May 17th 2001 - Violence at school. Holy crap.
You'll notice that there's no picture for this rant because this topic disgusts me beyond the expression of a whimsical image.
Sure, violence can be funny as long as it's very over the top in a satirical manner. But as soon as people take violence into the real world, it becomes something ugly, something deadly.
Today, a grade 7 kid was beaten literally to within an inch of his life by a grade 9. What had started as a bit of idle teasing between two grade 7s turned into a tragedy. What appears to have happened is the grade 9 took matters into his own hands by blinding the victim with a pizza pop, then knocking him down and kicking the boy until most of his ribs had broken. One of these ribs punctured his liver.
So now the victim is in the hospital and the offender is in jail. Due to a bit of sheer brilliance, something in Calgary called The Young Offender's Act, chances are that this little bastard's gonna get off almost scot free. Is this really the way to deal with someone who has nearly killed his peer, and knowingly? This wasn't an act of insanity, this was a violent act of conscious wrong. According to this act
"young persons who commit offences require supervision, discipline and control, but, because of their state of dependency and level of development and maturity, they also have special needs and require guidance and assistance;"
Which is basically saying that they can't be tried as an adult and. because of their "level of dependancy", can't be put into an adult prison. What kind of deterrence is this? Personally, I'm very partial to the idea of public crucifiction. I mean, that may sound bloodthirsty, but if you take someone's life, your own should be forfeit. Take it from a logistical point of view: Let's say someone murders someone else, then you take him to the top of a hill and slowly nail him to a 20 foot tall cross. Let's say you get lots of people to watch it. Would YOU commit a crime seeing what'll happen to you? I say it's better to brutally execute five people rather than waste millions taking care of hundreds of death-row inmates. Deterrence works, let's face it. How many more kids'll have to die before we realize that quietly taking murderers off to the side and giving them a little injection doesn't fix things?
I for one am sick of junior high kids thinking they need to fight to prove that they're tough. Would you believe that a kid at my brother's school actually wants to fight me? Christo mio... People are really beginning to piss me off.
Mark Edwards is working on his right hook.
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