Death Penalty

[MindForgedManacle]

The whole secret of being a criminal is to know where to commit your crimes with the least risk to yourself. So if you kill someone in a State that has the death penalty you might get it if you get convicted. That Norwegian who killed all of those people a few years ago in Norway only got 20 some years in a nice prison. He would have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia. He would have been facing the death penalty in Texas. He would have gotten life in Minnesota.

Think before you act.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that people (much less the average criminal) is fully or mostly rational. And your own example is obviously flawed. That guy was, as you said, a Norwegian in Norway. I highly doubt he thought particularly much of the fact about Norway's lack of the death penalty, so much as he chose to kill in a place more convenient (i.e it's where he already lived). The massive amount of gun deaths and gun related injuries in the USA would seem to demonstrate that, seeing as people tend to have an idea of who and where they want to kill. If they were taking the laws into account uniformly, the crime statistics relating to guns would tend to be massively higher in all states without the death penalty.