Let’s not forget why the vigilante is doing this, because the law wasn’t good enough in the first place. There are levels of failure, and as sad as it would be, it’s just another level. If his best isn’t good enough, karma will likely ensue.
I feel that that is too presumptuous a statement to make. We don’t know why he is doing it.
It may very well be that he feels it is justice that ought to be served, but it also may well be that he derives some sort of pleasure from it and chooses as his targets someone “less-dead”* like some killers choose prostitutes or vagrants or runaway youths.
When, and if, he strikes again (and hopefully he will not), then perhaps we’ll have a better idea of his motives. Taking too much out of his one attack, or that hardly believable note sent to the papers, might not accurately portray just what this guy’s about.
*less-dead is a term coined by Steven Egger (former project director of NY State’s serial killer computer analysis program HALT [Homicide Assessment and Lead Tracking System–similar to VICAP] and current dean of the School of Health and Human Services at the UoIllinois) and is explained as:
“The victims of serial killers, viewed when alive as a devalued strata of humanity, become “less-dead” (since for many they were less-alive before their death and now they become the never-were) and their demise becomes the elimination of sores or blemishes cleansed by those who dare to wash away these undesirable elements…”
If he’s doing it for some sort of pleasure, and if it’s found that there’s no coincidence, then he’s not a true vigilante. Vigilantes don’t want to kill for fun, they do it for revenge, and personal justice (or justice of a loved victim).
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It may very well be that he feels it is justice that ought to be served, but it also may well be that he derives some sort of pleasure from it and chooses as his targets someone “less-dead”* like some killers choose prostitutes or vagrants or runaway youths.
[/QUOTE]
If this is the case, then he’s just a serial killer (gets a thrill from it) with a pattern of killing SO’s (that’s his niche). He’s a Vigilante when either he himself has been a victim (or someone he cares about has been a victim) of an SO and seeks revenge against all SO’s. Sounds vauge, but IMO, I think there’s a difference.
Good points, ParentalAdvisory. I could use your help in the Pit. 
That’s a difficult question - I think our current notification laws make no sense; these people should either be kept in jail because they are dangerous or allowed to live as normal citizens because they have served their time - but it’s one that should be sorted out by society, not knife-wielding psychos. Justice is an instrument of society; that’s why the “parking ticket” comparison comes up: a vigilante prevents society from enforcing its version of justice by saying “society has failed, so I’ll do it.” Our society does not consider it just to kill people for sex offenses. If you think that’s wrong, as many people do, there are legal and democratic ways to deal with it. Finding RSO’s addresses and killing them, of course, isn’t one of them.
When someone who is guilty of a crime is not punished for it, it’s a terrible thing. But the laws that allow people to “get off an a technicality” also exist for the public’s protection, and those protections are important. Vigilantes going around those laws doesn’t strike me as a good thing.
Kyle, your idea of vigilantes and cops definitely sounds like it comes from comics and movies. I’m saying “sounds like” just to be polite. You’ve got a lot of assumptions about what things are like and what the problems are in inner cities, and a little bit of secondhand experience, but none of it really passes muster in here. Can you provide some facts?
You didnt ask me this, but Ill answer; if ones mental illness makes one a threat to those around them pretty much for the rest of ones life, and there is no medical possibility of ever changing the biomedical reasons for ones illness, then yes, definately.
Really? I seem to recall someone telling me that wasn’t the case. Personally, I feel that’s all it is: revenge. It doesn’t have a thing to do with actual justice. “The law wasn’t good enough” & “That dude really didn’t get the justice he deserved” are both opinions and I submit that it’s an incredibly dangerous thing to have someone going around dispensing his own version of justice via vigilantism.
So far Ive only seen two rational answers, that of JonScribe and Der Trihs.
Both of them pointed out two examples of how this could react ultimately against our individual self interest. Thats using reason and logic. All the rest of the statements on here are morality/religon based and thus are niether reasonable nor logical.
Wow, three whole pages and he went from a vigilante to a potential serial killer. Probably very similar to the process by which people went from being sex offenders to dead people in the mind of the vigilante. Funny how active peoples imaginations get when theyve decided ahead of time that someone is guilty, huh?
