By Victor C Kirk
I am tired of crying. I cannot handle death especially senseless ones. It’s gotten to the point now that each newscast emphases some crazy butt deciding their troubles must be aired in public and their self-diagnosis and prescription calls for the killing of anybody and everybody near. The more egregious the killing the more shock value to the public and the more we want to believe there must have been a psychotic breakdown. No sane person would enter a supermarket and just shoot everyone in sight while going down the aisle to find one more victim. No sane person would enter a church and worship with a group unlike their neighbors, spend a moment of prayer and asking for God’s blessings on his humble servants, then raise up and shoot every person in the room that he can see. No sane person would deliberately shackle someone, lay them on their stomach and bend a knee into their necks until life ends. Not their cry “I can’t breathe” and finally “MOMMA” phased them, nor did it change a thing. You would think if someone screamed ‘MOMMA” something within you would take note of the plea. You just don’t normally hear a grown man call out “MOMMA” without knowing and feeling the depth of his desperation. My God!!!
And to think we as a society struggle with gun control and criminal justice reform. Two ends of the social spectrum where race is the common denominator. More whites as hunters actualize the right to bear arms and after all, Louisiana is the “sportsman’s paradise”. Squirrels, deer heads, wild hogs, turkeys, and ducks adorn the trophy walls and shelves of many in this state and especially in North Louisiana. Constitutionalists have a different point of view. For them, the second amendment to the Constitution grants the right to bear arms. By now that right is felt to be God given. “You take my gun over my dead body” many may assert. Texans can walk around with a gun in their holster and some walk with that ”Richard Pryor strut – yeah we bad”. Many Louisianians walk around with guns on the hips out in the open where it can be seen and perhaps is legal. Everyone can have a gun but us. We have too many instances where it is acknowledged and a permit is near, only to find that we can be and have been killed just for reaching for our permit. We can have a gun at home for protection and shoot back when someone breaks in the door unannounced, and we are nearly killed and sadly charged for the murder of our loved one we did not commit but occurred during a raid on our home by the police.
For us, though, criminal justice reform is long overdue. Case after case turned over by courts having “found new evidence” that the “lifer” or “death row” inmate did not commit the crime. More often than not, someone in the District Attorney’s office knew or suspected such but a string of arrests for other crimes rids the earth of a “bad boy”, a bad seed. Public Defenders may cry “You got two lawyers, the court is not gonna GIVE you everything you want”, even if the “everything you want is a black attorney among the team, a researcher with experience in the field of law pertinent to the case, an investigator with sufficient time and interest and belief in your having been wronged.
But to just kill so many and so often and for a reason only God can understand? Death sentences now becomes a disservice to those crying for criminal justice reform during a time when the “outcast” or “deeply troubled” have found an outlet – MURDER. God may forgive but I don’t. I am tired of crying.
