That's not a contradiction at all. People are already free to do all sorts of things that are inherently dangerous; bungee jumping, contact sports, handling dangerous animals, racing cars, flying planes, etc. There are still laws in place concerning the when, where, and how of all these things to reduce risk.

Here's a fun fact: Heroin is the trademarked brand name created by Bayer, the same people who make aspirin. The compound is actually called diacetylmorphine. Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that one of the risks associated with illegal drug use, purity, would become irrelevant. I used heroin as an example because it is particularly notorious for being impure. But yes, if you're going to legalize drugs, you can't be picky, especially with the big money makers that are driving the drug war in the first place.

"The ten most dangerous words in the English language are 'Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'" - Ronald Reagan

To say that we do not have the freedom to do with our lives and our bodies as we see fit, is to imply that we are property of the state.

Hard drugs bring people downhill fast, real fast, and overdosing is easy. And by the way, Sherriff Joe is the man. Of course, seeing Im going into the Law Enforcement field my view will be different, but I think rapists and murders should live in a tent and eat bologna instead of gourmet. And mr. rapist doesnt get to watch friggin cable and eat cheetos on a couch, he works and does hard time.

Private prisons, a product of the drug war, allow Mr. Rapist to eat Cheetos on a couch.

Legalize drugs, punish more rapists, I think I've made that point a couple of different ways earlier in this thread.

Punish both, and i dont give a shit about drug users, they can be fined and avoid jails. Drug dealers, especially the ones selling to kids and near schools, could get shot for all i care but have a sherriff joe type prison is about all i can hope for.

The point is that you can't punish both, we don't have the resources for it. And legalizing drugs wouldn't mean you can suddenly sell them to kids. Alcohol and tobacco are legal, you can't sell those to kids. The same rules would apply to drugs.

Drug dealers now will sell to kids, whats to keep them from selling to them if there legal? 21-year old joe stoner may be able to stroll into 7-11 but mr highschool kid trying to act cool will still need a source.

The fact that the source would be 7-11, not Ricky down by the corner. If something is legal, you can buy it in a store. I don't go to Ricky down by the corner to score my groceries.

Im saying there will always be a market for illegal drugs especially cheap low grade crap, youd have poor people who need cheaper drugs buying it on the street, kids too young to buy in a store, etc.

The current price of drugs is vastly inflated because they are illegal. Around 1915 you could buy (in a store) one gram of cocaine for 25 cents. Adjusted for modern inflation, that same gram today would cost around $5.25. Because it's illegal, the cost is actually around $100, and by the time it's being sold in those small amounts, you're not even getting one entire gram. It will most likely have been cut with inositol or baking soda to increase the dealer's profit margins.

As for kids, yeah that's going to happen. Not alot you can do about that. I paid a homeless guy to buy me a bottle of Jim Beam when I was 17, the system isn't perfect.

What you're not taking into account is law enforcement's overzealousness to obtain a conviction resulting in the imprisonment and execution of an innocent person. This happens alot. Executions should just be done away with, getting to the point of proving that somebody actually deserves to die is expensive and time consuming and results in a very small number of executions. It's not even worth it. Executing certain people may be justifiable, but in practice it's more about revenge than actual justice.

The burden of proof is so high for a death penalty case, and modern advances in dna and other forensics are so good that the innocents on death row thing is really hard to believe, i know way back in time there were the false convictions but i havent heard of any in modern day trials. And look, stataes that have the death penalty have alower murder rate, so if you need to kill afew bad guys to save some inncoent people im or it.

I have no idea where Shooter got his information, what I found says the inverse is true.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/dete...r-murder-rates

The theory that threat of execution acts as a deterrent doesn't work if you only execute the minority of murderers who commit particularly heinous crimes.

Are they not the same? Hammurabi's code anyone...

No they're not the same. If I damage your fence, having justice would mean I paid to repair it. Revenge would be if you destroyed my fence in retaliation. Now nobody has a fence and we have a feud.

Hammurabi's code is where we get an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and as Gandhi said "An eye for an eye ends in making everybody blind."

