(In response to the recent crossbow shooting, where a young man murdered his father because his father had abused him and his mother)
This is what I find, we have condolences for the murderer because he was abused and vigilantism is respected in a country where our court system is so congested no progress is mad in any less than five years it seems. And many condemn (rightly so in my opinion) the father because he was abusive, so we say he had it coming to him, he ‘deserved’ to die because he abused his child therefore those mental scars provoked the son to kill his father.
However, what happens if we ask if the father was abused as a child? Then are we not supposed to sympathize with the father because he was abused and therefore those mental scars led him to hit his wife and children? Therefore then by our own standards of sympathy for those son do we not have to find condolences for the father or risk being hypocrites?
Perhaps the truth is that despite what horrors of abuse our parents bestow onto us we must accept that we make our own choices and need to be punished for them justly despite the so called “mental scars” we must endure? For if we have so much sympathy for every violent criminal we would have no one in our jails, and murderers and rapists would run free.
In cases which do garner so much sympathy for the abused while such factors should be taken into consideration we should not let them be the deciding factor as to what justice is enacted because the bottom line is for most people that we make our own decisions.
