Thou shalt not kill

Arizona Daily Wildcat Erin Kirsten Stein

But everyone seems to agree with one golden rule; thou shalt not kill.

I mean, this is obvious, right? You're not supposed to kill someone else. It's wrong.

Yet, we allow it to happen every day. We allow our government to permit it to happen. We allow other governments to permit it to happen.

History's most horrific tales are of state or church sanctioned killings: the hanging of witches, the gas chambers of the Holocaust and the crucifixions of thieves. Have we learned nothing from history?

In Afghanistan today, an adulterous couple caught together is stoned to death. Is this right?

We don't think those things happen in our country. Those other countries, far away, have all sorts of horrible outdated laws we ignore because they are not our own.

Today, our government kills people. Capital punishment still exists in our country.

Of course, we don't kill people for adultery. We kill murderers. After all, they deserve it, right? An eye for an eye.

But ask yourself: Do they deserve to be killed? If murdering someone is so wrong, does it make sense to perpetuate it by adding another murder to the list?

Murdering the murderer makes the victims feel better, but is that enough justification? Do they need to be killed, if they are behind bars and no longer a threat?

Can anyone really deserve to have their life extinguished?

Our society supposedly abhors the notion of murder, yet we ignore it all the time. We see death on the news and think, "Oh, how sad," until we change the channel to find "The Simpsons." It happens to other people so it's not something we need to worry about. It'll never touch our family.

We watch movies full of death and senseless killing and make heroes out of the stars. We expect violence in films; very violent films are often given the highest praise. No one gets upset that they are entertained by representations of death. Because the bad guys always get it in the end.

Amy Biehl was murdered in South Africa. She was there on a Fulbright scholarship to study women's issues. She was caught up in a multiracial conflict and killed because she was white, even though she was sympathetic to her killers' cause.

Her mother did not try to stop the killers from receiving amnesty. They were members of a political party bringing change to South Africa that her daughter had supported.

So what makes a bad guy?

We close our emotions and senses down when we see death because it would be too painful to deal with every murder we hear about. But maybe that's exactly what this country needs; we need to feel every death as if it were our spouse's, our children's, our best friend's, so that we are unable to ignore it anymore.

If killing is wrong, why do we let it happen? Why don't we care?

Erin Kirsten Stein is a senior majoring in creative writing and journalism.