Thread 2 Turn your son in knowing he’d get the death penalty

[Idinnaenah]

1st thread is full - this is to continue the convo. My original question is below:

’Kirk’s killer has apparently been turned in by his family - or persuaded to hand himself in.
Trump &’his supporters have been very vocal about getting the death penalty for the shooter.
would YOU hand your child over, knowing that the electric chair would be the likely outcome?

YANBU - I wouldn’t turn him in to die.
YABU - I would he’s a killer and deserves all he gets

She’s incapable of seeing it. How awful it must be to be so blinded by hatred with no ability to think rationally or think independently. Pitiable really.

I couldn’t turn my child over to the authorities knowing that the President has already condemned them as guilty and said he hopes there’s the death penalty but in the case I can see why the family felt compelled to.

I don’t see how he could get a fair trial, although perhaps the death sentence will be taken off the table in exchange for a full confession.

Hopefully not

‘MAGA Barbie’

So much hate on social media. It’s all part of it.

On a thread where you are saying you would protect your son's life despite the risk he posed to the lives of others, you expect another woman to do 'the right thing' and suppress her anger at her husband's murder for the greater good? Why are you holding this woman to a standard higher than your own?

I must admit my third thought when I heard her words was ... she's going to have lots of money to raise her kids & live a nice lifestyle. At some point there will be investigation into whether she mis-spent all that money that was donated.

Thought 1: she moved from grief to fury very fast

Thought 2: keen to believe this was a conspiracy or TR was "groomed" by lefties into becoming a murderer. I guess the "groomed by evil people" explanation will be very popular with MAGA.

ps: how can there be anything left to say about family turning in family for criminal prosecution. It's long running subplot on The Archers, btw, for anyone who wants to explore their feelings about that topic further.

I consider myself left wing. I literally shed a tear when I saw the video of her talking.

we need to stop the labelling of both left and right people

I’d be surprised, remember Kirk’s whole spiel was Women, submit to your men, women need to stay home and have children , men are the natural leaders - being his widow will only get her so far with the rest of the men in that organisation.

This can't be said often enough.

I also think 'right' and 'left' are completely meaningless terms now, and have always meant something quite different in the US from here and the rest of Europe. Even the most left-wing politicians in US terms would be right of centre here.

This will be Trump's Reichstag fire.

I saw this today.

Whether or not you agree with Charlie Kirk's views and politics, he should have been free to hold his views without the fear of violence and ultimately his life.

I vehemently disagreed with everything he stood for. What I find more abhorrent is people dancing on his grave.

We should all fear this division.

As for the premise of the thread, if you live in the US you grow up knowing that the death penalty exists, that ordinary people can and do carry and use guns,and that all cops are armed routinely. If you find any or all of that abhorrent, presumably you either move to a state with no death penalty and tighter gun control laws, or you emigrate. If you stay there then you have to abide by the laws and social attitudes as they are. Our country is so different that I'm not sure anything we say is of any relevance here.

'MAGA Barbie' is an abhorrent comment.

I posted on the first thread twice, and in good faith, because I'm totally against the death penalty. I regret having had anything to do with the thread now.

'MAGA Barbie'?

Your bias is showing there OP and not in a good way.

That's a truly vile and misogynistic way to describe a grieving woman. Some of the posts following it implying she is grieving wrong are also vile.

Makes me wonder if some of the sympathies to the killer in respect of the potential punishment for the crime actually stem from hatred of the victim.

I can't even imagine what it must be like to lose your loved one in such a violent and public way. She is living moment to moment. She may be taken advantage of, she may be furious, she may regret some of her words/actions down the line or not. She is a human, living out a nightmare in front of all of us. There are thousands of humans all over the world that watch their loved ones die under cruel and violent circumstances.

Something is very wrong, I don't have any answers but for me living in a world like it is at the moment feels very uncertain and heavy. The access to so much information feels very overwhelming.

All the MAGA trolls out in force on this one then 🤣

If you have a South Park episode made about you then it is pretty safe to say that you are the problem…if you don’t know who this guy really was then you shouldn’t really be criticising the OP.

The world has not lost a good one that’s for sure

But can't you see that by denigrating his death in cruel ways, that this ultimately perpetuates the division that maga wants to create.

He apparently like the South Park episode. I suppose any fame is fame when you’re a click bait influencer.

You are adding to the problems. Your loathing on social media isn’t a plus.

I don't really get the argument.

For the family, they probably saw it as a straight choice:

1. let it descend into a shoot out where there is an inevitably that he will die but also puts one or more of them is at risk because they are in the vicinity and even if they survived they'd be blamed by the community for not handing him in which puts them at risk in the longer term too.
2. hand him in and try and show yourself to the community as doing the right thing

In both scenarios they probably understand he's a dead man walking and the only choice is about their role in this and the manner in which he does.

Option 2) also gives a slim chance in him being given a lighter sentence or being able to commute it to life at a later date.

It's a sensible choice rather than condemning your child to death. He'd already got himself into that mess.

Going back to the original question posed, what would the alternative have been? If you found out your child or family member was responsible for a murder, had access to guns and was mentally unwell (suicidal ideation from what has been reported) your first thought would surely be - I need to make sure you are stopped and no one else is killed or injured.

If we are to believe what has been reported, he was planning on taking his own life rather than presenting himself to the authorities, is this a better outcome?

I maybe wrong but I am going to assume he new his home state had a death penalty? Asside from going on the run or expecting his family or other activists to hide him for the rest of his life, there was always going be consequences. Whether it was by his own hand or via the justice system.

there are people who would and have encouraged their child to go in the run, I suppose. People flee from justice all the time.

Well it's unfortunate for him that those people were not his parents

He'd just committed the most significant political assassination in the US in sixty year of a personal friend and ally of the President.

Going 'on the run' wasn't going to work out.

Suggesting he could have done this is stupid.