4 ms·
Is a criminal, or was a criminal? If you claim he is (in 2014) a criminal, is it because of his crimes pre-1995, or some crime he committed in the past year?
by clamprecht 12y ago
Is a criminal, or was a criminal? If you claim he is (in 2014) a criminal, is it because of his crimes pre-1995, or some crime he committed in the past year? If your answer is the former, then you are essentially saying "once a criminal, always a criminal." And if you claim that, I will throw some counterexamples in your face, beginning with myself.
- hcarvalhoalves 12y agoMitnick probably falls inside the psychopathy spectrum though, so the parent might have used the word in a looser sense.
- sliverstorm 12y agoThis gets into the mild ambiguity of the word... anyone who has been convicted of a crime is by definition a criminal [1] Calling them a criminal does not necessarily invoke [2] [1] a person charged with and convicted of crime [2] a person who commits crimes for a living