Okay, I'm going to stick my neck out here and ask a question....... why is this necessary?
"Hate crimes motivated by race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, and identity or disability not only injure individual victims, but also terrorize entire segments of our population and tear at our nation's social fabric," Hoyer said.
"I urge members on both sides of the aisle to act on this important civil rights issue by passing this legislation to protect all of our citizens from violent acts of intolerance," Obama said in a statement before the vote.
According to the FBI their latest figures.......
Total Incidents 7,624
Total Offenses 9,006
Total Offenders 6,965
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2007/downloadablepdfs/07hcpressrel.pdf
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2007/victims.htm
2007 are the latest available figures from the FBI. I assume this legislation has been based on FBI stats since all states are supposed to inform the FBI of all hate crime incidents, thus politicians will be lookling at these as being the authoritative figures? So the total population of the US is over 300 million and there have been 7,600 offences...........If so this legislation is a load of rubbish and just window dressing designed to appease lobbists and special interest groups - as I said I'm sticking my neck out.
