> - I changed my position on the right to bear arms and concealed weapons -
> now I support it (albeit the NRA types still make puke.)
I don't see why NRA types make you puke. You share with them a belief in the existence of something called "criminals" that you believe you can erradicate by killing. (You can't.) This is the NRA type's central belief--which makes *me* puke. It's identical to the neocon belief in the existence of something called "terrorists" that can be erradicated by killing.
There are no criminals. There are only people who sometimes do things we deem just and right and sometimes do things we deem unjust and immoral. I've yet to see a counterexample, i.e., a person who has only done things just and right or a person who has only done things unjust and immoral. The behavior at any given time can be extreme at either end, to be sure, but that doesn't make one no longer human. All human behavior has complex causes and must be viewed in a societal context that imposes conditions, limitations, and pressures on some people that it does not impose on others. For example, two mentally ill people, one white and in the suburbs, the other black in a ghetto. One of these people will likely have to suffer his mental illness without any medical treatment. Another example, a mentally retarded person, one white and in the suburbs and the other white in rural Texas. One of these people likely will never receive any siginificant social services for his retardation while the other will. Consequences follow.
Our societal context also includes the existence of persons (or associations of persons) powerful enough to shape and mold the society (e.g., the distribution of mental health services among citizens), and thus they bear quite a bit of responsibility for the state of the social context within which others must act. Crime is almost exclusively a social phenomenon (yes I said 'almost'), and it is for that reason that those persons with the most power to shape a society are most responsible for the crime that occurs within it. I figure (and this is just a hunch) those persons tend to use their power to maintain conditions of society in a state that favorable *to them* rather than fair *to all*. This, I imagine, creates inequities. Inequities have consequences.
Just a fun statistic on this note: since the Supreme Court decided that states could no longer execute mentally retarded persons, about 11% of Texas's then-existing entire death row has been found by the state's highest criminal court to have been able to make a prima facie case of mental retardation, no small task in light of the requirement of an IQ score at (or near) 75 (these scores almost exclusively come from testing that was done before the Supreme Court decision itself, so it's not a question of malingering, which psychologists are trained to detect anyway). As you can imagine, Texas's highest state court, which oversees more executions every year than every other state combined, is no coddler of "criminals," nor does it particularly care if mentally retarded persons are in fact executed. So that it has found that over 10% of all death row inmates may be mentally retarded is nothing to sneeze at. (Mentally retarded persons make up about 1-2% of the general population.) What I wonder though, is how many of their victims would have had to have died had those mentally retarded (or, at least, near-mentally retarded) death row inmates ever received any real and substantial mental health services growing up. And then I think about all the mental illnesses that are overrepresented on death row, left untreated as youths and young adults. And then I wonder who is responsible for that failure. And, ultimately, for those unnecessary deaths.
"Each of us is worth more than the worst thing we've ever done." -- Bryan Stevenson