A few random, gentle thoughts...
Some years back I read the thriller The Irving Solution by Leonard Simon ( NY Avon Books 1978).
It involved the use of a Rat Ecology experiment to decipher the actions of a serial poisoner and track the criminal down. The population issue was a big issue in the story. Thankfully, the fictional poisoner would not be around for any potential sequel.
Ben Bova, who among his many achievements is associated with our stop and start space program, addressed population control issues in The High Road, a text about the value of space exploration and commercialization. He regarded the natural resources of our world as a shrinking pie which the increased global population was forcing us to slice up into smaller and smaller pieces. As it is, we are dirtying up what remains of that pie with the industrial and natural wastes of too many humans, insuring that our children and their progeny will live a radically altered world.
Bova views near space missions as a way of supplementing that pie with the unlimited resources almost within touching distance of our world. The current weakessess of the space program
began during the seventies with cutbacks and Luddite style cries about the dangers of advancing technolgy, or so Bova claims.
I am not trying to state that global overpopulation is the sole excuse for today's crime but it certainly is making life more strenuous for the rest of us with shortages, higher prices, more competition for better paying positions, etc. Criminals were once human beings, with the ability to make choices like the majority of our species. They decided to, tragically, invest in wrong choices. Factors in their lives may have contributed to a career of crime but ultimately, just about every thug made a bad choice on their own free will.
However,our culture and courts insist on probing for "excuses" for criminal action. I don't see why the violently mentally ill cannot be humanely controlled or simply put down (many of these individuals make the choice NOT to take their medication then go out and harm other folks and are slapped on the wrist like overgrown children). My thoughts may be disturbing to some but I have met some of the hostile mentally ill; they are not all cuddly and victims of an uncaring society like pro mentally illness advocates claim them to be.
Not to excuse any of the atrocities which took place on an individual or mass scale during the 20th Century but such crimes have been going on since before recorded history. The one crucial difference is that the advancing technology of the past hundred years (from mass literacy to the internet and beyond) has insured that the latest batch of atrocities are recorded in some detail for posterity while earlier crimes were often forgotten. Yet, even earlier crimes from this century - atrocities which occurred before our society "liberalized", have been mothballed into the closets of forgotten history in an effort to blame the pop culture's obsessions with sex and violence. For instance...
Fritz Lang's movie M and the more recent Tenderness of the Wolves were based on the same German serial killer who plied his deadly trade decades before any Era of Permissiveness.
Few here will recall serial murderers like Ed Gein and Al Fish. Ed was immortalized, albiet loosely, in Robert Bloch's novel Psycho. Both killed during an era when our nation was supposed to be innocent.
Depression era gangsters are reported to have used Tommyguns and BARs in addition to repeating shotguns and explosives and must have knocked off a number of noninvolved citizens as well as law enforcement personnel and rivals. What do we blame these atrocities on?
After those two morons shot up Colombine highschool, these very own forums noted that there had been even greater American highschool mass killings, one of which was initiated by an ADULT (one of those pillar of the community types) and didn't involve firearms, violent videogames and whatnot. This incident is reported to have occurred, I vaguely recall, in pre- WW II rural America.
Public hanging for violent criminals? Too merciful, I think. The only reason I don't desire mass killings of felons is because of the limitations, ineptness and outright corruption that has made many citizens suspicious about the law enforcement insititution. I have no qualms about Joe the Rapist getting griddled on the hot squat but my stomech turns when I hear about noninvolved citizens actually being framed for crimes they were totally innocent of (and I believe, for instance, that scumbags like getaway car drivers should be as fully to blame for crimes that their comrades commit as
opposed to being allowed to plea bargain their sentence down).
I may have plenty of respect for police but think this framing nonsense is absolutely contemptible. Whether the person (s) involved is a beat officer or a DA, they are as much a threat to their fellow officers and the public as any hardened con. They are traitors to the police force and should be held accountable by their fellows.
Jeff
[This message has been edited by Jffal (edited August 07, 1999).]