Bren,
That is one of my gripes, free Porridge.
They don't have to worry about the cost of heating in winter, cost of a pint of milk , oats etc., it is all provided FOC by you and me and other law abiding tax payers.
All these types have committed crimes with total disregard to others .
If we cannot have the death penalty back, how about 'hard labour' ?
Quarrying stone to repair our worn out roads, litter picking to tidy up our beautiful countryside, digging out and restoring our canal system.
Rather than playing Pool and getting high on illegal drugs smuggled into prisons.
How can we have double standards such as giving vermin a comfortable life locked up for murdering and attempting murder.
Then to cap it all we sentence one of our own serving soldiers to potential life imprisonment for 'cruelly' killing a member of the Taloban !
That soldier, we paid to train him to kill and sent him into a hostile environment, which we all actually regret ever getting involved in and cannot wait to pull out of.
To be fair Pete, the people you're describing [i.e. the ones who take up or possess a sawn-off, whether they intend to use it or not] are, invariably, not the sharpest tools in the box and, as you quite rightly state, are, by default, criminals just for being in possession of one. That said, these clowns have always been with us since chemical elements transmogrified into the protozoa that then evolved and crawled from the primordial soup. So why should our times be any different?
And if we're taking another view on it, both Sweden and the Netherlands - traditionally two nations whose penal systems are routinely criticised for being too 'Hilton' in their amenities - have recently closed a bunch of prisons (Sweden 4 and the Cloggies 2, if memory serves) due to the way their systems works with offenders not to re-offend. Re-offending rates have dropped so sharply that they're having to close prisons. Imagine that.
As for the Marine who was sentenced, today, to 10 years in a civvie nick (and not the glass house in Colchester) for murdering an enemy combatant - alas, the poor Bootneck had a previously blemishless record - but was guilty in the first degree of breaking the 11th commandment: 'thou shalt not get caught' - albeit not his fault, as it was his fellow Bootie who was breaking operational procedure/orders not to go out on patrol wearing a helmet cam. The footage was found two years later by accident. The rest we know about.
I do agree that he, the Marine, would have jeopardised the lives of a casevac helicopter crew were he to have called one in - and by all counts, the Taliban in question had been hit by a number of 30-mil cannon rounds from an Apache (resulting in there not being much left of him and the Marine arguably having done him a favour by 'putting him out of his misery');
but, we can only deal with the evidence before us, and once that footage was found, the RMPs were duty-bound to prosecute; regardless of how "unfair" any of us might consider that decision to be.
As for hard labour - never gonna happen as long as we're part of, and adhere to, the articles of the ECHR (ironically largely written by an English barrister,
Lord Shawcross - who was Britain's chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials). Added to which, I've seen no evidence to suggest that even after having served penal servitude, that they'd not re-offend once they were released.
Lastly, capital punishment has proven, over several centuries,
not to be a deterrent: the proof's in the evidence - if it were, then people wouldn't murder other people any more, would they? And yet they continue to do so, especially in those countries where capital punishment is still on the statute books.
You won't get any argument from me on the fact that we should never have got involved in either of the campaigns in Iraq or Afghanistan. Fools' errands, both.
