Imagine being in Sderot, Israel, and hearing Hamas rockets land near your home. You’re scared, you instantly take mental stock of your family members’ locations. Then you hear gunfire. Screaming. You recognize a scream. A few minutes later, you’re holding your daughter’s corpse. She’s still warm and will be for a while yet, but she is dead. A Hamas bullet severed her subclavian artery, and that was that. You pray out loud, essentially singing, to trade places with her. It doesn’t work. She is dead. You are alive. You want to die. You won’t.

Can you kill anyone to fix this? Who? Where are they? Do you bring your other children with you to do it? Or do you get a babysitter for your other kids so you can go try and kill them? Is your babysitter alive? If you can’t kill your child’s murderer specifically, is there someone else you could kill? Would it feel good then and there, like working out or taking a shit? If so, how long would it take the feeling to dissipate?

If someone killed my child in front of me, I suspect I’d do my best to kill them right back. I wouldn’t be in the right, but people would get it. That said, I’ve always opposed the death penalty because it makes mistakes and is racist in its implementation. In the United States, it has been demonstrated to repeatedly kill innocent people and is disproportionately used against black people. The state should be “better” at solving problems than a violently bereaved father, but in the case of the United States, it is very often not.