darvlay wrote:muy_thaiguy wrote:darvlay wrote:comic boy wrote:If it is a just law then why not put it in place,it wont be used if everybody behaves in an equitable fashion.
Further to this, let's use an analogy:
State A has no laws against murder.
The constituents of State A believe murder to be a crime.
State A currently has no murderers thus no law against murder is required.
The logic above is faulty. It does not consider the fact that murders may (and likely will) take place in the future. This possibility becomes even higher if there is no law (read: deterrent) against murders.
Problem with that is, murder is a crime in every state, so it is kind of a bad example to use.
Anyways, if a man kills another, no matter the minority to which they might be that was killed, the murderer, regardless of their background, will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Even getting Life in prison even though many would push for the death penalty.
It's an analogy. It's not about murder, I'm just showing the faulty logic in saying there is no law needed for a crime where the crime is not likely to be committed. There is no way of confirming that the crime will never occur and furthermore the absence of law against that crime will raise the probability of that crime being committed in the future.
You state that if a man kills another man (ie. commits a crime that is widely accepted as a crime) he will be punished to the full extent of the law. What if there was no law against murder? What then would be the punishment?
This is why I state in my first post laws are
preventative not reactionary.
Another analogy would be drunk driving. There are no drunk drivers in my city, so it's not against the law. Do you see how that could create trouble in the future if an alcoholic moves into town?
Like I said, murder is a poor example to use for this. A good example, would be back in 1998. A college student was found beaten badly on a fence post a little ways out of town. And since he was gay, it was automatically assumed he was killed for that. As the investigation went in, it was found that he attended the college in the town but that a couple of other guys had met up with him at a local bar. The only thing is, there wasn't any gay bars in the town, it was just a normal bar. When the news of the murder went national, many gay rights groups started to pressure the state government to bring about hate crime laws, even though the student's parent's didn't want that kind of thing to happen. Many people in the town were outraged for many reasons, that a good student had been killed, the media making the locals out to be intolerant hicks, and people that had never lived there before trying to impose laws that had not been needed before. The Hate Crime Law was defeated, so it was not passed. The locals wanted the murderers to get the execution. However, due to the parents requests, the murderers recieved life in prison with no parole.
The story above is about Matthew Shephard from right here in my own hometown. And as you can see, the criminals were punished to the full extent of the law. However, it does not mean that everyone needs a hate crime law passed. It may for some, but not everyone.