with big boulders. Or just crash into people with cars - trucks - tractor trailers - or trains - capsize ships.
Mankind has an insane desire to kill their fellow man! Man has been fycked in the head for it's entire existence and still has not become civilized. What deterrent could we possibly invent that would preclude deranged people from killing themselves and taking as many innocent human beings with them as they possibly can?
People commit suicide and take their wife and children with them! What can we possibly do to punish the dead?
How can you punish people in a civilized manner who perpetrate an uncivilized crime?
So - what - if the penal system inhumanely tortured the next 100 convicted capital crime criminals instead of just a painless injection and then interview them and ask - would you do it all again if you knew you would be tortured?
Society would have to give up some of their personal freedoms and rights to stop or neutralize terrorism.Comment -
The number one threat to the American people is the American people
Forget terrorism, we're doing it to ourselves.Comment -
it just seems gun murders are way up
a few today in Vegas and family disputes;;;kills killed
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#killskilledComment -
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Well if Secret Service followed everyone around I suppose it would be a different story.
I'd feel safe with secret service packing all around me too. Not so much with every doofus and d-bag around me packing heat.
Republicans are nothing if not masters of absurd analogies.Comment -
That's why it's better to go by numbers than feelings. Because it's just the opposite. Gun murders and violence have actually steadily decreased over the past 20 years and are at historic lows. We just hear more about everything because of all the media, social media, etc.Comment -
[QUOTE=Grits n' Gravy;24579697]Any chance of stricter gun laws went out the window many years ago. If politicians and the courts had the balls to turn down gun advocate/manufacturer campaign contributions they would go after the businesses that sell guns to people who commit felonies with those weapons. It might make a small impact on vendors who operate in grey areas. The death penalty needs to become automatic for those convicted of these kinds of crimes as well.
The majority of gun owners in USA have them just to be cool and compensate for the fact that they couldn't beat another man in a fair fight.
I have to laugh at paco trying to flex with his pistols. Guy valet parks cars for a living in Detroit. Is he worried about someone stealing his $27 in tips after a hard
I worked in cincinnati as a debit agent. I worked in neighborhoods where it wasn't safe for black people to be in and this is black neighborhoods. I could go there because I knew alot of these kids when they were born. i paid claims on their grandparents. I walked in houses that had mounds and mounds of crack but these kids knew I would keep my mouth shut. I have 7 kids that made the first 48 as being killed.When the riots happened I was caught in the middle of it. 2 kids that had pitbulls (who happened to be from cleveland) decided to penetrate with me and i told them i could shoot both dogs and them before they could get to me. One of the kids that was a big dope boy walked over and told these to kids that if they wanted to make it out of the nati alive they wouldn't even look at me again. Another told them I wasn't white and that I just took care of his family on fire claim to back the penetrate off. As i always tell people; anyone that doesn't believe in guns has never needed one.Comment -
i will tell you exactly when it changed. WHEN REAGAN SAID THE GOVT. WASN'T IN THE MENTAL HEALTH CARE BUSINESS! Used to be when i grew up you could lock these knuckleheads up. Now you can't. Also there wasn't no a.d.d. when I was a kid. There was a paddle with holes in it. Now teachers are to lazy to teach so they want to medicate. WHy do u think heroin is on the rise. because we teach kids it is alright to medicate.Comment -
funny thing is last 3 shooters were devout faux news watcher.Comment -
REAL IMAGE (left) – CNN IMAGE (right)
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ROSEBURG, Ore. (AP) -- The gunman had already shot several students at close range when he stood inches from Lacey Scroggins and demanded she stand up.
It was only the fourth day of community college for the 18-year-old aspiring surgeon. She was face down, her head tucked between her outstretched arms, among dead and dying classmates.
Scroggins could hear someone gurgling. She felt the weight of mortally wounded Treven Anspach against her, the 20-year-old's blood flowing onto her clothing.
She prayed and played dead, frozen to the floor. The killer stepped over her and shot someone else.
In a rampage lasting about 10 minutes, Christopher Harper-Mercer took nine lives Thursday morning in chilling fashion before killing himself as officers closed in, placing the small town of Roseburg among settings that have become infamous for inexplicable violence.
In addition to slain English professor Lawrence Levine, the dead and nine wounded were students young and old - some high school aged, others just beginning college and some starting over after a broken marriage, drug abuse or in hopes of a new career.
The rural Umpqua Community College on nearly 100 acres of pastureland along the North Umpqua River has about 3,200 students in this southwestern Oregon community, where the struggling timber industry is no longer seen as a path to the future. Its website said it offered "a peaceful, safe atmosphere."
The school term had just begun and Levine's 10 a.m. introductory composition class was underway when Mercer-Harper arrived on campus not with books, but with a small arsenal of weapons that included five handguns, a semi-automatic rifle, five magazines of ammunition and a flak jacket.
The young man was described as an awkward loner who had flunked out of Army basic training and lived with his mother. His social media profile suggested he was frustrated with organized religion and had studied mass shootings.
Those who knew him said they never expected what would happen next.
Scroggins heard a pop and noticed a hole in a classroom window, according to a detailed account provided by her father, Pastor Randy Scroggins.
Harper-Mercer, 26, who was enrolled in the class but had showed no signs of anger two days before, entered, fired several rounds from a handgun and told everyone to get on the floor.
Natalie Robbins was in another writing class nearby in Snyder Hall when she heard the first muffled gunshot that sounded more like a table had been overturned.
"We heard this first BOOM," Robbins said. "About 45 seconds later we hear boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Six shots. In the middle of that is when my instructor said, 'We have to get the hell out of here.'"
She and other classmates bolted out of the room toward the campus center.
