Louisiana is poised to enact a law that would make it a hate crime to target police officers and other first responders.

Dubbed the “Blue Lives Matter” bill,  HB 953 would expand the state’s hate-crime law to include police officers as a protected class, as well as a broad swath of uniformed employees and emergency volunteers.

Bigotry as a factor to be applied in sentencing?  Maybe.  But that, like all sentencing, should be for a jury to decide, not a government with a one-size-fits-all sentencing “guideline,” the (limited) feasibility of which, anyway, stems only from overparsing crimes.