If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
At the heart of the NGRI defense is the claim the defendant either lacked the capacity to know right from wrong (was brain-damaged, intellectually impaired) or had a mental disorder when the crime was committed, causing an inability to act within the law's requirements.
Who wants to visit or invest in or even do business with a country that is violent and chaotic, where the government is in gridlock and the public divided?
The future has its surprises. Even the most farseeing among us, are -- for better or worse -- regularly caught off-guard by what tomorrow has to offer. Take the murderous acts of two disturbed young men.
Let's talk about gun laws. Let's talk about them now. Let's find a way to honor our Second Amendment while still keeping our citizens safe. But if we make gun laws the beginning and the end of the conversation, we haven't even scratched the surface of our issues as a violent society.
We can never know for sure who will strike, but we do know one thing: If assault weapons are kept out of their hands, killers will never have a chance to kill.
2012 might be remembered in the history books for many reasons. But it will certainly be recalled as the year gun violence reached a critical mass.
While I disagree with the current Supreme Court's view of the Second Amendment, why is it only this particular right that Americans are so insistent on exercising and cowardly legislators are so eager to protect?
Although rarely included in the public discourse regarding health reform, stories like James Holmes' reflect the ways in which our faltering health care system is even more problematic when it comes to mental health.
Sure, when tragedies of all kinds occur we all privately wonder about the race of both the assailant and the victims. My question though, is: why feed that beast? We need to remind ourselves that race does not matter, nor should it.
Part of preventing another tragedy like this will require an honest assessment of what constitutes a terroristic threat. We need to give credence to the risks posed by domestic extremist groups.
We know from the countless stories of many marginalized American communities -- from LGBT communities to Latino immigrants -- that bullying is practiced, promulgated and promoted in America. Why are we so good at it?
Right now we are dangerously close to repeating earlier mistakes in granting so much airtime to notorious suspects.
Just hours after each of the heartbreaking shootings, Holmes and Page were on their way to becoming common household names. While locked behind bars, they become notorious Twitter superstars, dominating news feeds and television debates.
No politician, including the most powerful man in the free world, wants to pull the trigger on solving the complex issue of gun control.
Instead of pushing some arbitrary, fundamentalist Christian agenda that offers zero intrinsic value in solving the grandest issue of where do we go from here, let's remember the community of Aurora, the fragility of a moment, and look ahead in search of a true solution.
As the bizarre courtroom faces of James Holmes start appearing in newspapers alongside the faces of the twelve people he allegedly killed, I wonder: is it possible for feel empathy for a person capable of such senseless violence?
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