The Death Penalty

I recently watched a video from the YouTube user ATXgambino entitled “Texas Death Penalty Video 2”. It is a pretty simple video with it only using a couple sentences and a string of photographs. It starts off by saying, “Texas Death Row Inmates.. Isn’t it MORONIC that our government kills people to show people that killing people is wrong?” After that it shows around three minutes of pictures of prisoners who are on death row while playing calming music. After the pictures, it ends by saying, “I’m not saying that these people don’t deserve to die. But WHAT IF ONE of them were innocent? What if it were YOU? Think about it…” It closes with an inmate giving us the finger while the screen says, “F--- The Death Penalty! And F--- it’s supporters!”

The mindset of the video’s producer is very clear, but its execution was lacking. Three minutes of flashing random people’s faces in the video gets old fast. I didn’t really understand that aspect of the video. How is that supposed to persuade me to joining their cause? The producer also used calming, relaxing music to try and coax people to feel sympathy for the prisoners. It seemed like the producer decided that if they couldn’t win people over with logic, they would try to use music instead. Now I will go on to the main point that the author was gunning for. The government isn’t “killing people to show people that killing people is wrong”. The government is killing people who have killed innocent individuals. Maybe it would have been a more fair argument if the user would’ve included a picture of the innocent person whose life was lost, next to the murder who took it. Finally, ending the video by showing an obscene gesture and using foul language made the video lose what little credibility that it already had.