When police kill

The R A N T of G L E N N glenn3@frontiernet.net
Glenn Jacobs / 130 N. Poverty Flat / Box 954 / Eagar, Arizona 85925 / 928-333-3517
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A time to kill

Letter to the editor;

The TV movie “High Noon” (not to be confused with the classic western of the same name) depicted a crazy man with a twisted personal agenda, holding hostages in a bank.

Eventually the SWAT snipers killed him, but only after the negotiator tried for a long time to coax him out.

To give the viewers reason to believe this murderous lunatic could be persuaded to surrender, the movie first covered some other hostage situations with varied results.

In the end, the police had to decide to take it upon themselves to kill this man before he would kill several innocent people he was holding at gunpoint.

This goes both ways: Evil government people (and there certainly are evil government people) can murder an individual of their choice and have the public applaud the killing as protecting public safety.

On the other hand, when the defenders of law and order have righteously killed a violent criminal, publishers and broadcasters can spin the story out until the public believes the bad guy was an innocent victim of corrupt and murderous police.

Glenn Jacobs
Eagar, Arizona

Deliberately killing human beings

The R A N T of G L E N N glenn3@frontiernet.net
Glenn Jacobs / 130 N. Poverty Flat / Box 954 / Eagar, Arizona 85925 / 928-333-3517
Permission is granted to edit, print and/or broadcast these weekly polemical essays.
(To subscribe -- for yourself or a friend – or to unsubscribe – send the e-address.)

Killing men and babies

Letter to the editor;

You probably think this is going to be a flaming polemical against abortion.

Actually, I am very much in favor of a certain variety of abortion.

Some men are so awfully evil that the only reasonable way to deal with them is to “cancel their birth certificates” and RETROACTIVELY abort them.

(Wow! Even from way back here, I can see the hackles rising on the politically-correct. There seems to be a correlation coefficient of about zero-point-nine between those who favor abortion and those who oppose capital punishment.)

Well, I also oppose capital punishment -- of two varieties: When the guilt of the defendant is not actually, truly, “proven beyond a reasonable doubt” – and when the “defendant” is too young to have done the crime, or even too young to be born, and is sentenced to death merely for being inconvenient.

We don’t need a Constitutional Amendment to take care of this. We already have the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that no State shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. That is, we are all to be protected by law from being murdered – including those who are not yet born.

As for capital punishment, the same Amendment says no State shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. That indicates that States may deprive murderers of life, but only after due process of law. See? Retroactive abortion.

Glenn Jacobs
Eagar, Arizona