h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Okay, so hunting isn't just about food.
How about Population control?
About every few years back when I was living up in Delaware, I'd hear about how the deer population had exploded dangerously in Pennsylvania. Seems there's not enough natural predators in the area to cut into the amount they propogate. As a result, they're decimating their own habitat, to the point of starvation. So the PA state gov't, wize as they are (HA!) would issue a few extra hunting permits for that year. Otherwize, if the HUNTERS didn't kill off a few deer, they'd kill themselves off en masse.
Say it's a matter of humanity's encroachment on their natural habitat, and I'll just have to point you back to an earlier post I made on this discussion...

Oh, and to clear things up, I don't go whole-hog, so to speak, for EVERY kind of weaponry out there - I couldn't see for myself why ANYONE would need a high-powered automatic weapon with night laser-scope and teflon-coated explosive warheads. This is an exaggeration, of course, but maybe a rifle(plain), a pistol, or a shotgun should suffice. Personally, I don't own ANY guns (so don't ask for my address), but I'm not going to demand that everyone gives theirs up!
(and I've NEVER known anyone to go hunting with anything more powerful than a rifle or shotgun! CERTAINLY nothing 'army-issue' like an assault rifle!)

The self defence justification doesn't seem to have the odds on its side according to this http://www.h2g2.com/forumframe.cgi?MESSAGES[(*?threadid*15776?forumid*7926)threads[(threadid*15776?forumid*7926?subset*0)#p72844


;^)#

In reply to Hypoman's now 2 week old point.

What you put forward is quite close to Muslim Law. A friend of mine's sister, her husband and their children were murdered in the Middle East while they were working as Aid workers. A hand grenade was thrown into the cafe where they were having a drink and then the terrorists machine gunned the survivors.

When the trial was held the terrorists were found guilty and at that point the families of the deceased were asked to state their preference. They could choose the death penalty, they could choose to accept "blood money" (a form of financial compensation) or they could choose total forgiveness. A long prison sentence was not an option.

After long discussion and soul searching they decided to accpet blood money. This was not for themselves but for the indigenous people who had lsot family members in the atrocity and now had no-one to earn money for the family.

Some societies are more "law abiding" than others. Often, though, they are driven to extremes by poverty - which often is related to their endebtedness to the super powers.

In Nepal it is becoming more and more common for poor families to sell their daughters into prostitution in India. Does this mean that the daughter is going to be raped? I think it does. The family know this and allow it to happen and make money from it. They use the money to feed the younger children in the family to stop them from dying.

Very poor women in India have been driven to killing their babies because they do not have enough food to go round the children they already have. Are they murderers who deserve the death penalty?

The Death Penalty in the middle ages and later was handed out willy-nilly for just about any crime. Hence the term "I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb" - in other words why commit a venial offence if the penalty were the same as a serious offence.

I cannot see how respect for human life can be maintained when people make large fortunes out of providing a frightened population with the means of killing one another and telling them that it is for their own safety.

We are all members of a sick socety. We are guilty of being part of the creation of our way of life and are victims of it. We all agree that our world could be more nurturing than it is, but whatever we make society in, there will be the irredemiably wicked.
The death sentence has two main problems for me. Innnocent people will be killed by it, and for the people who it should be used on it is insufficient a punishment.
The Devils Island scenario has many advantages. The wrongly accused still have a chance. The guilty will have the company only of their own kind.
Lets start with those whose crimes deserve permanent exclusion from society, and who admit their crime. For example, self confessed child abusers. Single sex islands only though please, otherwise the prison becomes a nation.

There are very few people who commit easily identifiable hideous crimes. The vast (UK) prison population is not like that. If you look at women's prisons, for example, they are crammed with women who have not paid fines or who have shoplifted or whose violence would have been disregarded had it been carried out by a man.

Setting up an island is incredibly expensive. Who gets sent there out of the existing prison population?

There are already separate facilities within prisons for sex offenders and dangerous murderers. Remember that the majority of murders are by people who know their victim. (Husband/wife, boyfriend/girlfriend and so on.) They are often not likely to kill anyone else.

I think that nobody has mentioned redemption. Can we save the human race? Can we get people to act and think differently?

You = little picture.

Mankind = bigger picture.

