Unhinged

Amer­i­cans have decided that it’s okay for a cer­tain num­ber of our own peo­ple to die in the War On Ter­ror. Even if those peo­ple did noth­ing wrong. Over 6000 U.S. Ser­vice­men and women have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003.

The U.S. Prison Sys­tem is over­flow­ing with expensive-to-house nasty crim­i­nals who have done some­thing wrong. More than two mil­lion of them. Half of state pris­on­ers were con­victed of vio­lent crimes. That’s a lot of folks who have hurt other folks, and chances are they’ll do it again if they get out. We’re pay­ing to house them and feed them and pro­vide them with cable tv. At an aver­age of sixty bucks a day, these bad­dies are cost­ing us a bundle.

War costs more than just lives. 2000-pound JDAM smart bombs cost about $25,000 these days. Each. On the other hand, Wing­suits cost a cou­ple of grand. You can get a nifty GPS unit for a hun­dred and fifty bucks. Add a con­victed vio­lent crim­i­nal and a few pounds of C4 and you’ve got your­self a truly ter­ri­fy­ing smart bomb at a cost sav­ings that any tax­payer can appreciate.

But what if those vio­lent crim­i­nals were wrongly con­victed? Well, that’s pretty rare. We’ve already estab­lished that we’re will­ing to let a num­ber of guilt-free peo­ple die in order to fight this war, so what’re a few more?

Imag­ine the effect it would have! You’re sit­ting there assem­bling your lat­est IED and you hear a hair-raising death-scream com­ing at you at two hun­dred miles per hour. You look up and see Explod­ing Char­lie Man­son incom­ing and you’ve got to won­der what sort of satanic whack­jobs would launch a meat­bomb at you. Word would get out, and maybe it would deter a few ter­ror­ists. If we’re really lucky, it might deter a few poten­tial vio­lent crim­i­nals as well.