What you wanted, if you were any kind of American, was to rewind the tape to just before the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon. And Spider-Man would swing down on a web, defuse the bombs and capture the bombers.

Or perhaps some shirtless movie muscle hero, firing guns with both hands, a rogue cop, would emerge from the crowd and kill both the Tsarnaev brothers, delivering a pithy one-liner in the process.

"Looks like you boys bombed in Boston," he'd growl.

I live an hour south of Boston, and I had friends there that day, though none was hurt. I'm a reporter, and I worked the story, finding out that in the days following the bombing, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had been on the campus of the nearby University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Spider-Man never showed up, which he does not, as he is a fictional character. No shirtless rogue cops.

Just regular cops. Bullets. More bullets. Twelve jurors and done.

And now the decision will be made to kill or not to kill Tsarnaev, cleanly and by law according to the rule book, in a building containing a room designated as the place where people are killed, surrounded by people in official uniforms, with all the paperwork filled out correctly. If it weren't for the uniforms and the paperwork, you'd think it would be murder, but you must not think that, not now, not in America.

I have seen self-defense, and I have heard of justifiable wars, but if you strap a defenseless man down and kill him, it is murder. Paperwork doesn't legitimize murder any more than sunlight sweetens garbage.

You can't serve justice with murder. People who believe that you can are either morally twisted or willfully ignorant.

Spider-Man never shows up. We are alone, battling to bring our instincts in line with our reason. That's why we invented Spider-Man, because we want at least some time in an imaginary world where we don't make the grinding decisions.

Shouting "kill the scumbag" makes you feel good. It's simple, and it ends all discussion. By God, people know where you stand.

You stand on a corpse is where you stand, maybe someday on a pile of corpses. And we worship death in this country. Bullets solve bullet problems. More problems? More bullets.

Sure, we can kill Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The big secret to all this bravura talk about killing is that you can kill anyone. It's easy to kill someone. In the end, if Tsarnaev is executed, dozens of people will be needed to get it done, as though he were some hugely powerful figure who could only be defeated by a horde of brave warriors.

It won't be that way at all, of course. They'll kill him the way you'd put a sick dog to sleep. It'll be a dirty little business because turning a person into meat is always a dirty little business.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a murderer. Are you?

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest e-book, "Marc Dion: Volume I," a collection of his best 2014 columns, is available for all major e-readers.