Irrelevant example, you can't pay for a murdered wife/son/daughter/husband to be "repaired" but in that case I see the death of the perpetrator as the closest to justice as you'll ever get.

Gandhi was racist and supported Adolf Hitler.......I have no respect for him or his quotes.

And that quote doesn't even make sense...

It's less expensive than keeping them alive in prison for the rest of their life

Theoretically, problem is they are on death row 25 years with three appeals, which ends up costing more, if they got one appeal and 8-10 years things would be different.

That's what I said earlier, dammit

Im agreeing with you, and BTW, didnt ghandi say the jews should commit mass suicide? I know all "civil rights leaders" are put to godly status in our textbooks in school but if you look into their lives they are usually WAY different.

yup. I like the PRC's stance on the death penalty, There was this child killer(sick motherfucker, hope he's burning in hell http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news...-1225859462055 ) and they executed him within a month of the murders. They do it by firing squad as well. I imagine that with the speed of conviction to execution and the method of execution that it would lower costs immensely.

Different in that they were all pretty bad people

Yes it is more expensive this way, and it is the only way we can justifiably execute people. If we sped up the process, yes we'd execute alot of people who probably deserve it, but we'd end up executing alot of people who don't.

As ive said, no we wouldnt, the burden of proof to get the death penalty is so big that it is next to impossible to be wrongfly convicted.

Jesus Christ are you serious? You really think China is a standard we should be holding ourselves to? China is horribly corrupt, this is a very rare case of them getting something right via the shotgun approach; execute as many people as possible and one or two will probably deserve it. If you people like China so much, go fucking live there and leave the United States for those of us who actually give a shit about liberty and freedom.

You're missing the point that you either execute a whole bunch of people who might deserve it at a low cost and get a whole bunch of innocent or not-deserving people executed with them, OR you go through the lengthy and expensive due process to make sure you only execute people who absolutely deserve it, thus using up resources and allowing many to slip through the cracks. It's not worth it to go through all that energy, time, and money to execute a few dozen people every year when hundreds more just like them are life sentences at a lower cost to the public.

Or we could just not have life sentences

http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs02...s/canon/06.jpg

It's not a full firing squad, just a bullet to the head. And killing a panda is a capital offense there.

SW, your not helping the cause much, and BRM, the due process is a trial and then an appeal if new evidence comes up, not 3 appeals since mr. bad guy doesnt want to die.

"My sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and in the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after their return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?"

Gandhi wrote against the creation of a Jewish state in the middle east because he knew the biblical claim used to rationalize it's existence was ridiculous. He was not an antisemite.

"Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs... It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions."

What he meant was that with the passiveness they presented in the face of the holocaust, they may as well have killed themselves. He was not calling for Jews or anybody to commit mass suicide because he didn't like them, he simply stated that had they called attention to their own plight (in this case by committing mass suicide) the world could have responded beforehand. This quote came from 1946, nobody outside of Germany (most Germans as well) even knew about the holocaust until after the war was over.

And no, Gandhi did not support Adolf Hitler.

http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/a...dhihitler.html

I said I like their stance on the death penalty

And something else I'm a Soldier in the United States Army jackass, don't you tell me about giving a shit about liberty and freedom.

You have no concept of what it means to be an American.

You are forgetting that that's what they used to do to certain criminals

Wearing the uniform does not shield you from criticism. If anything, it obligates you, as an agent of the state, to be under much higher scrutiny.

Yes, in the lawless wild west. Lynch mobs and vigilante posses, wonder why we don't still do that. Yeehaw frontier justice. Oh right, completely lacking in due process.

It was more like from the first colony through to the 1960's (in the south)

So you're talking about witch burnings and lynch mobs. Great.

Stop pulling your personal ideals out of your ass and proclaiming them as fact, and you completely missed my point.

I'm done arguing with you, you've just proven to be too fucking ignorant and disillusioned and I have nothing to gain.

You call me ignorant and you're the one claiming Gandhi was a Nazi sympathizer.

Anti-semite and Nazi sympathizer are two different things

Gandhi was neither.