This is so disturbing.
Police say two 12-year-old girls lured a friend into some woods in southeastern Wisconsin where one of them held her down as the other stabbed her 19 times.
The 12-year-old victim survived the attack on Saturday in Waukesha and police say her condition is stable.
Authorities say the suspects had planned to kill the victim for several months. Police say both girls were interested in a website containing stories of death and horror.
The victim survived and her attackers are expected to be in court today.
Lately we’ve all heard, and I’ve even written, stories focusing on the disturbing militarization of the police. It is disturbing. But this story is a flip side to that — the police should not be militarizing and buying up-armored tank-like vehicles and all that, but on the other hand, they are dealing with a less predictable environment than we’ve had in the past. Crime overall is down, but what might be called crazy crime is still out there and it’s likely that as the family weakens and society disintegrates at its foundation, and kids are less and less productively occupied in our post-agriculture economy, and kids grow up in a more and more coarse media environment with social media amplifying everything to maddening levels, there will be more crazy crime. Police don’t always know what they’re dealing with when they go into any environment. Could be a kid with a knife, or a barking dog that never deserved to be shot — or they could be facing a violent wacko looking to take out his whole neighborhood and commit suicide by cop. Or the cops could be in the wrong house, making deadly mistakes because they think they’re entitled to act like Marines in a war zone.
Life isn’t always as simple as we’d like it to be, where we can just denounce “bad militarized cop!” and never think about how things got to be the way they are. Sure, big government is feeling its oats. It’s also largely doing that because alternatives to its power — namely, the family, the church, private institutions generally — are falling prey to libertinism, and chaos increases as a result. Government is also to blame, to a great extent, for fostering the destruction of those institutions that challenge its hold on us.
Along these lines, there’s a push these days among some younger libertarian-flavored folks on the right to do away with things like mandatory minimum sentencing. But how did we get to the point where mandatory minimums became so prevalent? A millennial probably has no idea, as it’s certainly not taught in schools, but those of us who lived through the 1970s and 1980s remember well, or should.
It became a routine thing in those decades for a multiple murderer to get handed a light prison sentence by liberal lifer judges, judges who based their weak justice on leftwing arguments placing poverty or social injustice on trial instead of dealing with the crimes at hand. Parole boards also routinely freed violent criminals who had been sentenced to “life” but only actually spent a few short years in prison on conviction for heinous crimes. That judicial activism put dangerous rapists and killers back on the streets to terrorize the public, and provided little sense that violent criminals would face justice, and that their victims or victims’ families would ever get any sense of justice. Using prison as a deterrent to crime just about disappeared.
Mandatory minimum sentences became the answer, forcing through legislation what those lifer liberal judges had proven themselves untrustworthy to do. Mandatory minimums were a reaction to judges who had proven that they would misuse their power and leave us all exposed to terrible criminals. Crime is down over the last couple decades at least in part because we decided, as a society, to force the system to keep violent criminals locked up. And also, because state gun laws have opened up and allowed more Americans to arm ourselves, and state castle laws have tilted the balance in favor of the law-abiding property and gun owner. The law wasn’t always tilted in favor of the law-abiding. It was also a routine thing in the past to hear about the man or woman who shot a suspect breaking into their house in the middle of the night, only to have the suspect survive and sue them, and for the law-abiding person to find themselves facing charges from the local DA.
Maybe mandatory minimums aren’t the answer. But what is the answer to keeping liberal judges from abusing their positions to pervert justice and blame the innocent for the actions of the guilty? It’s easy to rail from a libertarian perspective that mandatory minimums are wrong. It’s much harder to come up with an alternative that stands a chance of getting through legislatures, and stands any chance of doing any good for law-abiding Americans.
Opinionated rants are so easy that everyone can do them, even people who would be wiser to close their mouths tight and open up their minds a bit.
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