If you really want to punish the Fort Hood murderer

 

. . . maybe he shouldn’t be given the death penalty.

I remember seeing a poster years ago that just had a picture of a teenage boy in a wheelchair.  The caption read, “Sometimes suicide doesn’t work.”

I thought that was such a compelling effort to deter teenagers from thoughts of suicide.  While they might be thinking death would be easier to face that whatever “insurmountable” (in their young minds) problems they were facing, the thought of having to live their lives with those problems plus being disabled might be a compelling deterent.

A man who belonged to the church I attended in my growing-up years, had a bullet lodged in his brain from a failed teenage suicide attempt.  He was a brilliant engineer, so obviously, the attempt didn’t hinder his thought processes, but he always had fragile health with many health problems related to the lodged bullet.

I now hear that the Fort Hood coward is paralyzed from the waist down.  And that makes me wonder if him having to live as a paraplegic (in prison without possibility of parole, of course) who also would have to suffer the disdain of everyone who dealt with him and knew what he had done, wouldn’t be a more appropriate punishment than the death penalty.