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Takeaways from the "hate crime" in Chicago

By Scott Tibbs, January 13, 2017

The "hate crime" in Chicago teaches us two things: Superpredators do exist and hate crimes do not.

I explored superpredators last year. We have greatly over-applied the term and went way too far in our criminal justice policies as a result.But superpredators - people who rape, kill and maim without any human decency or restraint whatsoever. John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy were superpredators. The three monsters who laughed and joked while brutally torturing a mentally disabled man and streaming the torture live on Facebook are absolutely superpredators.

While "superpredator" has been overused, we should not throw away the term because it describes a real phenomenon. Just because a word has been used poorly does not mean that word should be banished.

The thing that worries me more is conservatives rushed to label this a "hate crime." This is wrong-headed and dangerous. We have once again surrendered to the Left's definitions and the Left's basic premise. Crimes are not worse because they are motivated by race, sex, political orientation or disability. These three monsters would need to spend the rest of their lives behind bars no matter what the motivation for their crime was.

Conservatives have spent decades arguing against "hate crime" laws, because they criminalize thought and because they make some victims of crime "more equal" than others. Now, because some conservatives see a short-term political gain, they are latching on to the term "hate crime." Sadly, this includes some conservatives who really ought to know better and have stood against "hate crime" laws in the past.

We should not so casually toss aside our principles for very short-term political gain.