"... what possible punishment undoes the initial harm they caused? None. It is not metaphysically possible. Therefore, punishment is irrational." So, if a gang of thugs choose to beat the hell out you, your family, and your neighbors, then it would be useless to punish them because it wouldn't undo the beatings. It makes me wonder if they repeated the beatings once per week, then how many weeks of beatings you would endure before you thought it might be a rational course of action to lock those thugs up? With the possible exception of you, I would doubt if their victims would be bothered if the thugs are uncomfortable in their new residence. Also, at least while the thugs are locked up they won't be stacking up new victims, including you.

Deterrence is probably impossible to quantify, but maybe the above scenario is less likely to occur because the potential perpetrators decided not to beat you up in the first place because the jail time just isn't worth it." If you can't do the time, then don't do the crime" comes to mind.

So what? If he was watching any of the entrances and exits he might have noticed the exits were chained closed or maybe seen the terrorist set up his position and weapons at the only possible entrance/exit. It appears to me there was some very sloppy security management. Any return fire might just have reduced the number of people shot like sitting ducks. Being on armed duty in any capacity carries a lot of responsibility. I wonder with allosaur if "that armed security guard really wanted to achieve target acquisition."

I read the following one fine day and I can't recall the names~
A hundred years or more ago, there was a high official who visited a prison in Paris. Every inmate he met complained they were innocent and deserved to be set free.
Then there was just one who hung his head in shame and said he deserved to in prison for the crimes he committed.
The official told the warden to get that guy out of that prison before he corrupted the others.
I noticed during my 21-year career that few inmates who did not act like punk-assed thugs
did not also cry about their innocence.
But it's not a corrections officer's job to be concerned with that. It's all about custody,
control and keeping the little darlings safe so they don't hurt each other.
Transport officers (I also did that for while) take them to the hospital when they stick shanks into each other or really get sick.
And when visitors of all sorts come we look out for them too. And the prison chaplain and the shrinks and the GED school teachers and the get a trade teachers and the nurses and doctors and dentists. Oh, yeah, those four maintenance employees. Almost forgot about them, walking through inmates left and right.
I'm glad all that's behind me, though.
I had grandparents come over from Sweden.
They were Lutherans.
Despicable me is enjoying an inheritance because that grandpa and a great uncle built something Obama says they didn't.
Polygamy makes me think of Salt Lake City for some reason.
I read my Bible sometimes.

I'm gonna tell you about what happened today since I'm itching to tell somebody.
Today I bought a nice.357 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolver with a four-inch barrel and a very comfortable rubber handle.
My grown son and I went to a range and tried it out. First we (me 12 shots, he 12 shots) fired a 50 round box of .38s to get a feel for the weapon and for me to retrain myself on how to use a speed loader.
When I fired that first .357 round, I could not help but yell "Woooo!" I made a similar noised after I fired the other five rounds. Quite powerful!
I did not care for any 9mm carbines I saw at two places.
My son knows about a large gun shop 30 miles from home. We will take a look on this day next week..

I have a set of throwing knives I could send you but I guess they'd be frowned upon as weapons.
Say, maybe darts! Just be sure you also have one of those hanging targets with circles surrounding a bull's eye.

Old dino has no use for Twitter, Facebook and even texting.
My PC and a cheap cell phone is enough.
Well, I also like books with paper pages that you turn.

You would not believe how compliant that wannabe escapee became after I fired a warning shot.
I caught him running from a work release van and trying to scramble up a steep grade behind the sally port of my back gate tower.
First he froze and slowly looked back to find me holding him in my rifle sights. He was done.
I have a framed commendation for that and an earlier one for stopping two inmates from making an attempt on a Labor Day dressed in baseball uniforms.
I think it was their intention to hitchhike. All inmate baseball team uniforms were destroyed after that. Well, they play softball, actually.
I don't! Ha! Ha! Dino made a funny.

On TV I saw Muslim men in Europe chanting, "Your sons will be Muslims!"
Muslims want to fundamentally change our society.
They also want to convert us.
Or else.

With me gun shopping today, my grown son brought up a pertinent point. First he said "No ear protection" before he asked me to recall how loud his AR-15 was on an indoor range when we did have ear protection.
It's a real boomer inside a building. Imagine the psychological effect on terrorist victims.
People inside the enclosed Pulse were likely stunned by each and every shot and there were a lot of them one after the other..
"That's not like it is in the movies," he said and I agreed that I've long thought that movie indoor gunfights appear stray from audio reality.
":You know what people in real indoor gunfights hear?" my son added before he said, "EEEEEE!"
I told him that's all I could hear when a gun went off in an enclosed area back around 1982.
That deafening "EEEEEE! took a couple of minutes to clear up.
I could relate to that happening (due to an artillery shell) to the Tom Hanks character on Omaha Beach when I saw Saving Private Ryan years later.
It might be why I have tinnitus now.

