Shooting in Colorado leaves 12 dead, 58 wounded.

[Tempus]

I checked and Colorado is a death penalty state. He'll likely get the needle for this. :/ I don't agree with that, however, just making a statement.

I'm in favour of execution in principle. Not for closure or as a warning -- I don't think it works for either. I think if it could be demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that person X had committed a particularly bad crime (such as the one being discussed), had zero chance of rehabilitating and that said crime wasn't the result of a potentially curable / manageable medical condition then it would be permissible to execute them in a painless manner. The rationale is that keeping someone alive simply to remain in prison their whole life is senseless, a waste of resources.

Real life is a little more complex though. The changes in health these past hundred or so years have revealed all sorts of things that inform our decisions when it comes to punishing people, as well as the notion of what constitutes accountability. Is the person with a golf ball size tumour in their brain responsible for their erratic behaviour? In practice, it's difficult to find concrete answers and there's always the chance something has been overlooked. In a non-ideal world I think it's best to make decisions that protect people while still accounting for that possibility of something being overlooked.

Ah, and the shooter's family. It may be that if he were imprisoned for life that they would still visit him and get something from that. I think sometimes it's forgotten that the perpetrators of horrible crimes have their own families who often suffer along with the victims'. Not only will they know their child/sibling/parent has had their future effectively ended, but it's also possible they'll feel partly responsible.