Reply #43: Furthermore, righteousness is not always defined by what you "WANT"

[American Tragedy]

to do. Just because you feel a strong desire to kill does not make it right, nor does it remotely qualify you to be the ideal arbiter of justice. Part of the point of the justice system is that it is implemented by an ostensibly impartial third party (the state) which doesn't have an emotional ax to grind.

In any case, I would not want to kill someone, even one who killed someone I loved, if they were already safely in custody. Aside from finding the mental image of stabbing someone in the head and throat unbearably gruesome and primitive, it would resolve nothing, and as hippywife and others have said, it merely continues the cycle of violence. Incidentally, most of the industrialized world has drawn this conclusion as well.