Laws are rules set down by a society against behavior it finds unacceptable. Laws vary from society to society based upon their moral views. While murder is found unacceptable in nearly all societies, nude sun bathing may be acceptable in some and unacceptable in others.

Therefore, laws against particular behaviors are not deterrents, they are simply statements of unacceptability.

Laws cannot be legislated against stupidity. Stupid people, in all societies, will perform unacceptable acts regardless of the laws.

Threatened punishments, regardless of the severity, are not deterrents. However, actual punishment under the law, such as incarceration, is a deterrent, at least for the length of the sentence. As long as a criminal is out of circulation he/she cannot perpetrate a crime against society.

Even the threat of the death penalty, in capital crimes, is not a deterrent that will keep people from committing murder. However, carrying out the death penalty is a definite deterrent, putting the criminal permanently out of circulation, insuring that the criminal will never commit murder, or any other type of crime, ever again.

Legislators today, particularly those who lean to the left, but not limited to them, do not seem to be able to differentiate between laws and deterrents. They keep passing laws in the vain hope that they will deter crime. They keep piling on the laws, and only succeed in eroding the rights and liberties of law-abiding citizens. It is only the law-abiding citizen that bothers to obey the laws in the first place, so it is upon him only, that the burden of new laws is placed. A criminal will commit a crime regardless of the number of laws passed against it, or the threatened penalties.

These same legislators are so concerned about the rights of criminals, that they no longer seem to care about the rights of the law-abiding. If they truly wish to stop crime in this country then they should elicit the support of the law-abiding by restoring their rights and liberties, in full, and lower the boom on criminals. Granted, a mistake will be made occasionally, but they are anyway, and those mistakes run in both directions, as evidenced by the O.J. Simpson case.

We cannot keep new criminals from coming along, we cannot put an end to stupidity, and we cannot keep legislators from passing ever more meaningless laws. However, we can keep violent criminals from returning to the streets. The majority of crimes are committed by repeat offenders, and it only makes sense to keep them from repeating. This could reduce violent crime by up to 80%.

Violent criminals are domestic terrorists. They hold society hostage through the knowledge that nothing effective will ever be done to control them. They continue to commit their crimes, and sure enough, nothing is ever done to control them, proving them smarter than the society they feed upon. What if we treated them, as they deserve, like international terrorists? If an aircraft is hijacked by terrorists, the international community, including the U.S., will not let the hijacking become successful. The terrorists will either be captured, or killed, but they will not get away with it. If a few hostages are wounded, or killed, so be it, because that is the price a few must pay to insure the safety of the many. It is time we started treating violent criminals as we do international terrorists, and give them no quarter. It was the only effective deterrent in the 1930s and it is the only effective deterrent today.

The A.M.A. and the Center for Disease Control (C.D.C.) classify gun violence as a disease. However, the patient has been mis-diagnosed. The doctors, once again, have mistaken the visible manifestation of the disease (gun violence) for the disease itself (criminals). They are treating the small pox pustules rather than the cause of the pustules. Guns are not the disease, criminals are. Cure the disease, and the visible manifestations will go away.

Criminal justice, and medicine are philosophical soul mates, if one chooses to think along those lines. Criminals are like a viral infection. While one infects the body, the other infects society. If you contract pneumonia and the doctor has properly diagnosed your case, he sentences the virus to death, and carries out the sentence by giving you an anti-biotic. Hopefully, this kills the virus, curing you of the disease. Once cured, the doctor does not re-infect you by re-injecting the virus into your blood stream, but the criminal justice system re-injects the criminal into society, thereby re-infecting it, keeping it in a state of perpetual illness. It is time to cure the disease.

NO MORE GUN LAWS Stop persecuting law-abiding citizens for the criminal acts of a few. There are over 20,000 gun laws on the books right now, so let's start enforcing them, before we add any more. We need to hold the parents responsible when, through their negligence, their children take and use their guns, and then subject those who use the guns to adult justice. Existing laws aren't being enforced, and people aren't being held responsible, because anti-gun zealots can't, or won't, admit that it's actually people who ARE responsible. If they were to admit that people are responsible, their arguments against the gun itself evaporate, and if guns aren't responsible, there's no reason to ban them.

Submitted by Publius on 08/22/06. | Send Comments to ThePatriotExchange.com