what's the rush?

Everybody's outraged at McVeigh. Everybody wants him dead. I just watched a bit of a debate between Phil Donahue and Pat Buchanan, and Buchanan's emotional pitch was as heightened as if someone had just cooked and eaten his cocker spaniel.

I think we have to look at a lot of the built-in structure of criminal justice (when it's working the way it's supposed to).

When you do jury duty, they ask you things like

* Have you or any member of your family been a victim of a violent crime?

* Is any member of your family a police officer?

* Are you personally acquainted with anyone associated with this case?

And if any of the answers are Yes, you can't serve on that jury.

The idea is that a violent crime very naturally outrages its victims.

But doing justice is purposely set up so that decisions of guilt and innocence and punishment will be made by strangers who aren't boiling over with personal outrage and intense feelings of revenge.

That's why the Sheriff tells the lynch mob that in his town, theyre going to wait for the circuit judge and have a fair trial before they hang anybody.

When decisions about crime and punishment are made in the Buchanan Environment, everybody's encouraged to want blood fast. The first thing that does is blur questions about a fair trial and fundamental guilt and innocence. Beheading first! Trial and verdict later!

This week, even CNN news readers are whispering assurances that the Justice Department's failure to turn over exculpatory evidence before McVeigh's trial wasn't really a substantive matter, nobody expects it to result in a commutation or a new trial, or even a very long delay. Everyone REALLY is geared up for, wants, and fully expects a slightly delayed (that restores Fairness) execution.

In a murder trial, the defense often objects to the prosecution's introduction of grisly photos of the victims, claiming it to be inflammatory. What they mean is -- how hacked up the body is doesn't have anything to do with whether or not the defendant is the guy who did the hacking. But it inflames the jury to scream for blood, and the defendant's is the nearest and most obvious blood to scream for.

Everybody's screaming for McVeigh's blood so loudly that nobody wants to look at the withheld evidence very carefully.

What could it show?

It could show that the FBI threatened McVeigh's family and friends to give false testimony. (It's legal for cops to lie to witnesses and suspects.) If they didn't provide the evidence the FBI wanted, the FBI would threaten to include them in murder conspiracy charges. (The FBI told the Chinese-American physicist at Los Alamos that they were going to do to him what they did to the Rosenbergs.)

Is it possible McVeigh didn't do this bombing, or that his role in the bombing wasn't the central role? I remember in the week after the bombing, FBI spokesmen publicly promising the American people that they would catch the Arab terrorists responsible. And in fact all over the Midwest, the FBI started hauling in Arab-Americans and grilling and threatening them mercilessly. It was living hell to be an Arab-American in the Midwest that month, your American citizenship didn't count for shit.

There's a problem with rushing to snuff McVeigh. The sooner he's dead, the more likely it is that doubt and urban legends and conspiracy rumors about who else was responsible will spread — and McVeigh will never be able to address these theories, either to law enforcement, journalists or some eventual independent government commission, like the Warren Commission.

If he lived, would he lie and make up stories about a shadowy guy with government connections named Raul or Abdul?

Maybe. But the truth has ways of being verified.

But dead men tell no tales, false or true.

Already the Internet is full of rumors that the CIA knows the identity of a European guy at the center of the bombing, but had employed him before in counterterrorism operations and is now desperate to conceal their association and involvement with him.

Whacky maybe — but ten years from now, how satisfied will everyone be that McVeigh did it and did it pretty much alone? Especially with the rush to snuff him without a thorough look at the withheld evidence. There are, possibly, larger issues involved — our credibility and trust in the government that's helping us kill him as quickly as possible.

Droog4

One of the few sci-fi authors that I really enjoyed. And a wicked sense of humor. I'm sad for all of the books he'll never write! British Author Douglas Adams Dies

> without the intention of creating a huge gun/antigun flame war, i feel
> the need to limit myself to a simple statement.
>
> the US would be a safer place if there were less guns.

While I have to agree that guns can be used to do unsafe things to people, I am not completely sure that the issue is so much about the actual number of *guns* in the country as much as the number of *people* willing to use them in unsafe ways.

Excerpts from two articles are below, which I found incredibly *surprising* and thought-provoking.

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"If an armed society is a polite society, then what happened in America? We are one of the last countries that still allows its citizens to own personal weapons, yet our crime rate is above every other industrialized nation. Homicides are particularly above average for a first world country. By comparison, England sees just one murder for every 10 in the United States, and we can all agree that no one over there has any guns. Surely there must be a connection.

As a matter of fact, a view of gun ownership from an international perspective can be very enlightening about the efficacy of firearms as a crime-fighting tool when left in the hands of private citizens.

In Switzerland every adult male is required, by law, to keep in his home a fully automatic assault rifle for militia service. Shooting is practically a national pastime, and a permit to carry a handgun is easily obtained. Far from attacking those it views as "stockpiling" weapons, surplus military rifles are made available by the Swiss government for around $50 each.

Far from having blood running in the streets, crime in Switzerland is virtually non-existent -- putting even England's peaceful reputation to shame. And this in a country of gun-owners!"

------------------------------------

According to the U.N. International Study on Firearm Regulation, England's 1994 homicide rate was 1.4 (9% involving firearms), and the robbery rate 116, per 100,000 population. In the United States, the homicide rate was 9.0 (70% involving firearms), and the robbery rate 234, per 100,000.

[But] Switzerland, which is awash in guns...has substantially lower murder and robbery rates than England, where most guns are banned.

Here are the figures: The Swiss Federal Police Office reports that in 1997 there were 87 intentional homicides and 102 attempted homicides in the entire country. Some 91 of these 189 murders and attempts involved firearms. With its population of seven million (including 1.2 million foreigners), Switzerland had a homicide rate of 1.2 per 100,000. There were 2,498 robberies (and attempted robberies), of which 546 involved firearms, resulting in a robbery rate of 36 per 100,000. Almost half of these crimes were committed by non-resident foreigners, whom locals call "criminal tourists."

-- Stephen P. Halbrook, The Wall Street Journal
(Europe), June 4, 1999

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Now, regarding personal defense (the basic start of this thread), I have somewhere in my stack of stuff a study (that I found while researching concealed carry laws) that says you have something like a 10 to 20 times greater likelihood of being shot by an attacker whenever you're carrying a gun. In most cases of "stranger attacks", your chances of harm actually escalate greatly if you're carrying a weapon, such as a gun or knife. However, communities with concealed carry laws have seen a statistically measurable drop in violent "stranger" crimes such as muggings, etc., particularly against women, since the laws were passed. The study concluded that having the law in place is a psychological deterrent to criminals, though women carrying weapons on their persons were statistically more likely to be harmed by a weapon if actually attacked.

Strange double-edged (hell, multi-edged) conundrum, but it makes me think, very very hard, about all these issues. Because of my family history, I do a lot of thinking about these things (self-defense and related accidental deaths), and I am always looking out for articles with statistically valid numbers that I can add to my database of information on the subject.

-w

I wonder why it is when Rob Blake gets his elbow up on Yzerman, I get annoyed and consider Blake a thug, but when Kasparaitis does the same thing on Donald Audette, I think it's really funny and Kaspar starts becoming one of my favorite players...