Victims & Stolen M16s: It's Never All Black & White

A friend of ours recently questioned our referring to the two 17 year-old women involved in the Vina High School sex scandals as "victims." The word "victim" obviously has many connotations and certainly in legalese a victim might be one who intentionally made the wrong choices in order to promote an agenda but was deemed too young to be held responsible.

Do we personally call these two young women victims? We don't know their upbringing or in the case of Brian Keeton if any physical or chemical inducements were (allegedly) used. We're 99% sure from the details that have come to light so far that both these women need spankin' and the two coaches need divorcin'.

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Campbell's Madison Drug Bust

Now we come to a much more permanent type of  victim--a shooting/killing victim. For every victim who's murdered at random for money (think Mr. Elbert Farley in Tuscumbia), you have countless more who are murdered because of their choices and actions. That doesn't mean they should have been killed; it simply means if they had behaved in a rational, law abiding manner, they would not have been placed in a position to be murdered.

This latter group includes Thomas Grant Campbell. He's dead, so we don't know his side. We do know he willingly went to the Sheffield residence of Chris Martin. We do know that several local news agencies have pointed out that none of the three adults involved in the shooting have lived a completely law abiding life. Campbell's previous brushes with the law seems to have involved drugs and some (allegedly) stolen guns that precipitated his dishonorable discharge from the military.

This space is reserved for a sermon entitled "Life is Hard Enough without Drugs or Alcohol," but sadly such sermons never seem to reach their intended audience.



Shoalanda