Reply to Eight People Shot in Black Church in Charleston, South Carolina

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=jsteele][quote=Anonymous]What I fail to see is this was deemed a hate crime last night early on yet the DC family murders weren't. Why is that ?

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I am not sure anyone has made the case that Wint was motivated by hate. Roof told the folks in the church he was going to kill them because they were black. Wint was able to obtain $40,000. Roof didn't take a dime.

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That's too easy, Mr. Steele.  Wint didn't have to torture and/or light a child on fire to get the $40,000.  There was apparently way more cruelty involved in the Wint case than can plausibly be explained by purely financial motivations.  While the Wint case continues to have a lot of open questions, this is exactly the kind of inference I think is to some extent intellectually dishonest.  All the term "hate crime" does is try to make certain crimes sound worse because of extraneous political considerations.  I'm not sure there is any meaningful way to say which case was worse; obviously more were killed in the church shooting, but I suspect the Wint victims suffered far more over the length of their ordeal.  I think it is foolish to try to get into such comparisons, and the hate crime concept does so for no good reason, in my estimation.

Having said that, there is zero doubt that the church shooting was a racist incident.  I mean, the guy actually said as much.     [/quote]

Sigh... The murder of people for racist reasons is a separate issue and that is why we draw these distinctions. It has nothing to do with who suffers more or which crime is more heinous. It is the about the motivations behind the crime and the fact that black people were singled out as targets of violence. Unfortunately, this kind of thing can spark copycat crimes. There are MANY reasons to be upset about hate crimes and it is not just the fact that people were killed. Have you taken American history 101? Geez. [/quote]

Sigh.  Do you know how hate crimes laws work?  They enhance the sentence beyond what is normally available for a specific criminal act.  By definition, they reflect a judgment that hate crimes are more "heinous" than otherwise identical crimes committed for other reasons.  That's the whole point of them. You are being intellectually dishonest to deny that.  [/quote]

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