*originally printed in Red Shtick Magazine – September, 2007 (pdf)
As we go about our daily lives, we are given to forget the things that make our daily lives possible. Part of the reason that we live in peace and comfort is the fact that billions before us died, so they take up less space and generally cause less trouble. Many of them died from natural causes, but others died from supernatural causes, like being killed by some a–hole.
Human life and civilization depend on the death of human beings, so as civilized people, we must cultivate a balanced and moral understanding of the value of human life and death. We must strive to be enlightened humanitarians while still satisfying the need for some people to be dead. Nature will certainly satisfy some of this need, but we are industrious creatures, and to grow and expand, we must provide for ourselves.
Our needs as human beings are only met when we have power over the life and death of other human beings. To protect our right to fulfill this need, we protect our right to bear arms with passion and ambition. In a technologically advanced society, the only way for a population to protect itself is with inexpensive and readily available weaponry. To maintain social equality, the ignorant and lazy must have the right to easily purchase powerful firearms to protect themselves from the hyper-educated intelligentsia and their homemade electro-laser cannons.
Handguns are a simple and efficient equalizer. Handguns give power to the weak and weak-minded: real power, not like the pen, voting, knowledge, or any of that crap. Small, light, concealable, and fun, handguns allow any man, woman, or child to intimidate, maim, or kill as nature intended.
With total equality achieved through mass armament, we must still protect human life and encourage people not to kill each other unnecessarily. Modern civilization has created a mechanism to protect human life from rampant cycles of violence and retribution. The solution is as simple as the problem: Kill people that kill other people. We do not apply this solution indiscriminately; we reserve capital punishment for the most heinous offenders and people we need to kill to prove a point.
Capital punishment should be considered analogous to antimurder or unmurder. It is as antimatter is to matter. The two are tangible and real but annihilate one another, releasing extreme forces. Capital punishment acts as unmurder by discouraging murder while effectively canceling its overall effect on society.
Because of strong unmurder legislation, we have a much lower net murder rate, if we calculate murder and unmurder together. If we include those killed in police raids or by prison rape, we have mathematically eliminated murder in our society.
This mathematical balance is threatened by the growing popularity of suicide. It is especially attractive to those enduring extreme suffering who are so very close to a natural, moral, and legal death.
Suicide is analogous to double murder. It counts as the deaths of both a victim and killer, but it cannot be reconciled by retributive unmurder. The only way to discourage suicide is to legislate its immorality and severely punish those who assist in the process. State-mandated punitive death should be the only legally permissible form of death available to those who aren’t already dead or going to be.
We have the tools to kill each other and the laws to kill each other for doing that. If we apply them wisely, we can maintain a civilized and moral understanding of life and death.
Compassion for all human life is the true measure of our moral values. We are a great people, and the way we run our society today will teach our grandchildren’s grandchildren the value of human life and show them the path to the future. When they arrive at that future, they will appreciate that we are dead and take up less space and generally cause less trouble.