My Word for May 13, 2001

I want to talk about the death penalty. Not so much as it has to do with Tim Mcveigh, but as it has to do with our friends in what is called Europe.

Europeans are appalled that we have a death penalty. In today's New York Times, an editorial describes how any American tourist traveling in Europe is almost always confronted by a question about our death penalty.

The Brits, the French, the Germans ... those insufferable Scandanavians ... they all think they are so much more advanced because their societies, en masse, disapprove of death as a punishment for killers.

It is so much more enlightened to pack a killer away in a small room and punish him with bad wine for the rest of his natural days.

In this, and other matters involving similar European snobbery, I urge Americans to tell the Europeans to buzz off.

Europe doesn't have 20-some-odd thousand murders a year. Europeans don't have a Second Amendment. In fact, they have no amendments. So, they don't have to deal with people who can't handle their right to possess a gun.

These are American problems and we've learned to deal with them, in part because we've got a death penalty to dispatch with those who just can't get it right.

Sure, we may want to end the death penalty ourselves. We may think too many poor people get death, or too many black people, or too many people who didn't actually commit the crime ... but why should we take advice from nations that have stuffy aristocrats as monarchs, or whose history was built on the guillotine, or — for that matter — why should we take advice from a country that put a guy like Hitler in charge?

Here in America, we will execute Tim McVeigh and other guilty killers if we darn well please.

So ... Europe, buzz off.

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