Christopher Lane – Another Senseless Murder

Just when you thought you’d seen and heard the worst, yet another tragic headline grabs your attention.  Christopher Lane was a 22 year-old Australian student attending East Central University.  He was a catcher on the school’s baseball team.  The Melbourne native was jogging in Duncan, Oklahoma last Friday, the hometown of his girlfriend of nearly four years, Sarah Harper.  Lane was jogging north on Country Club Road when three teenagers saw him run by.  The trio got into a car and followed.  One of them then shot Lane once in the back and the three drove away - a cold-blooded killing.

According to an article in the Duncan Banner, Duncan Police Chief Danny Ford said one of the suspects, 17 year-old Michael Jones, had implicated  16 year-old Chancey Luna as the trigger man.  A 15 year-old suspect, James Edwards, is also in custody.  Luna and Edwards are held without bond.  Jones is held under a $1 million bond.  All are in the Stephens County Jail.  Parents interviewed do not believe, of course, that their children could ever be involved in such a heinous act.  No parent wants to believe that their child could.  But a confession is something an innocent person just does not give.  Chief Ford also doubts that the shooting is gang related.  “Gangs shoot each other; they don’t shoot people walking down the street.”  That’s debatable. Gang members do take the lives of innocent people, as cases in Los Angeles involving a baby, a mother and a teen football player illustrate.

The way I see this, you do the crime, you do the time.  Or as should be the case here, you do the swinging-as in from a rope.  Personally, I wish they’d bring back the gallows.  Perhaps a few public hangings would sober up our society a bit from this obsession with violence we’re so enamored with.  We’ve become far too desensitized.  Specifically, our kids have become too desensitized.  Whoever is ultimately proven guilty of such a heinous act, whether they are 16 or 60, should get the death penalty.  This is nothing short of cold-blooded, calculated murder.  According CBS News, these punks were ‘bored’.  They shot and killed an innocent man because they were bored!  And they can’t get the death penalty.  We don’t execute anyone under 18.  We’re too righteous for that.

But there is another aspect of this case that much of media are simply ignoring, so far.  Two of the three of the suspects in this case are black.  The victim was white.  Seems that this would qualify as a hate crime, right?  To be honest, I hate the term ‘hate crime’.  Crime is crime.  Murder is murder.  The race of the victim or the assailant should not be of issue.  In the case of the Trayvon Martin shooting, the media at-large damn near broke their collective necks labeling George Zimmerman a ‘white Hispanic’.  Yes, they actually made up a whole new race to stoke the fires in that case.  Why?  Because it served their own sick little political agenda, of course.  But here, much as we saw in the case of the murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, the race of the murderers received scant mention in few publications.  In fact, that case received very little national attention.  I’m sure Lane’s murder and the trial of those accused will garner very little national attention either.  It doesn’t fit the lamestream media’s mold of beneficial journalism.

The three accused in Lane’s murder will face life in prison at most.  The Lane family, as so many other families have done, will grieve their loss from now on.  Their son died, most likely, just because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He did nothing wrong.  Those accused, once convicted, will get three-hots-and-a-cot at the expense of the Oklahoma taxpayers for several decades.  But it won’t stop there.

The gun-grabbing, leftist Second Amendment haters will come out of the woodwork once again, screaming and screeching about how congress must take action and disarm our society for its own good.  Make no mistake; gun or no gun, people with evil in their hearts will do evil.  If not a gun, a knife, a car, a shovel, a toothpick-they’ll find a way to carry out their sick intentions one way or another.  Disarming you and I will do nothing to prevent another murder such as this.  Might Lane be alive had he been armed?  In this case, it’s doubtful.  The assailants were cowards who shot him in the back.  I  doubt he ever actually saw their faces.  But you and I don’t want to live in a nation where we are stripped of the right and the ability to defend ourselves and our families from thugs.