Touching Our Guns Drives Many American's Crazy

Guns don't kill people. especially since crazy people will kill with or without guns. I felt the need to clear up the image of guns since gun sales double every time we even hint about weapon laws

James Holmes is crazy.

Not like you and I who all suffer from some level of mental instability at times.  James Holmes is at war with voices in his own head, and the voices took over on one Dark Night.  In his own words- spoken to his own psychologist prior to the Dark Knight movie release that inspired Holmes to color his hair and boobie-trap his apartment with bombs since he would likely die in a hail of bullets- Holmes was losing the war within himself.

Is killing James Holmes the right way
to stop the rise of more crazed killer's?

What could we have learned from
the mind's of Klebold and Harris?

Sentencing that Boston Marathon murderer to death seems agreeable to the blood lust region of the black side of my heart.  Killing Holmes doesn't feel the same for me.  In fact, keeping him locked up in a jail and not a sophisticated psyche ward for crazed killers waiting on justice seems off tilt as well.  Is a police detective or the FBI actually the best first interview for criminals of this sort?

Typically, the kind of gunfire that takes more of our societal purity ends with the death of the gunmen, so exploring the minds of our crazed killers is mostly uncharted seas.  Rarely, to almost never, do we get to explore the mind of a societal rapist' who we think capital punishment will justify.  Is their death and our ignorance truly bliss or can we seek to learn from the minds of terror?

Imagine a chance to talk to Klebold and Harris.  What directions could they give us towards dealing with people like them?  Maybe we could try to convince Holmes to help solve a plot similar to his own by someone with problems similar to his own.  Could an animal find a propensity to protect as even a killer grizzly does at times?  If we saw past the animal that Holmes appears to be, could we learn to help avoid the kind of animal Holmes and others have become?

If we are never able to explore the minds of another domestic terrorist, is it reasonable to at least keep crazy people away from certain tools of death- or monitor them if they purchase one or more of these tools as Holmes did in preparation for that fateful day?  Might many off these same people- especially those already seeking help like Holmes was- actually consent to being monitored during their mental warfare before they're losing too bad to ask anymore?

If that sounds too much like gun control, I apologize to anyone that I've offended.  Your weapons are safe, so please don't double and triple your personal armory whenever you hear the words crazy people and guns in the same conversation.

We're talking about James Holmes kind of crazy.  Not you.

Capital Punishment Is Necessary But Complicated

A quarter century ago I met the woman who would provide me the love of 5 beautiful daughters and the benefit of 25 years of wedded bliss.

I knew that she was the one for me when our first phone conversation became a 12 hour marathon that ended with the sun rise and ran the gamut from marriage to capital punishment.  The former we both seemed agreeable to, the latter I have recently agreed that she was right and I was wrong (the secret to 25 years marriage).

9-11 might have been an act of terrorism against America, but the response was the equivalent of capital punishment, and even a pacifist like me could relate to the emotion.  I never believed Sadaam Hussein was the right person to hold accountable for the crime, nor were the already war tattered mountains of Afghanistan a worthy place to chase after Bin Laden, the presumed mastermind of it all. What I did believe is that seeing bombs on television would help vulnerable Americans feel like they'd responded to the highest level of evil- enacting a version of retaliatory capital punishment, and it felt good to me too.

Years after we married, a dear friend came to me for support of her golf tournament designed to honor the memory of her murdered son and his girlfriend who were killed because he was scheduled to testify against a  killing that he witnessed at a party.  When Sir Mario Owens was finally convicted for the murder of Javad Marshall-Fields and his girlfriend Vivien Wolfe,
I didn't change my view of capital punishment, but I found myself suddenly eager to shoot her son's killer dead just to ease the pain of her loss.

