A headstone at Hamilton Memorial Gardens in Hixson reads, "Edith Ivey Russell ... 1920 to 1983."
It adds, "Seeking justice."
Well, Mrs. Russell, if you are able to see what departing Gov. Phil Bredesen just did, you know that justice will not be done in your case - at least not in this world.
Right before leaving office, the governor commuted the death sentence of Edward Jerome Harbison, who, 28 years ago, bludgeoned you so savagely that he splattered your brains on a wall of your home in St. Elmo.
Rather than face a decidedly gentler death by lethal injection, Harbison will spend the remainder of his life in prison. Taxpayers will not quite cheerfully fund his room, board and medical care, as they have done these decades since he took your life and left your husband, Frank, to grieve and die a year later.
Bredesen justified the softer sentence by arguing that the crime was not as bad as some others that merited capital punishment. Of course, taking that to its logical extreme, no one would be executed because there's always a worse crime out there somewhere.
Around the time that he granted this inexplicable get-out-of-death-free card, Bredesen won an award for irony by instructing fellow elected officials to avoid "out-of-the-mainstream political issues," such as fighting illegal immigration and defending the right to bear arms. Those "distractions," he lectured, keep lawmakers from focusing on things like job recruitment.
Um, were we all imagining it or didn't Tennessee attract Volkswagen and other major economic developments the past few years despite robust debate on what Bredesen dismisses as "distractions"? If companies objected to the state's legislative focus, you'd think they'd stop sneaking in so many manufacturing plants.
More to the point, voters don't regard gun rights and border integrity as bothersome sideshows. Looking at the lawmakers for whom Tennesseans cast ballots, I'm betting the state's residents consider it pretty "mainstream" to uphold the Second Amendment and stem the back-breaking costs of illegal immigration.
Dollars to dishwater says what they don't find particularly mainstream is commuting the sentence of a murderer who created, according to one officer, "one of the most horrific scenes I have ever witnessed in my 27 years of law enforcement."
Well, it's all blood under the bridge now, Mrs. Russell. But maybe we'll luck out and Harbison won't kill again before he dies old and full of the years he denied you.
Gun control vs. crime control
A reader debunks the theory that excessive gun rights led to the shooting of a congresswoman and the slaughter of six others in Arizona. If the suspect is one-tenth as nutty as he seems, it's nuttier still to assume he would have been dissuaded from his course of action by fear of punishment for violating a law against firearms possession.
But fret not: The news media's pro-gun-control bias remains firmly in place.
"Arizona has become a national leader in the gun rights movement in recent years as the state enacted law after law to protect the people's right to bear arms nearly anywhere, at anytime," The Associated Press advises. "The shooting rampage that wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords ... has done nothing to slow down the Legislature."
So the default presumption is that it's self-evident that a state should consider broadly restricting the right to bear arms because of what authorities say were the acts of a lone madman. Everybody "knows" that.
But expand gun rights to let people defend themselves? Whoa there, Buster Brown! That's plumb wacky. Give us some proof that guns stop crime.
Naturally, when you do, the data you offer on crimes averted by lawful gun owners are not disputed (much less refuted) but mocked.
Happily, if you're one of America's overwhelmingly responsible gun owners, that suits you fine, because as C.S. Lewis put it, "Any man would much rather be called names than proved wrong."