This past weekend, several friends of mine - students - were the victims of an armed robbery. They were on their way to Macon and stopped to get gas. When they went in to pay, three men armed with guns came in, forced them to the floor, and took their money and keys.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally got around to seeing the (mostly excellent) movie Crash. I'll spoil (a small part of) it for you: at the end, the lovable carjacker gets shot for no (apparent) reason by an off-duty cop with an itchy trigger finger. The expression on his face as he dies clearly says, You creep! What did you go and do that for?

I suppose I was expected to feel sorry for the senseless violence that took this man's life, and upset at the social circumstances that forced such a friendly guy into a life of crime, and to some extent I was, but mostly I wanted to shout at the character, "Oh, don't you even get self-righteous! What right do you have to go giving people dirty looks? You're a carjacker! You've been shoving your gun into people's faces since the movie began!"

All my friends are okay, and are now processing the trauma that they went through. For those exposed to the real thing, though, any depiction of violent crime as funny and lovable is utterly abhorrent.