Both of these are fine, and it makes complete sense. The KKK could do anything it wished and get away with it for a long time. My personal attitude though is that for it to be a hate crime it should be a crime committed in conjunction with a hate group. If it's just some drunk idiot that decides he wants to go beat up a gay man then he should be punished for being a drunken idiot. If he did it as a member of one of these hate groups though, then it should be treated differently. While the action may be the same, it seems the real goal of the legislation is to deter these groups, therefore why not make that a stipulation of the law for it to become a federal crime? The power of these hate groups have greatly diminished, and in this era of lightning fast news allegations of intimidation by hate groups are going to be brought to light swiftly.


That's why the changes make sense to me, is that they are expanding the laws to protect the all the groups of people that face discrimination. The theory makes sense to me, but the actual practice thus far doesn't.


There are a lot of those kinds of crimes, and those are only the ones that are reported. According to a couple criminal justice courses I took the real figure is probably double that, or more.