Every time a gun is shot in Canada by a criminal, liberals use the event to ooze out some more of their specious politics and evoke the ubiquitous plaintive wail about “banning guns”, and increasing “gun control”, as the ingenious liberal premier of Ontario did yesterday as if on cue, even as the young man’s dead body was still cooling. All Liberals and members of the you’ve got to be kidding party agree with him.
But actually, Canada should return the death penalty. It works.
Liberals are against that.
Liberals don’t believe in punishment for crime as a general matter. They abhor long sentences and suddenly claim “religion” when confronted by the death penalty question—despite the death penalty concept being the word of God, quite literally (of course most liberals would have no way of knowing that). Liberals all believe in “rehabilitation” of criminals and their “reintegration into society”. They’d sooner risk your family safely going about its daily life than keep a child molester in jail. They’re more concerned with offenders’ rights than the rights of victims or the innocent members of our communities in general.
Death Penalty Discourages Crime
Monday, June 11, 2007
Anti-death penalty forces have gained momentum in the past few years, with a moratorium in Illinois, court disputes over lethal injection in more than a half-dozen states and progress toward outright abolishment in New Jersey.
The steady drumbeat of DNA exonerations — pointing out flaws in the justice system — has weighed against capital punishment. The moral opposition is loud, too, echoed in Europe and the rest of the industrialized world, where all but a few countries banned executions years ago.
What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument — whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.
The reports have horrified death penalty opponents and several scientists, who vigorously question the data and its implications.
So far, the studies have had little impact on public policy. New Jersey’s commission on the death penalty this year dismissed the body of knowledge on deterrence as “inconclusive.”
But the ferocious argument in academic circles could eventually spread to a wider audience, as it has in the past.
“Science does really draw a conclusion. It did. There is no question about it,” said Naci Mocan, an economics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. “The conclusion is there is a deterrent effect.”
A 2003 study he co-authored, and a 2006 study that re-examined the data, found that each execution results in five fewer homicides, and commuting a death sentence means five more homicides. “The results are robust, they don’t really go away,” he said. “I oppose the death penalty. But my results show that the death penalty (deters) — what am I going to do, hide them?”
Statistical studies like his are among a dozen papers since 2001 that capital punishment has deterrent effects. They all explore the same basic theory — if the cost of something (be it the purchase of an apple or the act of killing someone
[…]
Among the conclusions:
• Each execution deters an average of 18 murders, according to a 2003 nationwide study by professors at Emory University. (Other studies have estimated the deterred murders per execution at three, five and 14).
• The Illinois moratorium on executions in 2000 led to 150 additional homicides over four years following, according to a 2006 study by professors at the University of Houston.
• Speeding up executions would strengthen the deterrent effect. For every 2.75 years cut from time spent on death row, one murder would be prevented, according to a 2004 study by an Emory University professor.
[…]
And when scientists come up with statistics, liberals mock them; don’t believe them, or claim, as they did in this article, that “results are untrustworthy”, “[w]e just don’t have enough data to say anything,” and said they were “flimsy” and appeared in “second-tier journals.”
But they’re not “deniers”. Don’t worry.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
Contact Mr. Johannesen about this article using this form. Please refer to article's title.
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