Last week there were three deaths that made the national news.
- Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah.
- A high school teenager in Colorado shot 2 students and then killed himself.
- A schizophrenic man stabbed a woman to death on a train in North Carolina.
It seems like every few weeks, there’s another news story about a school shooter, a convicted criminal with a known record of multiple violent offenses, or a mentally ill person with a history of violence who commits some horrific violent crime.
In hindsight, some of these killers seem “easy to identify”. These are those individuals with well documented histories of violence, incarcerations, involuntary psychiatric commitments, arrests, police interventions etc.
Others do not have those histories. They may post manifestos online, make threatening tweets, and present misanthropic and nihilistic worldviews. Many of these types seem to fall “under the radar” with friends and family saying after the fact that they had “no idea he was capable of this”.
I’ve written about the second type before. I have not changed my position on this.
As for the first type – ie. criminals and crazy people with a history of violence – they need to be isolated and removed from the public where they cause harm. In a peaceful society, you lose your right to freedom when it bumps up against another person’s freedom.
In the old days, people who harmed other members of society were shunned, expelled, exiled or killed. As civilizations developed we introduced prisons and mental institutions to lock people away from harming others. For some of the worst criminals, we have executions.
This is how it is.
It’s not always pleasant. It means taking a hard line and making a decision that may feel less compassionate and sympathetic to the roots of the person’s problem vs. their personal responsibility for their actions.
The chances of rehabilitation and reentry into society for these people is low. Their lives will likely not improve.
Decisions like this are not easy, but that doesn’t make them wrong.
