LogFAQs > #930480305

Kyuubi4269 posted...

_AdjI_ posted...

As I mentioned earlier, the hate crime aspect is less relevant to the crime at hand and more relevant to determining how much of a threat they are to society (which should always be the primary consideration in sentencing somebody). Somebody shoots up a church because they were bullied by some of the congregants, they're going to have fewer potential future targets than somebody who shoots up the church because it was full of a certain type of people. The former is emotionally unstable, the latter is genocidal, meaning the latter is more dangerous.

Then you can remove the narrow definition specifying a hate crime and just punish people who act in this kind of way. The issue isn't targeting a protected class, it's the mindset of murdering a collective like it's a single, inhuman entity.

I'd be fine with defining hate crime like that. As you say, it's not an issue of whether or not the target is a protected class (although the concept is usually applied to protect a class that an appreciable number of people want to target), it's a matter of killing on an impersonal basis that implies they have many more potential targets.