In terms of development of our 'civil'-isation, you're suggestion at best is proof positive that we are in the most frightening phase of our history, where through electronic media we raise or lower our thumbs over people's lives, and at worst it takes us back millenia, to the club-wielding primates we once were.

Its diversity of thought that has brought us to the end of a fantastic century (i.e. the strides we have made in technology would seem more out of fantasy than any reality, when compared to previous hundreds of years), and your thoughts must therefore be allowed equal space at the forum, but you must be told that your thoughts are not only dangerous, but have no place in progressing this species. Be gone!

Hey, pal, the point is, you own a gun, you give someone (including yourself) the opportunity to USE that gun, they might use that gun on you, but they might use it on me. I'd hate for you to have the death of someone by YOUR gun on your conscience. You make guns freely available, you increase the amount of violent crime. But as with all crime, the actual chances of being caught, tried and convicted, WHATEVER the penalty, obviously aren't enough to put people off murdering and maiming each other in the first place.
The most violent places in the world are the places with the least control over personal firearms. The most violent places in the world are also those with the death penalty. Go figure.

Ahh, a comment spat directly at me, if I'm not mistaken, and it tells me to be gone, at that. That hasn't happened in a while.

While I do stand by what I wrote to a degree, it wasn't to turn my thumb at these people, or at least that wasn't the intent. It's purpose was more just an experiment. If you read the following few posts up there, I later say exactly that. The outstanding response is more than just that, and while some may not enjoy looking into people's opinions and trying to understand how and why people are coping with what's going on the way they are, I think it's fascinating. What's more complicated and...well fun, than the human mind?

Thoughts can only be met with thoughts, and electronic media such as this is the best way to prove that. Almost no one here personally knows anyone else, it's just a random (within the boundaries of h2g2, but I trust you know what I'm saying) collection of people- or words, actually- and while jibber is fun, so is this.

Maybe there should be the occasional poll on h2g2.
We aren't randomly selected - more randomly volunteered but the outcomes may be interesting.
Do we have the technology?

That's a good idea, but there'd have to be a way to get *why* they think what they think to go along with their answers...

I didn't mean randomly selected, just a random group that found this place- not the forum, h2g2 in general was what I was referring to.

As for technology- you mean to conduct a poll?

How about we gather up the sadists (surely murderers and rapists come in that category) and masochists and get them all to share living space.....

Death Penalty is about revenge.
And at the risk of sounding like a lentil munching hippy, isn't it better to try and get to the root of the problem ie why people hurt other people (my view: it's societys fault, whoever said that violence is glamourised had a point and I would add that raping children and women is thanks to the images that society etc creates)rather than trying to exact revenge after the unpleasant event..

Yes. Poll conducting technology. A questionnaire even.
"Has anyone directly known to you been killed in a criminal act?" could be one of the questions.

If it is wrong for Mark Barton, Buford Furrow et al. to kill, why isn't it wrong for us to kill them? Are you saying that murder is justifiable in some cases?

If someone is convicted beyond reasonable doubt for murder (let's say the jury is unanimous - makes it easier) and executed, what happens if it later transpires that the late accused was innocent? Do we then execute the judge who passed sentence? How about the jury, so sure of his guilt? How about "executing" all those involved in the collection of evidence in the run up to the original trial? Surely they were all accessories to the murder of an innocent man.

Modern humanity has no need of this kind of atavistic barbarism.

My next door neighbour was murdered after I'd moved away from the area.
I knew a rapist. (Once I found out he was a rapist we kind of lost touch...)
Scares me anyway.

Well it would help cull the legal profession - every cloud has a silver lining.

"Since 1973 at least 53 men were released from death rows in seventeen U.S. states due to significant evidence of their innocence. At least twenty-three innocent people between 1900 and 1987 were not so fortunate, they were executed before their innocence was proved."(source Amnesty International USA)

;^)#

Isn't there a hebrew saying about if you save one man you save a nation because you also save all of his descendants who would not live if he ceased to exist. Surely the same happens in reverse - when you kill a man you kill thousands from future generations!

I think pro death penalty people would see that as an argument "for" as you are reducing the population of the world at a time when overpopulation is an issue.

So you are saying that criminal behaviour is genetic and so the descendants don't have the chance to live either!