As for myself, my opinion depends on the circumstance. He may have targeted just those two, maybe it was a relative of his that they had molested; in which case I dont blame him. I would do the same thing and when I went to jail I would serve my time with pride and my head held high (that is, if the jury convicted me).
But, if hes just taking it on himself to restore moral order and all that rediculous crap to his local paradise, then the reasons stated by JonScribe and Der Trihs on page 1 take effect. His actions threaten the whole sex-offender tracking database, making it harder in the future for family members to find closure (see previous paragraph). He may decide he doesnt like potheads tomorrow.
One isolated incidence of vigilantiism or an isolated set of vigilantes is one thing. Yet if this behavior starts appearing amongst a large segment of the population in the area, then that means that society is saying that the governments ‘revenge in their name’ (also called justice) is not enough and it needs to be increased.
Huh? Are you saying that you’d happily go kill someone and then be proud of it? What difference, btw, does it make whom this man’s victims had victimized? The society, via the courts, had already decided their punishment, which did not include some random lunatic coming along to murder them.
Again, not to me but Ill answer.
When do some people need killing? When theve threatened the life of me or my family and there is every indication they will do so again. Pure, rational self interest, nothing moral about.
Perhaps you could explain how one becomes an expert in a non-physical science? There are expert in geology. There are experts in astronomy. Thats because rocks and planets are things that exist externally to us.
Morality does not exist external to us. Morality is nothing but a mater of opinion. To say there are experts in morality is like saying there are experts in which brand of chocolate ice cream tastes best. Its absurd. None of those disciplines you mentioned by the way are physical sciences. Any conclusions arrived at by any of those disciplines are thus (cultural bigotry notwithstanding) only opinions.
Oh, and by the way…justice is nothing but the appropriate amount of revenge on the appropriate people. Its silly that in half your posts youre talking as if revenge and justice were two different things. When these sex offendors were first put in jail, how do you thing they got there? Someone called the cops, i.e they started the chain of revenge.
Yes, if I had a daughter and someone molested her, I would kill that person and be happy I had done it. I wouldnt be happy that I had to, but I would be happy that I did.
And please, spare me the govt=society shpiel. Government is not society, we are.
If everyone in a particular area shot sex-offenders on site, that means that society in that area thinks shooting sex-offenders on site is the appropriate level of revenge (or justice, whatever you want to call it). If this is more drastic than the current law in that area provides for, then obviously society and law are out of whack; and, since law is nothing but a tool for societies to use to structure things how they wish, the law would need to be updated to be more drastic in order for the law to fullfill its purpose, which is to serve the people in society.
This whole talk of the law or society being some thing or entity seperate and apart from us is nuts. Since the vigilante is part of society, and he is shooting sex offenders, its obviously wrong to claim society has decided that shooting sex-offenders is wrong, since a part of society is doing just that! Its similar to the claim that society is against drugs, when 30% of society use them. Obviously, ‘society’ is not against using drugs, just some parts of society are. And obviously, ‘spciety’ is not against vigilantiism, just some parts are.
One doesnt need to delve into secular religous beliefs when there are perfectly rational reasons, affecting our self interest, to outlaw vigilantiism.
What you just posted is insanely far from rational.
BTW, you would not have had to kill the person.
Not at all. I don’t know how it is in the rest of the country, but in Whatcom Co., where the murders took place, sex offender housing is hard to come by, because people don’t like living near them and landlords don’t like renting to them. And who would want a sex offender as a roommate? As such, there’s one landlord who’ll rent to sex offenders, or the city owns property it can lease to them, they tend to put a few in together.
That they were living together also had a law enforcement benefit, too. The cops could keep an eye on them more easily, because they’re all in the same place, and as such, they are less likely to re-offend. Also, because even sex offenders don’t like being homeless, when they live together they tend to be very quick to rat each other out if any of them look like reoffending - if one steps out of line, they all have an increased chance of losing their housing.
Sex offenders in Whatcom Co. who don’t live in houses like that tend to live up in the woods round Mt. Baker. They are much harder for police to keep track of, and more likely to reoffend. The last thing you want is for them not to feel safe, and try to take off or something.
