Mr. Arizona Shooter appeared today in court and I found the list of charges interesting:
Mr Loughner was charged with five crimes – the attempted assassination of a member of Congress, the first degree murder of two federal employees and the attempted murder of two federal employees.
Why do all these charges involve attempted or successful murders of government officials? Because they’re like you and me only better. You get a much tougher punishment usually if you commit a crime against a government official as opposed to a little peasant such as you or me. It’s rather telling what our government thinks about us when they decide not to treat all murders with the same punishment (we’re just not that important I guess).
Also the blame game is still going on as everybody is trying to show out the shooter’s politics mirror the politics of those they disagree with. It doesn’t matter if the shooter was a liberal, conservative, libertarian, socialist, communist, or anything else because the simple fact is he killed people. Once you kill somebody your political beliefs are irrelevant as there are far more non-violent people who hold any political belief than there are violent ones. Stop trying to demonize everybody you don’t like because of the actions of one fucked up individual.
Point of clarification, that the Brits apparently missed: those are his federal charges. State charges are still pending.
From appearances, it would appear as though the feddies get priority when it comes to prosecuting criminals, and since those charges are specifically for the federal employees, that much follows. Once Uncle Sam is done with thim, the state of Arizona will have their shot to prosecute him for the other four murders and 14 attempted murders. I hope. As I understand it. Etc.
This would be similar to the OK City bombing trials; the feds had one for all the federal laws broken and the state had one for the state laws. You’ll remember Mcveigh’s accomplice Terry Nichols avoided a federal death penalty but the state found him guilty and sentenced him to death instead. Its twice the tax payers money, but it better ensures that you get convictions.