Question I am responding to: How should hate crimes—such as firebombings—be punished?
A hate crime like firebombing clearly has a long history of a problem history behind it. People would not be committing crimes like that unless they were very, irrationally I would say, angry about something. Like from the reading where it discussed 20 incidents of vandalism against his newspaper and Tisdale recalled the fire bombing incidents more so than the other, this is an act not just of meanness, or racism, not an act of crew words or spray painting, but it is an act of extreme violence that legal bodies must punish with a swiftness and show the punishment publicly in order that other people will not do similar things.
Tisdale was so shaken up by the incident of his paper being fire-bombed that he even remembered the date, December 1st, 1981 that it happened. He emerged from the ashes and somehow managed to even get his paper published on the schedule he had set before the bombing. I think that was an act of defiance against his enemies who attacked him because of his race. He did not want to allow them to affect how he was running his business because by doing that he would be giving them a power that he did not want them to have.
The fact is though, people who want to commit these hate crimes do have such power if the legal system, government and police cannot do anything to stop them. This is why it is so important to not just have laws that punish these crimes harshly but to live up to those laws.
