Thought Police and Teens
September 5th, 2006 | by Paul Merda |How many men had violent fantasies when they were teenagers? Today, that could land a kid in jail.
As always, American over-reaction causes more problems than it solves. A 14 year old boy was arrested and charged with “making threats or conveying false information concerning acts of terrorism” because he had e-mailed a friend about doing some “Columbine like [expletive]“. Neither weapons, plans nor maps were found at this young man’s house and yet he is placed in custody and charged for merely talking about shooting folks. Sure, the kid probably needed a good talking to, but arrested?
I don’t know about you but when I was in my early teens, me and my buddies always talked about doing something along the same lines. Like how many teams of guys would it take to gun down everyone in the mall during christmas shopping season. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I think most young males go through a stage like this and now we are going to put them in jail for being normal? Jail them and send them on a path to ruin because they talked about something that most young males talk about, gratuitous violence? It used to be you actually had to do something wrong to land in jail, now all you have to do is THINK something wrong…
14 Responses to “Thought Police and Teens”
By tos on Sep 5, 2006 | Reply
I would have to think if this kid was making these threats about doing this in a school that your child attended you may have a different view about it. But then again the liberal view would be to sacrafice others in order to let this kid have the freedom and privacy he so well deserves.
I am pretty sure when I went to school,school violence was usually limited to a fight after school between 2 people.
It is comforting that “shooting up people in a mall” in considered “normal behavior” today.
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 5, 2006 | Reply
No one was arrested for violent fantasies, which, so far as I know, the police could have had no way of knowing about since fantasies occur within the brain of an individual. What he was arrested for was making a threat in an email.
Do you suppose the 9/11 crew, at one point in their endeavors, merely talked about committing mayhem with airplanes? Don’t you wish we’d have caught the SOBs while it was just talk? Boy, I sure do. Quite possibly, if we had, there’d have been no war in Afghanistan, let alone in Iraq.
Not all talk is protected speech. Talk about Columbine shit needs to be nipped in the bud. What is the proper punishment for threatening mass slaughter of one’s fellow students and teachers? I’m not sure but, surely, “Play nice, young man” isn’t it.
In part, your chats with your pals, whom, presumably, you could be sure were just talking and would never actually do any of the things that you talked about, have — what has changed is that there are now people who will act on their violent fantasies and the results are too awful to countenance ignoring such banter.
Think about it…until mass murderers are caught having committed numerous crimes, nobody suspects that they would do what they had done. “He was such a quiet guy…no problem at all…I just don’t understand how he could have done such a thing.” What I’m saying is, post-Columbine, not even you could be sure that one of your buds wouldn’t act on the fantasies. How can you expect the Police and school administrators to know that they wouldn’t. My answer is, they couldn’t. At some point, all conspiracies are just talk.
By Paul Merda on Sep 5, 2006 | Reply
Craig,
I agree that “play nice young man” isn’t going to nip this sort of thing in the bud, but arresting someone for a noncrime isn’t the answer either. What’s next, ”son I heard you talking about sex with your buddies and you mentioned you bang her whether she liked it or not, so now I must charge you with attempted rape”??
The kid may not be right talking about going Columbine, but he shouldn’t be in Juvenile Detention centers because of it either. Just because someone in the past acted on their violent fantasies does not mean all will, because if they did, no one would be alive to contemplate this. When conspiracies become more than just talk, that’s the time to make arrests… The kid was arrested for a thought and I have always presumed that it was actions that put Americans in prison, I guess not anymore.
tos,
We talked about shooting people up in a mall, that’s fairly normal among young males and I say that because just about everyone I knew at that time had talked of similar things. But once again in your unending need to feel “safe”, you’d rather see the “authorities” imprison someone for nothing which is what this case is about. Now, it is no longer safe to think about things if someone finds them abborent? What should have happened is that the kid should have been investigated and watched and if he started, say, aquiring weapons and developing a plan to actually do anything, then you arrest him because he’s serious. There you go again blocking out the sun…
“Liberty cannot be sacrificed for the sake of temperance, for the sake of morality, or for the sake of anything. It is of more value than everything else. Yet some people would destroy the sun to prevent the growth of weeds.” – Col. Robert Ingersoll
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 5, 2006 | Reply
Matt,
I, not surprisingly, disagree. You say:
Again, no. He was not arrested for a thought, which the police could have had no knowledge of. He was arrested for an action: sending an email containing a threat of violence against others. Threats of violence against others is a crime which is punishable and detention center does not seem an outlandish punishment, to me.
Anyway, gotta go away for a while.
Good chatting with you.