In the wake of the recent Dzhokhar Tsarnaev conviction in the Boston marathon killings, we return to the mirrored reflection we always confront every time we decide that killing a man is the best way to deal with killing a man.  Places like Boston become more challenged in their moral convictions since they are a state firmly opposed to capital punishment. Yet, even Boston found a way to try Tsarnaev in a jurisdiction (federal) that would allow a jury to kill him if they saw fit.  Once again, even this pacifist would happily put the bullet into the brain of Tsarnaev to ease the pain of those most harmed by his brutality.

Personally, I have never seen death as a worse option to being beaten or molested for years in a prison, but Tsarnaev would likely miss out on that form of prison life even if he avoids death.  If sentenced to life, he likely gets sent to ADX near Florence, Colorado, a VERY expensive maximum security prison that is built to avoid escape, or the kind of prisoner interaction that might encourage escape attempts.  Extra heinous criminals that find their way to ADX are secured and separated in a manner that isn't quite as interactive or vicious as traditional prison.  With six levels of security, ADX inmates have to earn their way into general population interaction. Critics of this location have called the prison the Alcatraz of the Rockies or a cleaner version of hell.

Will Colorado sentence James Holmes to death?

Our uneasiness with disposing of dead weight made us give Tsarnaev the best lawyering we could imagine for the pursuit of saving his life. For the man who was partially responsible for the worst act of terrorism on American soil since 9-11, we give the best representation our system can imagine. In addition to super lawyer Judy Clarke, Tsarnaev received 3 additional public defenders including one who speaks Russian, Tsarnaev's native language.   If sentenced to life in prison, Tsarnaev will join another of defense attorney Clarke's popular clients, Ted Kaczynski (the unabomber), who was saved from death himself thanks to Clarke, and is currently residing in Florence, Colorado as well.

Killing Tsarnaev will not come without years of delay and appeal, both on our dime and at our expense.  Once the appeals run out, finding the drugs to kill Tsarnaev will be a challenge too.  Currently, the states that love to kill people are down to their last few doses of capital punishment cocktails since drug companies that make these meds don't want to be associated with the botched killings that are becoming more prevalent from our lack of skill at capital punishment.  By the time Tsarnaev gets his just deserts, medicated capital punishment's might go by the wayside unless some medicine company gets into the death business soon.


Although any medication can be fatal when used in dangerous doses or combinations, medications of all sorts are originally designed for the opposite purpose of capital punishment.  Even when they help capital punishment achieve its purpose, no medication  or combination of  meds will ever react the same given to different people.  Just as alcohol effects each of us differently, so do murderous cocktails, and these repeated botched killings are an embarrassment to any forward thinking society.

My bullet to the head idea is rather risky too, in that killing the brain doesn't insure that the body will immediately follow, yet we find this method to be the most humane way of killing cattle.  The guillotine is another oldie but goodie, though I doubt our stomachs will endure rolling heads or spurting blood since we can't handle the convulsive agony with the medicinal route we currently administer.

Way back when I first started courting my wife and challenging her on the question of capital punishment, I asked the question of "who wants the blood on their hands anymore".  Way back when, my would be wife said she would kill them herself, so that angle of argument proved hollow against my boo- but it worked with most.  The killing panels were popular a quarter century ago in which several people took part in the process so that no one knew exactly who administered the lethal injection, thus minimizing the potential for personal guilt.  When the first person sentenced to a medicated death began to slobber and convulse for a few minutes longer than expected, we instantly lost this freedom from guilt as well.

Way back when, my wife didn't argue about marrying me, so I put my energy into trying to convince her  that we should stop spending so much money on capital punishment.  I've dreamed forever of an island of ill repute where those sentenced to death could option to live and survive in an environment where we only provide access to  fresh water.  Every other aspect of survival would be the responsibility of the  islands criminal inhabitants. A new age Alcatraz of sorts, but much further from civilization and built, organized and maintained by the convicts themselves.  If a man can not be reformed to live within the order of society, this idea would force him to conform to societal order in a graphic first hand experience.  The most unruly would likely be killed and disposed of a lot faster than they are within our current system of law and justice, leaving the murderous side of capital punishment to be done by those most comfortable with doing it already.

