Thank you for explaining to me how I see the world. I always appreciate it when someone goes to that effort on my behalf, especially unasked. I must concede I'm no logician, but then I never know quite how to approach these debates; as you've noticed, I greatly enjoy rhetoric and incline very strongly in that direction, but it's a form which has been roughly handled of late by the partisans of what is called "social science", and the trappings of rigor are frequently necessary in order to have a conversation with that sort at all. (Though I wonder whether "conversation" is really the word.)

The use of "honest citizen" and "criminal" was an instance of extreme imprecision on my part, brought about by unnecessary haste to reach my point, and you're right to pick on that. I could much more usefully replace those terms with "one who seeks to contribute to society" and "one who seeks to parasitize society". While still imprecise, those phrases come much closer to the heart of the distinction I draw.

You will no doubt take exception to that latter phrase in particular, and I don't blame you; "parasite" in description of any person is an extremely loaded word. Let me respond in kind by noting that "rehabilitation" is the wrong term for your meaning. To rehabilitate someone is to restore him to an ability which he previously lacked. But someone who is not able to obey the law, be he willing or otherwise, is not someone our society generally regards as criminal, because he cannot accurately be said to have possessed mens rea -- in other words, he lacks the capacity to know that what he is doing is unlawful. For some who break the law, this is true. For many, many more who break the law, this is not true in the slightest; most who break laws choose to do so, whether they conceive of themselves as having done so or otherwise.

Such a person need not be "rehabilitated", because his problem is not that he is unable to behave in accordance with the requirements of society, but rather that he chooses to do otherwise. The process through which he needs to go, in order to be restored to society's good graces, cannot therefore be accurately called rehabilitation; unfortunately, I'm not sure that our modern vernacular has a word which does describe that process. In days gone by, this process was considered one of penitence, hence the old name "penitentiary" for that institution which we now call a "prison".

Moreover, I consider the rehabilitative model a grave insult against the human dignity of most who commit crimes -- specifically, all those who commit crimes while being able to behave otherwise should they so choose. You seem to regard these people, more or less, as though they were ill, or perhaps mentally disabled; in other words, you consider them as bereft of either the necessary volition to behave other than in a criminal fashion, or of the necessary reason to differentiate behavior which accords with society's requirements from behavior which does not.

The Soviet travesty of criminal justice, for at least a considerable part of its existence, regarded its dissidents in precisely this fashion, and labeled them with a variety of pseudo-psychiatric diagnoses in an effort to explain the supposed insanity which rendered them unable to recognize the obviously ongoing triumph of dialectical materialism. You may have heard the phrase "sluggish schizophrenia"; in this enormity it has its origin, and I'm sure you can imagine what life became for those misfortunates who fell foul of the Soviet state in this fashion. Years prior, during the eugenics fad in the United States, a family history of criminal behavior was considered grounds for sterilization, in order to prevent whatever genetic traits led to such misbehavior from propagating further.

Do I seek to slander you by these invidious comparisons? I do not. I seek merely to place in sharp relief some historical consequences of the way you look at criminal behavior, in order to help demonstrate the essential difference between my attitude toward that subject and yours. Specifically, where you by default regard someone who has committed a crime -- "done a shitty thing", in your formulation -- as being unwell or mentally disabled and therefore in need of custodial care to restore him to full health, I by default regard him as having made a choice to behave as he has, and, until he demonstrates otherwise, being just as fully equipped as anyone else to choose to behave otherwise. The former, if I may borrow a term from the vernacular of the social sciences, dehumanizes him; the latter instead exalts that sine qua non of humanity, the ability to make moral choices, that which Catholics call the indwelling Holy Spirit, which Quakers call the Inner Light, and the existence of which even those au courant with the most modern atheistic agnosticism recognize, even if they tend to lack words with which to name it.

Let me finally address the siege mentality under which you seem wrongly to believe I labor. When I speak of "enemy", I refer not to some nebulous Lacanian Other, but instead to the man who is not satisfied merely to mug someone on the street for his wallet, but feels it necessary to answer any resistance with a knife, or a gun, or worse indignities still. I've been fortunate thus far in never having fallen foul of such men myself, despite having lived in some of the less delightful areas of a city generally regarded as not particularly safe. Not all my friends and acquaintances have had the same good fortune. I acknowledge that this somewhat prejudices my perspective on the matter. No doubt firsthand experience would prejudice my perspective still further. Should it not be so? Do you ask that I not merely vow allegiance to your principles, but value those principles more highly than I value my own life and unpunctured carcass? You are of course welcome to make whatever decision in that regard you find meet, inasmuch as it concerns your own meat; I'll thank you not to tell me how to dispose of mine, it being the only one I've got and a whole life's worth of use to get out of it.

Perhaps you believe it is possible to render firearms unavailable to men of such ilk. While that belief seems optimistic at best given the commonality of firearms in the United States, we need not stipulate in either direction to acknowledge that, be he able or unable to lay hands on a gun, he will certainly have no difficulty in finding a knife.

Perhaps you believe it is possible to empanel a sufficiency of police officers to ensure that such men are unable to pursue their fell trade. This has been tried. It has never worked. I see no reason to imagine it will ever work. The police we do have, God protect them, have among themselves a saying: "When seconds count, the police are there in minutes." And even if it were possible so to multiply their ranks, it is inherently enfeebling of self-respect and self-determination to be dependent, for such a basic need as the integrity of one's own corpus, on another human being -- the condition of a child, not that of an adult.

I have no general fear of my fellow man; as far as I can tell, everybody's just trying to get through the day, the same as me, and why not? But if my fellow man should start to think that the best way for him to get through his day might be to interrupt mine with a demand for my wallet and a weapon at the ready should I presume to demur, I am very much in favor of the idea that he should be afraid of me -- not because I mean him harm, which I do not, but because he recognizes that, should he offer me harm, I'm just likely to see him and raise him.

Is this an ideal state of affairs? Of course not, but no ideal state of affairs is attainable in any case -- that's what "ideal" means. But I greatly prefer the situation I describe to one in which, should my fellow man take it in mind to behave toward me with fell intent, he feels free to do so unencumbered by any shadow of concern that his intended victim might ventilate him, instead. Were that state of affairs more general, I misdoubt I'd have fewer friends with scars.