Man Kills Child Molester

I daresay that none of us really knows how he would behave in this situation. You can't predict accurately how you're going to react to the emotions that it will arouse.

You've probably all heard me stipulate that the founding premise of civilization is that no one has the right to kill another person except in defense against a direct threat of lethal violence or something comparable such as rape. That includes not killing someone who has already committed a crime and is in custody, locked away where he cannot repeat the crime. (And yes there are exceptions such as the terrorist whose buddies will kidnap twelve of your people and kill them if you don't release him; that's just "situational ethics.") Capital punishment is nothing more or less than revenge institutionalized, and revenge is the most evil of human emotions: grief makes us selfish and irrational.

That said, we have to cut some slack for people who walk in on a scene of personal horror and grief. No one's veneer of civilization is unbreakable. Regardless of what you, sitting in your comfortable chair with a cup of cocoa and your favorite music playing, speaking in abstractions with people you've never met, say today about what you would do in this situation... if by some cruel coincidence of fate you one day find yourself in this horrible situation and you do actually kill the bastard, I personally, Fraggle Rocker, the war-protesting love-and-peace anti-death-penalty last-of-the-hippies pacifist, will go on national TV and plead with my countrymen to forgive you.

But if, instead, you wrestle him to the ground, your wife runs out and beans him with a frying pan, you tie him up and call the cops, they put him on trial, the defense attorneys cross-examine all of you and tell the jury your child is the local grade-school slut and your wife is a satanist and you run a dog-fighting ring, and they eventually convict him and lock him up forever... and then the fucking goddamned shit-for-brains government kills him anyway (let's escalate this to murder so the death penalty is a real possibility), then I will protest. If you were able to manage your own grief and behave in a civilized fashion, then why the hell can't the government do so?

 

People kill their own children every day. There are six or seven billion people on this planet and if only a tiny percentage of them are wackos, that's still a lot of wackos.

Nonetheless a lot of people who don't quite qualify as wackos punish their children rather harshly. How would one of those people punish a son who had molested his own sister? They might get carried away with the violence. People who resort to violence to express their anger have a pretty short fuse.