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Degrees Of Hate — By John Reed

Degrees of Hate
The past week’s headlines have been dominated by the actions of a pair of deranged people: sending mail bombs and shooting up a synagogue. As usual, the media were quick to wring their collective hands and bloviate about gun control and hate crimes. As local readers have come to expect, I have a few thoughts.
Stricter gun control laws wouldn’t have stopped Mr. Pipe Bomber. Should we now ban sending anything via snail mail ever again? Actually, the system worked pretty well, with most suspicious packages being spotted long before being delivered to their intended targets. Kudos to postal workers everywhere! I’ll gladly pay another penny or two for stamps if it buys bomb-sniffing machines.
It’s possible Mr. Jew Hater could have been prevented from getting a gun, but his psychopathic efforts would have used a knife or something else. As nice and well-meaning the thought would be to keep people like him away from all the things that can cause mischief, not even the most rabid leftist would want to live in the police state that would require.
These tragedies have been called “hate crimes.” No kidding. But isn’t all murder, rape, and other violent crime a product of hate in some way? How does it help to get a separate label? Simply putting a higher level of seriousness to the crime seems to me more about helping the rest of us make sense of it.
Does making manslaughter more personal and agenda-driven somehow make it worse? The victims are dead either way. Just as some churchgoers see different levels of sin when they confess, making some forms of violent crime worse than others only serves to offer excuses for it.
And of course there are already some who want to make excuses for these crimes. It helps to ease our collective conscience to blame Trump for his “dangerous” tweets, the liberal media for giving air time to equally dangerous “activists”, naïve friends and neighbors who missed the signs.
But the bottom line is these two criminals had long built up rage, and took it out on the objects of their paranoia. Hopefully the lawyers and courts will make fast work of them. Down here in the Deep South, we have a solution for the rabid dogs of the human race: we put them down.

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