Media Monster

Mike Francesa Wonders If Torture Should Be Legalized To Deal With People Like The Colorado Shooter

As we said earlier today, unfortunately the biggest story of the day was the massacre in a Colorado movie theater that left 12 people dead and dozens more injured. It was such a big story, in fact, that it made it onto outlets that normally wouldn’t concern themselves with non-sports stories – outlets like Mike Francesa’s show on WFAN. Francesa used the incident as a jumping-off point to talk about why we like, and even need, to talk about sports… oh, and he also mused about potentially legalizing torture.

First off, Francesa honestly made a decent point when he said he was uneasy with the idea of the 24-hour news cycle essentially making a celebrity of alleged shooter James Holmes in the coming weeks. It’s a fine line to walk – we want information about a tragedy like this, it’s reporters’ duty to get information about a tragedy like this – but to a warped mind like the one that would commit such a crime, is all that information about them getting out there a good thing? And then, the torture talk, which starts up at the 2:25 mark:

In fairness, this was about as muted a “maybe legalize torture” discussion as one could have, though perhaps that’s not saying much. Francesa couched it in some hedging (“It’s almost like you want to legalize torture in these cases”), so he wasn’t exactly gung-ho about the idea. Still, he talked of wanting some “deterrent” to people like the shooter “while we still retain our humanity.” Unfortunately, the “torture” thing is a slippery slope – it provokes arguments this heated for a reason. One the door’s opened, hard to close it back up.

Additionally: all we have right now is a shooting suspect. In the aftermath of an event this heinous, the “do whatever you can to make someone not wan to do a thing like this” option sounds appealing, but if a situation ever arose where a “deterrent” got used on someone who turned out to be innocent, you’d have a shitstorm on your hands – and for good reason. (Maybe Francesa was talking about torture after the person’s been tried and convicted, but from what we can tell, that’s not clear.)

Another issue: how much of a deterrent would torture be, really? As we’ve established, whoever would open fire in a movie theater and kill 12 people has some serious, serious issues, and the potential of something bad (beyond a prison term) happening to them after they commit the crime isn’t especially likely to make an impact on such a disturbed mind. More likely, something would need to change that would make it harder to commit such a crime in the first place, and that’s why you’ll see – and are already seeing – U.S. gun laws once again being heavily scrutinized.

Clearly, heavy stuff – way more so than the usual sports talk radio (or any talk radio, really) fare, and just like Francesa said, it made us glad to have sports. So, in that spirit, we’ll close on a lighter note and say we’re really glad the above clip incudes the “Mike’s On” jingle. There are very few situations its delightful corniness can’t brighten up just a bit.

[h/t Bob's Blitz]