I know what you're thinking.  WE are way too humane for that sort of idea.  Which is the same thing that I used to say about capital punishment.

Arizona Lethal Injection Failure Questions Our Will And Skill To Kill

When last we had this not-so-merry go round about the death penalty, the name of the hour was Troy Davis. His name is like the name  Sir Mario Owens to me, people who I will always be able to recall in my brain, even when I am old(er).

My brain has conjoined these names because of a dear friend, Colorado House representative Rhonda Fields, and she is why I am changing about the death penalty. Changing for me means leaning towards it more, but I have yet to fully cross the border.

I am an adult person who only recently bought my first adult pistol, a cheap pellet gun to protect my garden from, "whatever". In hindsight, insects, not animals, have always been my greatest garden issue. Maybe I was secretly leaving the world I once knew, where guns couldn't beat God, so having one represented a lack of faith; faith in the military or law enforcement to stop the crazy folks, but mostly a lack of faith in the mental stability of mankind. I still don't care to own a gun, but I am

getting pretty good with that pellet pistol.

I say all that to squarely categorize myself as a death penalty pacifist. Well, that's not my personal description of me, but it's what those who ardently believe in the death penalty might call me.  My aforementioned change makes me a modified pacifist, and here's why.

Rhonda Fields.

Today she represents district 42 in the Colorado state house of representatives. Back in the day she was my friend Rhonda who does the golf tournament. Before Rhonda Fields, I only played golf when business customers made it free, and they had to cover club rentals as well. When I met Rhonda, I bought a set of second hand junkers and took out lots of weeds practicing for the yearly tournament. Because of Rhonda (and a wicked competitive streak), I turned my back yard into a practice course, bought a better junker set of clubs, quickly dropped my average score by 15 strokes and changed to someone who would push the death penalty button myself, at least for Rhonda Fields.

As for her position on the death penalty, I basically assumed too much. Rhonda is the sweetest person on the planet and she is also a person with a powerful voice. A few days prior to the verdict that would find Sir Mario Owens worthy of death for his part in the ordered hit on Javad Marshall Fields (Rhonda's son) and Vivian Wolfe (Javad's girlfriend), Rhonda came by and expressed her concern for the verdict given the fervor of the defense. I was well aware of this fervor because my crew got the project to print the signs for Owens' defense team. They offered a tragic family tree with mental illness more common in one family then any of us who printed the signs could ignore. The short version of his defense is, this kid never had a chance.

My assumption was that Rhonda felt like I did about capital punishment. Maybe she did before it was her son's murderers in question. In the years after Sir Mario Owens was sentenced to death, Rhonda Fields, that lady with the powerful voice, became rep. Rhonda who led the charge against the gun violence in her district by the Aurora theatre shooting.


When Troy Davis was up for execution, I had to come face to face with my feelings about killing killers (especially with controversial convictions) and the ease at which I would eliminate Owens if I knew it would comfort my friend. Funny how life can change our beliefs.

Yet, would I wish to be among the executioners who now gets to imagine Joseph Wood gasping for air for the better part of two hours? Only for Rhonda. Even then I might want to double check to see if she was pleased with the proceedings. According to some of the family of Wood's slain victims, his passing was too serene in light of the carnage he was convicted of. They described it as an uncomfortable sleep of sorts that ended at two hours. If others couldn't endure two hours of gasping, several members of the victims family would've happily offered to expedite the process.

Humans are not really good with the death process. We are awful with every aspect of killing because it was not included in the original design. We don't even grieve well enough to understand the death business.  We are well rehearsed in the realm of retribution and retaliation, so typically one emotion or the other is driving our efforts to kill each other when non-psychotic people find solace in death.

Owens has yet to be put to death. In solidly purple Colorado, his death will drag on. I often wonder if Rhonda will even feel the same by the time she is in the room like the Arizona families of the slain victims of Joseph Wood.

As for me? I will call Rhonda Fields when it's time for Owens to die and reassess my feelings after I talk with her.