July 13th

I was party to an interesting discussion today. Someone I work with peripherally was thinking about markets with gaps in that she could fill and concluded quite seriously and with no little passion that a lucrative profession for her would be as a paid assassin. Her logic is that society is full of people who do disgusting and despicable things to innocent people. She cited the rapist of the three year old who is out again having served just five years of a fifteen year sentence. She cited the yobs who murder a pensioner for a fiver and so on. She said that the families of the victims and the victims themselves have to live with the fear and misery of these people being at large because so often the law lets them down. She said that for a fee she would free them of the threat of "these vermin" and reckons that 95% of the population would be pleased. She views it as a service to society that society would pay for and not condemn whilst not actively condoning it. She even reckons that it would be pleasing to God.

Of course I put the Christian view that Christ died for sinners and enquired why she felt that her judgement was more right than the state's and put to her the later consequences to the victim's families of taking life etc etc. But I find myself less horrified by her thinking than I might have expected. I do not think for one second that she or anyone else should take on this role - but there is something in the thinking that is heroic in a very fundamental sense - that defends the brutalised against both the brutish and the ridiculous pc-ness of the law. Incidentally, I don't think this particular person would pursue such a design, but it does raise some interesting quetions.