The first 911 call was made at 10:38 a.m., but those on campus were not immediately alerted.
Biology professor Ken Carloni was sitting in his office in the science building next door when a colleague entered with a startled groundskeeper who said there was a shooting.
They locked the building, gathered about 40 students from the surrounding classrooms and huddled with them in a small hallway with no outside-facing windows.
Back in Snyder Hall, Lacey Scroggins didn't see her teacher fall, but Anastasia Boylan did.
The first-year student told her family from the hospital that Levine was shot at point-blank range.
"She was crying and saying, 'Grandma, he killed my teacher! He killed my teacher! I saw it!" Janet Willis said, in recounting her granddaughter's story.
In the chaos that followed, Boylan found herself on the classroom floor, bleeding next to a friend who had also been shot.
Harper-Mercer began singling them out for slaughter, telling them to stand and state their religion.
Both Boylan and Scroggins said the gunman shot Christians in the head and wounded others, though there was at least one account that said he treated all religions with the same cold response.
"She hears the shooter in front say, 'You, in that orange shirt, stand up!'" Randy Scoggins said. "'What religion are you? Are you a Christian?' He says 'Yes.' She hears another pop, and she hears a thud as he drops to the ground."
Rand McGowan, who was shot in the hand, told his mother it didn't seem the shooter was deliberately targeting Christians.
"It was more so saying, 'You're going to be meeting your maker,' " Stephanie Salas said.
Boylan, 18, was in terrible pain when Harper-Mercer told her to stand. She had been shot through the spine and a bullet was lodged in her back.
"Hey blonde girl," he said, according to her grandmother. "Get up! I want to talk to you!"
Like Scroggins, she played dead and Mercer left her there.
He showed little mercy to others.
At one point, Chris Mintz, an Army veteran and student who helped evacuate his classroom nearby, sounded a fire alarm in another building and ran back to help. He was shot as he came through the classroom door.
Mintz asked the gunman to stop, saying it was his son's birthday. The gunman opened fire again, shooting Mintz but somehow missing vital organs. Mintz lived.
The gunman told a woman to beg for her life, Randy Scroggins said. She did and he shot her anyway.
One woman tried to show sympathy for the shooter, saying she was sorry for whatever happened to him.
"He said, 'I bet you are, but it's not enough.' And with that, he shot her," Randy Scroggins said as he began to cry.
Harper-Mercer herded people to the center of the room and shot them as they were lying down.
Perhaps in a reference to the afterlife, he announced: "Don't anybody worry. We will all be together in just a moment," Scroggins said.
McGowan, 18, managed to stay alive by staying as still as possible and avoiding eye contact with the shooter, his mother recounted.
Then his phone began to vibrate in his pocket. His older brother was calling.
"Rand was like, 'Oh my goodness,' and said 'Thank you Lord! My phone was on vibrate,'" his mother, Salas, said. "If it had rang, he would have been picked out."
Harper-Mercer singled out a "lucky one" that he wouldn't kill and directed him to stand in the corner of the classroom to deliver something to law enforcement, according to Bonnie Schaan, the mother of Cheyeanne Fitzgerald, 16, who was seriously wounded and had a kidney removed.
Police said he left behind a manifesto. That may offer some insight into what propelled him, but at this point they have not released details of what it said.
Roseburg police officers arrived within six minutes of the first call for help. Two minutes later, they were in a shootout with Harper-Mercer.
Lacey Scroggins said she heard a burst of gunfire and then the shooter said one last thing.
"You got me. I've had enough. I quit," her father recounted.
And then it was silent.
Lacey Scroggins had thought it was her day to die, she told her father. But she was not hurt.
She got up and began tending the wounded, fashioning her scarf as a tourniquet on the limb of a bleeding woman.Comment -
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Never realized how dumb the general population was until this gun control stuff started popping up. We really do deserve to be destroyed. lolComment -
"A person that doesn't use his intelligence is no better than an animal that doesn't have any intelligence and thus are steaks on the table by choice and consent." This is appropriate for everyone that thinks gun control is a good idea.Comment -
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Democrats on the presidential debate going hard on gun control and the NRA.Comment -
I'm placing the blame of these mass shootings on the Republicans who have cut mental health programs to the bone
or not at all. Insurance companies have cut mental health related benefits to the bone also. Drug companies and their
new antidepressant drugs are creating more crazies than helping.
Parents and or spouses need to recognize mental health issues and for god's sake, don't teach kids how to shoot guns
if they are on mental drugs!!!! If their spouse is on mental drugs, get those firearms out of the house! It's fukking
common sense!
Kids on antidepressants before, during and after puberty should be a big no no! Emotions during that time is rampant.
Putting them on drugs will only increase those emotions.Comment -
I prefer a machete anyway....... that A&M receiver was on to something........... much more fun to hack someone up alive than to hit them from a distance with a measly bullet.....
JJ, i need you to purchase a machete for me from a local pawn store there in vegas, in a classic "straw man purchase" that Hillary is trying to outlaw.... I don't want the clark county sherriff's dept to be able to trace the machete back to me, as I plan to throw it into the fountain at Bellagio after I complete my tourist killing rampage over at Bally's.........Comment -
An issue many of you are not seeing is that at least 40% of people have no business having children because of various issues and their kids turn out to be losers like the parentsComment -
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How right am I… It's why I'm the most respected poster here because I'm very very accurate on almost every issueComment -
More guns is the solution. Maybe give them away free.
Lets try to triple the amount of guns circulated.
Gun control is stupid. More guns i say!Comment -
I think everyone should just turn in their guns so that way nobody gets killed by them...the government agencies have plenty and they will protect us, they have special training and most citizens do not so it makes more sense for them to have guns.
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