Some disorganized thoughts for Fafnir & Zanket's posts
Could this be an extension on the age old maxim about "means justifying the ends" ?
Not quite. The ends/means relationships in this case look to me as follows:
(1a) A hole in the floor and ceiling of the flat upstairs (end) is justified by the right and need of a person to behave unsafely with a gun (means).
(1b) The death of a toddler (end) is justified by the right and need of a person to behave unsafely with a gun (means).
(2) The prison sentence for an act (end) is justified by the means (due process).
The means, are the accedental discharge of the weapon, leading to possible outcomes.
A possible counterpoint would be to ask whether the accidental driving of a car under the influence forgives DUI injuries and deaths. Few drunk drivers intend to get in their car drunk and kill or maim someone; it just happens by accident.
Another possible counterpoint is that there are no accidents with guns. How does the "accident" occur? Did the shooter forget to unload the weapon before cleaning it and after having a few drinks (that one occurred in the Seattle area several years ago)? Did the gun salesman forget how to operate the gun and accidentally discharge the weapon, hitting a schoolteacher and missing by inches the child in her arms? (Also a few years ago.)
Did you leave the weapon loaded in its locked display case? (I know one person that happened to; thankfully, a hole in the roof of his house was the only damage.)
Did you point a weapon at someone without checking it first? (Not-quite amusing story. I really dislike guns. One day, a friend's roommate--a "responsible" gun owner with years of hunting and target experience and time in the National Guard--says, "Hey, come look at this." We walk into the room and he's pointing a nine millimeter pistol at us. I simply fell over backward and cleared the room, whereupon the guy laughed. "Pussy," he said. "It's not even loaded, look!" And then he pulled back the slide and we all watched in silence as, with slow-motion grace, a live round popped out and tumbled onto the bed.)
How, I suppose, does the theoretic "accident" happen?
It's just that the NRA was very big on the idea of "there are no accidents with firearms" until prosecutors proved willing to charge people on those grounds.
But why do outcomes matter? How does it improve society? Let’s assume the scenarios are otherwise exactly the same . . . The only reason I can think of for outcomes mattering is, as jps put it, for the benefit of the victim’s family. That is, for revenge.
This is a hard question to me. On my most rational days, the whole of the criminal justice system seems the tragedy described by Hawthorne in the opening pages of
The Scarlet Letter.
Part of it is that our society punishes people disproportionately, based on sentiment and not any objective reality. Hence, I can get a longer sentence for possessing cocaine than I can if I get in my car drunk and kill you.
Addressing the disparity
Zanket mentions would require a reassessment of the value and role of people in society. This is well and fine with me, though I tend to think if people in general were capable and prepared to do so, we would have done so.
A justice system
should exscind revenge from its motives. But justice is a human creation, and the dichotomy between the ideal and the real is an unfortunate necessity of not being born with complete and perfect knowledge.
The outcomes matter because we're not supposed to nail each other for potential, otherwise we'd have to arrest you for being angry at someone.
An illustration of that is the war on terror. In principle, we cannot just go out and presume people guilty as we have been. If we go ten years without a terrorist attack, it cannot be said that the war on terror will have worked. The paradox is that the more successful the WoT
seems, the more we will have trampled on innocent people. But the political view is also deserving of respect: that while yes, we need to wait until something happens before we can react to it, we must discuss with ourselves the
price of our actions.
Or, to put it simply: Fast forward ten years and look at the war on terror. Let's call it a "success" and say that there have been no major strikes against American homeland territory (e.g. the 50 states). Now then, how many people are in prison for things they never did but we thought they
might do?
That's a huge ethical problem that is currently resolved by "Us/Them" comparisons. Better the suffering be by them instead of by us. And in my opinion, "Us/Them" has to go.
I mean, look at my posts. If Homeland Security came and dragged me off tomorrow based on my writings here, would that be acceptable? Would it be acceptable that they arrested me based on some notion of what they imagine I might do someday?
Which allows a tie-in back to the topic:
The ideal solution would be to raise incidental unnecessary gunfire to the level of a serious felony. In other words, I don't care if you
didn't hit someone when your stray "accidental" bullet went through their house. You're still going up for two to five because you couldn't figure out that you possessed a lethal force in time to respect it.
But I don't accept that point for other arguments of law and order, so I can't directly invoke it now.
How would we view the disparity if it was in such terms? Would it bother you that a friend was serving several years in prison for accidentally shooting out his neighbor's porchlight?
Justice is supposed to be responsive. Justice is supposed to be blind. These are the reasons why Justice is not supposed to measure the act and sentence you as if someone was really hit by the bullet, and it's why Justice is not supposed to measure the act and sentence as if nobody was in the way.
Obviously the guy target-shooting without a backstop was a big risk to society. I think his sentence should be based on the risk, which is the same whether or not a kid was killed.
Yes, but I don't accept that logic for the cokeheads who can generally control their behavior, or for the drunks who make it home safely. What of the potential of speeding? When I was a kid, we violated
federal law discharging aerosol containers in unsafe manners. In high school, I blew up a model airplane, threw a Molotov cocktail, and carried a bomb into an airport for a history project. I even created a huge security risk by getting out with an inappropriate amount of footage of the security screening process, such as it was, at the time. Massive potentials. Zero results. Based solely on the potential of our actions, I and most of the people I have called friends over the last fifteen years are ridiculously dangerous and should be kept separate from society. Yet on the other hand, what are my actual crimes? I smoke pot, and haven't been busted. I've been arrested for DUI, but when I can afford the defense, I'll win it easily because I wasn't in violation of the law. Yet based on my
potential, and the
potential risk of my prior actions, I ought to be kept with Hannibal Lecter.
Based on the potential risk of my prior actions, we might also say that I'm the last person on the face of the earth who should be raising a child.
It's a conundrum, but the most apparent alternative invites such social dysfunction as to make Justice beside the point.
Remember that nothing exists in a vacuum. An example of that is the smoking debate: people were angry at smokers during the Clinton administration because "smokers cost the rest of society too much money". As the 1990s gave way to the new millennium, there is a rising awareness of how much consumer money is wasted by companies on frivolous things. (My mother, a pharmaceutical rep, had to clear a garage full of items that new laws prohibit her from distributing to doctors for promotional purposes. Yeah, your prescription drug dollars pay for high-priced conferences at mountain lodges held by pharm reps trying to hawk drugs to doctors who use other products. And what promotions ... books, reproductions of sculpture ... we have golf towels and monster-sized plastic beverage cups coming out the yang. It was great for a lot of people like my mother who accepted the political line about the cost of allowing smokers in society. And it would have been nice for her if that idea could have remained isolated in its philosophical vacuum, because as we start applying that logic to polluters (always a tough sell), pharmaceutical companies (people love to bash them), professional athletes (but we
need a championship!),
ad nauseam, people have found that they're not so enchanted with the idea once it restricts them.
And so it is with sentencing based on risk. Assessment of risk is far too subjective, and people's bloodlusts and emotional irrationalities far too strong. Should we try to isolate the idea to just this set of crimes or what happens when we apply it more generally?
Seriously ... the potential risks of
speeding can be construed as greater than the potential risks of raping one person. And that's what happens when you let the cat out of the vacuum bag.