He reminds me of the guy in Unintended Consequences.

+1!

I recall being taught from my training to always shoot whoever has a shotgun first because his weapon makes him the most dangerous perp.

That would be cool in some action flick.

I know some gay people and we have pleasant conversations.
One even plays the piano at a church.
But when I worked at a state prison, one of the most dangerous fights I ever broke up was due to a love triangle.
Another time I managed to stop with hasty verbalization a huge jealous lover from dropping a Jodie he held upside-down over the rail of a second floor tier onto a concrete floor.
Then there was that inmate who said he had a crush on me. No, thank you.

The "rent-a-cop" was an "off-duty" police officer (no such thing, really). I see that like many self-identified patriots, you have a low opinion of the police. And you have opinions about this case that are not derived from facts in this case.

That is a difficult skill to master. Excellent!

Probably, but he was an "off duty" police officer.

He was an "off duty" police officer.

See my response to Blarman. I underscore the fact that hundreds of innocent people have been convicted of murder in our own time. What happened in the past is lost. But we know for a fact today that innocent people are convicted of crimes they did not commit. How do you make up for that? Do you imprison the jurors who wrongfully punished the innocent? Maybe we should...

You are wrong on every point. First, my degrees are in criminology, so I knew right away why I would not become a corrections officer. Prisons are a failure mode. We have never had a workable penology theory that informed imprisonment.

Second, we know for a fact that hundreds of people today were wrongfully convicted of murder. We have no idea about the past because no state will allow an appeal for an executed inmate. You cannot undo an execution. So, two lines of logic speak against the death penalty: it is misused; and it cannot be remediated.

Third, color TVs or whatever, the basic claim is that people in prison should suffer more than they do. Imprisonment is suffering. Make it as pleasant as you can, you cannot make it the same as not being in prison. Prison is pain. That is its only effect. That is why prisons are unmanageable. You are torturing people every minute of every day. ... and again, often for crimes that they did not commit...

And fourth, as for the crimes that they did commit, what possible punishment undoes the initial harm they caused? None. It is not metaphysically possible. Therefore, punishment is irrational.

Fifth, very few people came here come here knowing the Constitution. Very few Americans know it. When my grandparents came here, they had to learn English first so that they could take citizenship classes. It was never the other way around, that we taught Americanism on the shores of Europe and allowed in only those who passed a test. (It is an interesting proposal, but it was never that way before and that includes your own ancestors, of course.)

Sixth, religion is tough. The Supreme Court ruled in the matter of polygamy that you have a right to believe what you want, but no right to do what you want. The opinion in that case said that if we allow polygamy, someone will claim a religious right to human sacrifice. So, we have civil law. That said, in the US military, the chaplain's flag flies higher than the US flag while services are being held, as a nod to the fact that we recognize that moral law supersedes civil law. While St. Paul claimed that we must obey the authorities because God put them here to rule over us, that line in the book of Romans flies in the face of everything else in the Bible. The Bible is all about civil disobedience. You have to accept that on its own terms.

Finally, when my grandparents learned about the separation of church and state, they stopped going to church. Where they came from it was a civic requirement. Even today, in Switzerland (among other places) the government collects taxes for the churches -- which, in fact, many American colonies and early states did also. Just sayin'... I might agree with the legal subordination of churches to civil law - taxing them, for one thing - but I am not sure that most Americans (and certainly not most conservatives) would agree.

How right you are, Dino. The first thing I thought of when I heard about all these deaths was someone should have had a gun.

Indeed. Brandon Smith is one intelligent and talented young man. I've been reading his stuff for a couple of years now.

This can be very true. I have a good friend whose wall is lined with trophy's brought back from police competitions. And he is not a policeman.

But he is good. I was tossing clay pigeons out there and he was bring them down with a pistol. Almost all of them. Myself and other friends have remarked, "Glad he is on our side!"

except that the muslims seem to take that part of their religion seriously at this point in time. If they want to be around me, I want them to disavow tht part of their religion.

Do you really want people around you who want to kill you if you dont believe their religion? Taking them in I think is NOT the thing to do and definitely NOT a good policy. As far as I am concerned, if they want me to accept their religion, they have to accept and be ok with mine- and not say they are going to kill me if I dont change my religion to believe theirs. Its only fair.

In the meantime, they can sit in their cold, dark tents as far as i am concerned. Call me politically incorrect. When it comes to immigration, I think we should be looking to people who will better OUR society, not make us less safe.

Fantastic!

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I completely ignore Twitter. Most of the really good policy discussions and explanations take significantly more than 130 characters. More to the point, I philosophically object to any medium which encourages the type of sound-bite driven, meaningless media communications we are inundated with in this day and age. To me, every effort at communication deserves the time to treat the recipient like a human being, hoping they will do the same in return.

A sincere thank you for your attention!