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Originally Posted by TSGracchus
I'm talking common-sense meanings of language, not legalities. It's possible that the legal definition of murder stretches to encompass the accidental death of persons engaged in criminal activity, but to ordinary understanding that's a weird quirk of the law.
After all, the legal issue here is dead. We're concerned with a moral issue, and how we should regard what they did. If you want to include serious criminality in the analogy, say that the victim was driving while intoxicated. It's still not murder.
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From a moral standpoint, I believe that they are culpable in the deaths of their three co-conspirators.
If they had botched their planning and killed someone during one of their intentional bombings, that would have been murder, correct?
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Originally Posted by TSGracchus
Very well. I can go with arson. That probably avoids false connotations of triviality which "vandalism," however technically correct, conveys.
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Fair enough.
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Originally Posted by TSGracchus
The implication of the above two sentences is that the bombs they planted in buildings killed people. This is false. The only people who were killed by their activities were themselves. A fully correct statement would be: "They bombed buildings. In the course of their criminal enterprise, several of them accidentally killed themselves."
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What do you make of the well documented fact that one of the bombs they were building was an anti-personnel device planned for a dance at Fort Dix?
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Originally Posted by TSGracchus
If they were, I SHOULDN'T see it that way. I'm as human as anyone, and we don't have an example before us. In the future, should I come across one, I shall keep this discussion in mind.
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I honestly don't care about the political bent of the bombers - left wing, right wing, it's irrelevant IMHO.
They put lives at risk by bombing buildings. They were intent on mass murder when the premature detonation killed three of their members.
But not for the accidental explosion, they would have gone on to murder who knows how many people. One doesn't wrap a bomb with nails to make a statement - that's an act of premeditation of murder.
Matt