By Paul Watson The Cranky Brit on Sep 5, 2006 | Reply
Craig,
When you get back, does that mean you think anyone on LGF or Powerline who makes death threats should also immediately be arrested? Why do you think that hasn’t happened?
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 5, 2006 | Reply
I’ve read very little of LGF, beyond the front page and I don’t recall any death threats being made there. What their commenters say and do, I couldn’t say, as I rarely read the comments. Of PowerLine, I am a fairly regular reader and, given that the bloggers are all Law profs, I seriously doubt that they’d be writing anything that could be read as a threat against anyone’s life. Since they don’t allow comments at PowerLine blog, beyond the occasional quote from someone who has emailed them, commenters aren’t an issue. I guess I don’t know what threats you’re talking about.
As a rule, threatening people with mass murder and destruction warrants, I would think, legal action. For example, the Sears Tower plot was little more than an exchange on a web site, as I understand it, when it was stopped. I think that threatening to bring blow up the Sears Tower is an actionable offense. Not actionable to the degree that actually blowing up a building, as Tomothy McVeigh did, but actionable. Something on the order of “I hope he dies an untimely, horrible death”, while tacky, is not a threat of death and would not, I wouldn’t think, be actionable in court. However, as an exercize, send an email to the White House containing the words “I want to blow up the White House and assassinate the President” and see whether expressing the wish to kill multiple persons including the President in an email or whisper “I want to blow up this plane” to a flight attendant mid-flight and see whether such expressions are actionable in law.
JUST KIDDING…DO NOT DO EITHER OF THESE THINGS!!! You will wind up being locked up for a good many years.
I recognize that not everyone who talks about violent fantasies will act upon them: Stephen King goes on at length about mass murder and mayhem without ever seeing the inside of a courthouse. Why? Because the people that he kills are fictional. They don’t exist outside of the world he creates. It is quite a different thing to threaten actual people with murder. I leave it up to prosecutors to decide whether something that someone says or writes constitutes a threat and a jury to decide what is an appropriate punishment for making such threats.
Hope that helps.
By Paul Merda on Sep 5, 2006 | Reply
I am still of the opinion, that if there is NO victim, there is no crime. There were no victims here…
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 5, 2006 | Reply
Paul,
Are you really saying that there’s no crime untill there are a mess of bodies? Is there no place to preventing another 9/11, for example? What is your suggestion when we discover a plot to blow up a school? You assume that a persons whose lives have been threatened but the threat has not been carried out are not a victims. They are. They are terrified that the person will carry out his threat. If there is no crime, and the law is powerless to intervene untill a threat like killing dozens or hundreds of people is carried out — well, I’m pretty speechless. And that’s quite an accomplishment.
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 5, 2006 | Reply
Comment #08 is for Paul Murda.
By liz50 on Sep 6, 2006 | Reply
Today’s generation are quite different compared before. There are several factors that led to this kind of behavior of kids. One thing is the environment , media, and peers. It’s a fact!
By Paul Merda on Sep 6, 2006 | Reply
Not what I’m sayin Craig. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, you INVESTIGATE the kid, you watch him and when he starts acquiring weapons and bomb-making designs and develops a plan you arrest him and charge him because it is no longer an idle threat. Let us take serious threats seriously and take idle threats with a grain of salt…
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 6, 2006 | Reply
Paul Merda,
“I am still of the opinion, that if there is NO victim, there is no crime. There were no victims here”
“you INVESTIGATE the kid, you watch him and when he starts acquiring weapons and bomb-making designs and develops a plan you arrest him and charge him because it is no longer an idle threat.”
How to reconcile these two statements? Even after he starts acquiring weapons and bomb-making designs and develops a plan…where are the victims? NO victim, no crime. See my problem?
Your second statement has merit. I just don’t think we can take certain threats as idle.
By Paul Merda on Sep 7, 2006 | Reply
Exactly Craig, you must investigate to see if the threat was idle or not, not immediately arrest and charge a kid for what was more than likely a rash statement. Let’s make certain someone wants to make victims before we arrest anyone.
To me, one of the prices of freedom is this; sometimes you have to let a bad guy go so that we are more certain that innocents are not being denied their freedom. I would rather see ten bad guys let go than to see one person wrongly imprisoned… That’s what is supposed to set America, hell, Western Civilization apart from the rest fo the world.
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 7, 2006 | Reply
To me, one of the prices of protecting our children from mass murder by other children is saying that some threats, even idle ones, cause harm to others even when those threats are never followed through on. This was not, to my mind, a victimless crime…just a corpseless crime. That’s the way I like them.