What's your opinion on this?
Fund Considered for Va. Tech Victims
State Compensation Could Be Modeled on Program Created After 9/11 Attacks
By Tim Craig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 29, 2007; Page C01
RICHMOND -- Virginia legislators are considering creating a taxpayer-financed fund that would compensate the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre to try to stave off potential lawsuits.
The informal talks among legislators center around what, if any, responsibility the state should shoulder in financially supporting the more than two dozen injured students and faculty members, as well as the relatives of the 32 victims who were killed during the April 16 shooting.
A state fund could be modeled after the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, which Congress created in 2001 to disperse $7 billion in taxpayer money to the families of victims of the terror attacks in exchange for a waiver of their right to sue.
washingtonpost.com
One opinion can be found here
distributedrepublic.net
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My take is that if there is a real case (or enough of a threat of serious lawsuit problems even without a real case) that this would amount to an out of court settlement.
If there isn't any need for an out of court settlement, then I'd sort of be against the fund, for the same type of reasons laid out in the blog post. There is already a private fund (that received $7mil so far), and I don't see why it should be the governments job to try to compensate people that it hasn't harmed. (I suppose you could argue that it did harm them through disarming them with the "gun free school zone" rules, but that's a whole separate debate).
In addition to considerations like "should the government pay people who suffer when it isn't the government's fault (and the payments aren't really welfare or disaster relief, so any justification based on arguments for those things don't really apply), there is the point that lots of people suffer, why should someone shot in a mass shooting get money, while someone shot in a 7-11 robbery, or killed in a car accident doesn't?
OTOH I don't get worked up about it to the extent that Jonathan Wilde apparently does. Certainly there are a lot of worse things the government does with out money. Yes I know that that argument could be used to defend a lot of waste, and useless or even harmful programs, but still I'm not really upset about this one. |
