Just a thought...

As you probably know, there's been another mass shooting. This time at a theater during the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises. Unlike most mass shootings, the gunman was caught alive. Now I know most will be calling for the death penalty, but I have a much more beneficial solution:

KEEP HIM ALIVE FOR SCIENCE.

Seriously, guys like James Holmes and Jared Lee Loughner need to be studied. They need to be poked, prodded, examined, and studied fully. Brain scans, blood work, psychological evaluations, etc. We have an opportunity to understand what makes people like this tick. And once they die (from natural causes, of course) we can take our studies to the next level.

Some of you may find what I'm suggesting to be a bit....extreme. However, I don't mean inhumane experiments. After all, we need our subjects alive and at least partially cooperative. I'm not talking about scienceing them to death, just enough so they can actually give back to society. What would happen if we just sent them to prison or we executed them? What good would that do? Now, think of things we could learn about the brain or even the human genome from them. Both of these shooters are young, so we'd have decades in which we could run these tests.

I don't know, maybe it's too crazy to ever think we'd go through with something like this. Maybe this is a terrible idea. I just hate the idea of people committing these atrocities with nothing to counter-balance that. I don't want to sound like I'm trying to cheapen what has been done. I just feel so outraged by tragedies like this. That someone could just go, "you know what? I think I want to kill a bunch of people" and then plan and plan and plan. What kind of mindset is that? How is a monster like that created? There are so many unanswered questions. So maybe, just maybe, I might be on to something.