Please know that I wouldn’t twist your response to accuse you of sympathy for the assassin; that’d be straight-up trolling. My lack of sympathy, similarly, I hope will not be used as evidence that I am a heartless scofflaw. The beating the assassin took, however vicious and/or however criminal, was an expected outcome of his action. If you attack [member of group] in front of [group] –  and that’s physically, verbally, or otherwise — [group] won’t like you very much. If [member] turns into [leader], expect the worst. Sadly, that’s what humans do, and we’re very, very good at it. Doesn’t make it right or legal; it’s just what happens. For the assassin to expect any different treatment would be folly. The execrable idea of “suicide by cop” (I really hate that term) is, unfortunately, operative in this situation; unless he was delusional or simply irretrievably stupid, the assassin could not have expected to make it out in one piece.

Perhaps I erred in trying to minimize the beat-down. I suppose I should have said that the assassin got off lucky that he didn’t get killed right there (although his punishment, and the incarceration leading up to it, will surely be a far worse fate), and not tried to qualify it. Sorry for ruffled feathers.

You do not lose your basic human rights, no matter what you do. Yes, he tried to kill someone. There will be a judge, there will be a trial and there will be some form of punishment, according to the laws of the country. 

The bodyguards who kicked the man while he was on the ground, are no better than him. Their job is to protect their client – something they have failed at abysmally. Their job is not to deal out punishment, for this is the sole right of the state. They assaulted a defenceless person in a manner that could have led to grieveously bodily harm or even death (if one of those thugs had hit the guy in the head). 

Kicking a man who lies on the floor is a crime, no matter if the man himself is a criminal. 

This is not about sympathising with a would be assassin. This is about rising above bronze age concepts of justice and society. 

If one plans to kill someone — not grumbling and stewing, and muttering under one’s breath “ooh, if I only had the chance,” but really, truly planning to take someone’s life, acquiring the means to do so, and then attempting to execute the plan, no pun intended — and the result is that one fails and subsequently sustains a whoopin’ (and, I think we can all be honest about this, having seen anything from a complete UFC match to only just snippets of what goes on in an octagon, that really wasn’t much of a beating), one had it comin’. Obv, sure, and it doesn’t make the beating, live and in living color, any less shocking; I guess this is just a longish, poorly-worded way of expressing that I can’t muster much/any sympathy for the assassin taking the whoopin’.

I suppose the bright side (?) to this is that the attempt on Doğan’s life failed; had the assassin succeeded, the body count would have been waaay higher than just one: Doğan, the assassin, and all the other probably-completely-uninvolved folks who would have been (and, sadly, may still be) swept up in reactionary ethnic violence. Ah, the Balkans.

[sigh] Humans…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzF_TbmDH5s

It’s not likely that the fellow with the gun intended to use it, because he took his sweet time.

Just another day in the Balkans.