Boy, do I know what it means to be bloodthirsty!  When I think of government goons smashing into cancer sufferers' homes, trashing their precious mementos, ruining their lives, I see red.  I fight really hard not to think with glee at the idea of machine guns striking down the marauders.

But, as a wise man once said, as we sow, we reap.  Even government goons have families, and lives beyond their destructive jobs.  I don't wish death upon anybody.

Even horrible criminals.  Yes, there are criminals worse than government thugs.  Or maybe we could debate the point (the venerable Phil Zimmermann, creator of Pretty Good Privacy, has pointed out that, throughout history, governments have murdered many times more people than non-government criminals have), but in any case, there are some horrible "private" criminals out there.  Like, for example, the Georgia woman who apparently dispatched several lovers and husbands with ethylene glycol, a particularly nasty and painful death.  Thank goodness we catch the murderers we do, and try them before a (hopefully) impartial jury, and when we find the evidence compelling beyond a reasonable doubt, we convict the bastards.

Now what?

The United States remains a bastion of support for capital punishment while most of the rest of the world turns away from it.  We're in increasingly embarrassing company (China leads the world by a good margin, both in numbers executed and in the swiftness of "justice"), but that doesn't bother the hard-core defenders of capital punishment.  Their argument is simple: some criminals deserve to fry; therefore we fry them.

Let me acknowledge a point of complete agreement: there are many criminals who deserve to die.  Alas, one does not have to look far to find crime after crime whose horror, brutality, and inhumanity make such a judgment easy to make.

Is it an easy leap from there to the support of capital punishment?  Or perhaps even no leap at all?  Not to my mind.

Instead, I would insist upon this distinction: There are many who deserve to die, but I do not deserve to kill.  That is, I do not want any man's blood on my hands, barring killing strictly in self-defense, in the heat of the moment, when there is no other choice.

If some thug comes bursting into my home, and in my judgment killing him is necessary for the preservation of myself and my family, that is one thing.  To sit in judgment of someone who is already in custody, and pronounce a sentence of death, is something quite different.  I can accept being splattered by the first man's blood, but not the second.

And make no mistake: though we have proxies who perform the actual executions, any of us who do not oppose government killing DO have blood on our hands.  We all throw the switch, and push the plunger of the needle with deadly poison.

Case in point: Tim McVeigh.  What a dope.  What an asshole!  If, as he claimed, his hope was to radicalize people in the U.S., he did worse than fail.  He also, of course, wiped out a whole bunch of human beings, many or most of whom were guilty of zero crimes.  He deserved to die.

So we executed him.  Don't get me wrong, I shed no tears for Tim.  But I do for his father, and his other family.  Killing him brought back not a single life, but only added to the tally of death.

Now that we have sent Tim packing, do we feel better?  Some people do, according to their own loud protestations.  Me, I'd prefer to have let him rot in prison, possibly some day to explain the story behind his plot better than it can now ever be explained.  The intriguing possible connection to the alleged would-be dirty bomber, for instance.

What about the argument that if we don't execute someone, liberal courts will surely release that person to murder again?  I would agree that we should ensure that a life sentence really means, "Never to be released."  In other words, let's address that problem directly, instead of using it as a back-handed excuse for dealing out death.

I am not an active adherent of the Christian religion, but I marvel at how many people who claim to be members also support capital punishment.  Am I the only guy who has read the Bible and can understand Jesus' clear proscriptions against killing in cold blood?  Or is this question best answered by the blanket assertion that organized Christian churches have completely turned their backs upon their supposed "savior"?  I would prefer to think that such an explanation is untrue, and yet I can't help but feel that, if Jesus is truly alive in heaven, he is doing a lot more than weeping.  How about sobbing uncontrollably?

I think it's safe to say that we all understand what it means to be bloodthirsty.  We can all join in the lusty cry, "That monster deserves to die!!"  It is, however, a serious mistake for any society to translate lusty emotion into bloody action, unless circumstances provide no other viable option.  We do, after all, reap what we sow.