Well I’m pretty sure people are missing the major source of murder in a murder allowed society. You really think that any business that sees an advantage in murdering people won’t rise to the top? I guess that’s assuming people understand the evolutionary principles of business. Which most don’t so meh.
Sure, except with, y’know… murder. Heck, arguably O.J. Simpson’s money let him murder with impunity, and even then it went all the way to a jury verdict, not just bounced by a corrupt judge.
Obviously you didn’t get the memo. If you get a traffic ticket in LA, you have better odds on killing the cop and beating the murder rap in court than you do on beating the ticket in court.
Actually nm, if you look at corporation’s activities outside the US they already murder whoever they can get away with murdering. Union leaders, other political problems ect. So this isn’t even speculative lol.
As far as the abortion debate murder baiting it’s a pretty pathetic argument. Outside the third trimester a fetus’s brain is as active as an adult who is brain dead. People don’t have a problem pulling that plug since you know no brain activity = no humanity, but the churchies need something to toe the line on and love that they can use it as a guilt trip against sex so ya… gj there thread starter. Not very original, but hey oldies are goodies.
I kept meaning to bring up OJ but it seemed in poor taste.
I’m pretty sure most people here would agree that having money helps in a legal fight. Consider the number or rich people that beat a murder accusation, vs the number of poor people wrongly convicted.
What this says is that in our CURRENT system we have an imbalance between rich and poor when it comes to the criminal justice system. So there isn’t much point complaining about what might happen if murder was legal when the same complaint is applicable today.
There was a case in Florida where a really rich kid killed two people and was able to buy himself out of a murder confiction. Problem is that when I tried to look up “vehicular manslaughter florida paid off family” to find the story I got flooded without results such as:
“Cleveland Browns wide receiver Donte’ Stallworth has agreed to plead guilty to DUI manslaughter charges Tuesday, and reached a financial settlement with the family of the pedestrian he struck and killed in a March car crash, a person with knowledge of the deal said.”
No guarantee, but being rich certainly helps in the CURRENT system. So if murder was made legal, that would still be an issue. It’s good to be rich.
There are several hundreds of books written about this issue in the past 50 years. I don’t suppose you would expect a comprehensive academic treaty as a response to this question.
The disparity in murder rates in the US vs any other “developed” country has to do with cultural factors that put more importance on the individual and his needs/urges/desires, rather than society.
The US is still a young country and during the first half of its life it was full of independent, adventurer, gold-digger types that left Europe because they couldn’t make a living there. The idea that a person is part of a social group and his actions have an effect on others is not as entrenched in the social fabric as is in Europe or other countries.
In the past few decades, conservative politics have also been a big factor in allowing handguns to be as accessible as possible because so many murders occur in inner city minority populations, something that conservative politics is all to eager to see keep on happening as much as possible.
Murder is illegal in the US too, but access to handguns is not. That’s a major difference between the US and, for example, Austria.
So your legality question does not apply here. Murder is illegal in all countries. What’s different in the US to cause its high murder rate is the continuous push by conservative and religious fundamentalists to allow unfettered access to handguns and to stop State and Federal law enforcement authorities from being able to track them and identify the chain from manufacture to sale to the shooter.
If murder rates in the US were at the same level but concentrated in middle class white populations they’d be probably reduced back to similar rates as in other countries within 10 or 15 years.
I think you’re probably wrong here. The other major thing that’s different in the US is a rather large concentration of underclass poor (mostly racial minorities, mostly in decaying inner-city neighborhoods) who literally don’t have anything to lose. People who’d at least be in the safety net in Europe.
That’s what I said.
Conservative political interests want to allow the inner city poor, usually minorities, to have unfettered access to handguns so they can kill each other, to the pleasure and satisfaction of the mentioned conservative interests.
Europe has poor too but they don’t intentionally cultivate and promote a class disparity of such great magnitude as in the US. Things are changing there too, but the general attitude of a European is that he’s part of a group that should take care of each other. The general attitude of a US conservative is that he should accrue as much financial assets as he can and let everyone else go to hell, especially inner city minorities.
In general.
A nitpick: The first seat belt law was not in New York, but in Brooklyn. Brooklyn, OH, that is. In 1966.
And a non-nitpick:
I’m amazed it took 74 posts before someone brought that up-- I was going to say that, too. Yes, the police and courts get it wrong sometimes, too, but since they have greater resources at their disposal, they get it wrong less often. And at the very least, with one body in charge of going after the guilty, you’re at least not going to get two different innocent people unjustly punished for the same crime.
Murder is one of the few crimes for which there is a near-universal, deep-seated moral objection, so no, I don’t think legalizing murder would turn life into a killing spree. But if it were legal to go around grabbing women’s tits or stealing cars, everyone would be doing it. There would be all kinds of rationales for it.
Nitpickpick: the first seat belt law was in Victoria, Australia, in 1970. Prior laws simply required that vehicles be equipped with seat belts, not that occupants used them. The first seat belt legislation of any kid was enacted in Wisconsin in 1961.
Except for all those cases in reality where it’s not true.
Theft of bodies to sell them in the UK was illegal (and so was murdering people to sell the bodies); yet it occurred when demand was high.
It stopped when demand dropped low by changing a law about what to do with unclaimed bodies, making enough bodies available for med schools.
Reducing poverty by giving people other options in life reduces the rate of theft and other crimes.
Treatment of drug dependance lowers the rate of related crimes to afford the high prices of illegal drugs.
And so on.
How many cases of this happen already and aren’t discovered, because an 80+ year old dying “in their sleep” (from a cushion on their head) looks natural?
People can find dozens of impossible to detect poisions on the internet or the next med library. It’s easier than ever before to kill somebody without being detected if you have access to them and their house and they halfway trust you, and esp. if it’s older people who aren’t strong any longer.
You’re equating murder with killing. Even under the current system, murder is illegal, but you can end up killing another person without being a murderer: neglience (non-criminal), self-defense, accident … you may or may not feel morally guilty depending on your own conscience, but not every case is classified murder under the justice system.
I remember a short SF story where road rage had been taken off the books, that is, the cops investigated, but if it was one driver challenging another to a “race” and one of the two was killed, well, their own fault, the surviving driver wasn’t punished. (The story was about a father avenging the death of his young hot-headed son … by updating his own car with a bunch of special defense and offense weapons and then seeking out the car that had killed his son when his son had foolishly challenged the driver).
IIRC, you’re thinking of Why Johnny Can’t Speed by Alan Dean Foster. Somehow crazy driving becomes a constitutional right of free expression.
Two points:
- Murder was partially limited in medieval Europe by the strong religious beliefs: If you murdered someone, you would burn in hell for eternity.
- If murder were legal, a lot of murders might be committed in anonymous ways: hiring hitmen, killing random strangers for kicks or due to a spontaneous annoyance, doing it in a way not easily detectable, etc. Therefore concern about being killed in turn by the victim’s friend or relative might not be such a factor. There would probably be a lot of extra murders of this kind, since the family and friends of the victim would have less resources for solving the crime than would the police.
If murder was legal then we would be always in the movie Cube and i would kill every next Principal or Boss. Kidding, i would’nt kill anyone, but i might just blow them up all together.
FWIW, in that scenario the surviving driver would be charged with manslaughter in the US.
And get off despite being drunk after a previous conviction because he’s rich enough.