Two Dads
I noticed on the news the other night that a guy who was mad about something decided to load a gun and go over to another guy's place and shoot him. Dead.
He was convicted of 2nd degree murder but his lawyer plans to appeal.
Fair enough.
But I have to ask - how is it that everyone can't see that the verdict was just? I mean, this guy killed somebody, pretty much in cold blood. Do his reasons matter? Because I'd say this case was pretty cut and dried in terms of it being a pre-meditated murder.
I kind of think he's lucky he didn't get charged... more. And harder.
Clearly, the fact that his sixteen year old daughter was living with the victim, doing drugs, no doubt having sex, would not have endeared him to her Dad. But since when is it even remotely justifiable to take a gun (was it registered, I wonder?) and shoot somebody because we don't like how they are affecting our lives or the lives of those nearest and dearest to us.
I mean - isn't that the challenge of all parents? To accept that freedom of association is pretty much a, er, used to be a right? (I haven't read The Patriot Act or whatever it's called, but I guess Mahar Arar knows more about the changes with regard to a person's right to "freedom of association" than I do.)
Gee... Well, now I wonder why the accused's lawyer didn't just go with the Terrorist Defence. You know, that the Dad thought his daughter's boyfriend was part of a Terrorist Cell and that he was afraid she was being trained to be a suicide bomber. Or somesuch. Come to think of it - maybe he should have gone to the police with that accusation at the beginning. Had the boyfriend deported to Iran or someplace.
Meanwhile... it was pretty hard for me, when listening to the reactions of some rightwing pundits on the case ("poor caring Dad, justified, scum junkie anyway, hot daughter but too young"), to not think of Robert Latimer, about whom those same rightwing pundits went frothingly berserk a few years back, even though he didn't even shoot the doctors who had operated on his daughter to the point where, well, he was driven to kill her to spare her any more pain.
Of course, he didn't use a gun. And lord knows, rightwingers like guns. Well, unless they're black, er, gang guns.
But it's interesting what some people are willing to justify in the name of their political allegiances. It's justifiable homicide to shoot someone if you're a Dad and that someone you shoot is supplying your sixteen year old daughter with drugs. It's not justifiable homicide if you're a Dad who can't bear to watch his daughter live on in pain, facing a lifetime of invasive operations to prevent her from dying.
I'm on the left and I don't think either homicide is justifiable. But nor do I think they are comparable. That's because I think a guy who keeps a loaded gun handy to shoot people he doesn't like is a much greater danger to society than a guy who euthanized his suffering daughter.
In any case, justice must be seen to be done and so it was/is. There is only so much room for subtlety, I guess. Robert Latimer got 10 years. This other Dad is going to get 10 years.
Which brings me to the Picton trial. Well, let's see. There's a confession, witnesses, and DNA evidence all over a farm.
I think Robert Picton did it.
What I want to know now is - did the Mayor of Vancouver at the time friends and families of the missing women were begging, imploring the police to at least try and connect some dots to locate their missing daughters, ever get that guy who was breaking into all those rich people's homes in that posh neighbourhood of Vancouver? I know there was $100,000 at stake.
THAT'S the story I wish the media would pursue.
