This is National Crime Victims’ Rights Week.  Most don’t know this.  One might say crime victims are the truly forgotten here.  In our current victim-obsessed society, where so many build hierarchies of historical and present grievances, actual victims of crime are the lowest rung on the authentic ladder of the injured.

As a founder of Crime Victims’ Rights Week once warned, we must be careful to protect the word “victim,” lest it be corrupted.  For too long, law schools have emphasized the rights of the accused, teaching almost nothing about the rights of their victims—or the rights of the innocent which, at basal levels, is the whole point of a society of laws: the protection of the innocent.  Today, we make causes célèbre of the accused; see Luigi Mangione.

As President Reagan put it: crime is not “some inevitable sociological phenomenon [but] a cumulative result of too much emphasis on the protection of the rights of the accused and too little concern for our government's responsibility to protect the lives, homes, and rights of our law-abiding citizens.”