Ah yes, a mish-mash of moral absolutes, social perceptions and bigotries and long-outdated philosophical hypothesis is so much more rational than biological impetus weighed against potential empirical outcomes. 
Well, if youre ever in that situation, youre free to deal with it as you wish. You have your morality, I have mine, she has hers, he has his…thats what makes a free society go round.
But molesting your daughter, atrocious as it would be, is not the same as threatening her life, or the life of anyone else in your family.
Your first quote suggests that you justify killing to defend oneself or one’s family against a potential deadly attack. Your second quote suggests that you also justify killing as a matter of personal revenge for a non-deadly attack that’s already taken place.
If you’re going to argue for an alleged “pure rationality” in determining punishment and/or retaliation for crimes, you need to be applying a rational and consistent standard. Monty is quite right to point out that you’re not living up to your own claims of rationality here.
But you were just arguing that we should handle criminal punishment not on the basis of individual morality, which according to you is “nothing but a matter of opinion” and “neither reasonable nor logical”, but rather on the basis of “pure, rational self interest, nothing moral about it”.
Your arguments are self-contradictory.
Since violent pedophiles are part of society, and they’re raping children, it’s obviously wrong to claim society has decided that raping children is wrong, since a part of society is doing just that!
With reasonning like that, equally valid for any human behavior, on what basis could any kind of justice be defined or enforced (be by the government or by vigilantes)? Does it means that I can do whatever I feel like doing, be it raping children, killing child rapists, killing my annoying neighbor who made so much noise this afternoon? Should society (or you, or whatever you define as being society) accept all behaviors as being morally equally valid?
I feel americans are evil. I think I’m going to learn how to make bombs. With your blessing, I hope. I swear I won’t do anything because I feel some sort of pleasure doing it. It will be done solely to promote my ideal of justice. I’ll be a true vigilante, in the noblest sense of the word.
Biological impetuses (me want sex. pretty girl) weighted against potential empirical outcomes (I probably won’t be caught) perfectly explain the behavior of child rapists.
So, I think we’re in agreement : the motives of this vigilante are as much valid as the motives of the people he’s killing (and as valid as the motives of some random guy helping an old lady to cross the street, for that matter).
Noting your arrogant way of displaying contempt for “outdated philosophical hypothesis” :
You don’t think you’re the first one who thought about the concept of moral relativism (especially on this board) , do you?
So your argument is “if people start killing sex offenders, the law ought to allow them do keep doing it?”
Okay. Everybody in society except this one guy has decided that hunting down and killing sex offenders is wrong, or at least not right enough to do, but this one guy thinks it’s okay. Clearly, society is really divided on this issue.
Vooodooochile, what you describe as justice is nothing more than immature, self-centered anarchy.
You don’t have to look far to find examples of that not being a good argument for the basis of a society. Hell, you don’t even have to look outside of the current headlines.
When I posted the OP, I wasn’t sure there was a debate here. Thanks for the interesting points of view, y’all.
The documentary After Innocence, whose subject is the lives of men released from prison following exoneration for crimes they did not commit, features the story of a man positively identified by a rape victim as her rapist. She picked him out of a lineup; she pointed to him in court. And, what do you know, she was wrong. After years of believing firmly that she had named her assailant, DNA evidence not only proved him innocent, but exposed the actual rapist. The film shows photographs of the two men published side-by-side in the newspaper, making it clear that they do not resemble each other in any way other than their race. Somehow, the woman had suffered a brutal attack, looked directly into the face of her attacker, and then had mistaken the face for another’s. In the film, she says that when she looks at the picture of the true rapist, she still doesn’t recognize him.
To her credit, as part of apologizing to the falsely accused man for destroying several years of his life, she now travels with him to police and other conferences, expressing her regret to him in front of audience after audience, in order to communicate the near-total unreliability of eyewitness testimony. It’s a remarkable story.
And if she’d just gone ahead and killed the man she was dead certain had raped her, or if she’d asked or hired someone else to commit the murder, we never would have heard about it.