Amerika

Source: Calgary Sun

Above you can see the parents of Matthew de Grood, who was recently found “not criminally responsible” for killing five people in a psychotic break:

“I find on a balance of probabilities that at the time he caused their deaths, Matthew de Grood was suffering from a mental disorder that rendered him incapable of appreciating or knowing that his actions were wrong,” Macklin said.

…The trial heard de Grood became withdrawn about a month before the attack and started posting about the end of the world, religion, vampires and Darth Vader on Facebook.

De Grood reported hearing voices telling him to kill before he grabbed a knife from a kitchen in the northwest Calgary home and stabbed the victims.

In the modern West, we are drowning in a wave of mental incompetence that has us asking the wrong questions entirely and coming up with nonsense answers as a result. In a sane world, the point of criminal trials is to remove threats to the good people out there, not protect the broken. In a sane world, five people at a party could at least put up a decent fight — by working together — when someone has a psychotic break.

Past societies would have hung this guy and ignored any questions of culpability because what matters is the victims, not the aggressor. Who cares if he was mentally competent at the time? If you allow people to go crazy, kill five people and then walk away with their lives, there is no responsibility at all. It encourages others to have a looser standard.

If instead you have a simple ironclad rule — kill unjustly, and you will be killed — people have an incentive to treat their family members who are going through psychotic breaks. They have reason to take their psychiatric meds. They also have a clear standard for when it is acceptable to kill in self-defense, since that is clarified as part of determining what is “unjust” in a killing.

Instead, the great equality lie has replaced their brains. They worry about whether he was fully culpable instead of how to protect ordinary decent people against the raging craziness out there. They do not look at the parents and ask what went wrong there. They do not point out that if this guy obviously went nutty a month before the stabbing, plenty of people had a chance to intervene before the disaster.

Instead, it is feel-good time. Feel good because we are compassionate. Deny that the cause of most human misery is delusional or crazy actions. Gather around to talk about how civilized we are, not like those brutish louts with their inhumane death penalty. And then for kicks, go dump a bucket of AIDS blood on the graves of these five victims in a futile attempt to desecrate them further.

Tags: decline, ineptitude, insanity, mental incompetence