I've been doing some thinking about hate crimes the past few weeks. Hate crime legislation, particularly. I've been trying to understand why reading about lynchings in the history of my area bothers me in a way reading about robberies-turned-homicide in the newspaper doesn't. I've been trying to understand why I thought additional legislation was a good thing even though anything that a hate crime law applies to is already a crime.

I've come to understand in the past few days. A hate crime occurs when one human decides that the personal characteristics of another human mean that the laws and moral codes preventing various acts no longer apply to that other human. It really isn't a crime against a single individual, although an individual may be the only one left bleeding or dead because of it, because the real target was the bigger group as symbolized by that individual.

This to me seems particularly the case in instances of killing violence.