Crime and Punishment

Going Too Far

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Long time readers know that I have devoted a large chunk of my life (and income) to aiding innocent people gain the skills they need to fight their way through a violent criminal attack. I count it as my life’s work.

Obviously, I have a great deal of concern for the welfare of anyone who is a potential victim. Children in particular. As civilized people, we have a duty to protect the most vulnerable in our society.

But this admirable desire to protect children can lead to some extreme abuses of government power.

Case in point is this news article, which discusses a proposed law in Maine. If it passes, then “visual sexual aggression” against children will become a felony.

“Visual sexual aggression”? What does that mean? It means you can go to jail if you are observed to look at children in a public place.

Dr. Helen, who first blogged about this article, asks some very pointed questions. What is the difference between simply watching children in a public place, perhaps at a mall or city park, and actual visual sexual aggression? Who determines that, exactly?

Dr. Helen also points out that women will probably never run afoul of this law, since it is a treasured myth of our culture that women are never guilty of sexual abuse. But what about men like me, a big ol’ hairy-scary guy who is physically confident, and who always tries my best to be aware of everyone in sight? Do I have to start staring at the ground whenever I’m out in the open air, eyes demurely downcast like a woman in a country where Sharia holds sway? Do I have to wear a burkha next?

How in the world do you defend yourself against the accusation that you were gazing at a child with “visual sexual aggression”? “Sure, officer, I was watching the kids. But they were getting pretty close to the edge of the frozen pond, and I didn’t see their parents around. What was I supposed to do, just walk away and trust that Darwinian forces would strengthen the species?”

Many of the rights taken for granted by the general population are forever denied to those convicted of a felony. You can no longer vote in a national election, for example, and most state and local elections are also closed to the convicted.

What is worse in my eyes is that it becomes a crime to possess a firearm, the very tool needed to protect yourself and your loved ones. I don’t object to this restriction where violent criminal offenders are concerned, but to forever be made helpless because one was seen to be gazing at children in public? Might as well start locking men up for walking down the street, simply because they are men who have the gall to wander around in public spaces, and stop all pretense of trying to actually protect anyone from crime.

I don’t think anyone here will be surprised to find out that the state Representative who proposed the law, Dawn Hill, is a Democrat.

(Hat tip to Glenn.)

Dancing Fast and Squinting Hard

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I don’t read Industrial Equipment News on a regular basis (who does?), but they printed a fascinating article by Mark Devlin that is worth checking out.

Mr. Devlin took umbrage at a recent paper written by two sociologist PhD’s in association with the University of Oxford. In the paper, the argument is made that there is something about engineers that causes them to become murderous, right wing radicals in greater numbers than other professions. This is due to the fact that most of the movers and shakers of international Islamic terrorist organizations were trained as engineers.

The 800 pound gorilla that the two sociologists are trying oh-so-hard to ignore is that an engineering degree might just be something sought after by people who are desperate to build bombs and place them where they will do the most damage. Terrorist wannabes will take classes that reveal the weak points in infrastructure and how to use explosives, as opposed to Texas Instruments turning normal college students into monsters with their mind-warping engineering calculators.

Or, as Mr. Devlin so pithily states, “Tough to overthrow much with an English degree.”

But I actually think there are two factors that both Mr. Devlin and the authors of the paper missed.

More than a few terrorist organizations of the Left in the 1960’s and 1970’s were started by, and heavily recruited, disgruntled college students and university professors. It worked back then, why wouldn’t it work now?

(As an aside, I would like to point out that the majority of those Leftist college students who turned to terrorism were enrolled in the soft sciences, mostly philosophy. I think the authors of the Oxford study would get bent out of shape if someone would suggest that the humanities warps the mind and turns people into violent terrorists. I would never do that myself for fear that Ginny, our resident expert on the humanities and former college student in the 1970’s, would decide to retire to her kitchen and assemble something volatile from common household cleaning products.)

It is also no secret that the Arab world is hardly a hotbed of growth and innovation. Seems to me that most of the families which can afford to pay for a modern Western style education would be pushing their spawn to get a degree in the hard sciences, if for no other reason than there is a real need for development through most of the Islamic world.

I corresponded very briefly with our fellow Chicago Boyz and resident engineer Steven den Beste about this article, and he had this to say about well educated terrorists….

“As to them being disproportionately engineers, I would suggest that observation of any large university will show that the vast majority of exchange students are to be found in departments who teach utilitarian subjects. Not too many Arabs are to be found studying postmodern literary theory or art history. And I don’t think you’ll find too many of them in the Women’s Studies department, let alone Queer Studies. Or any other “studies”, for that matter.”

That appears to be sound wisdom to me.

(Hat tip to Ace.)

It’s Cheaper If They’re Dead

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Pizza Hut seems poised to fire the delivery driver who defended himself against an armed robber using the handgun he was legally permitted to carry. A Pizza Hut spokesperson stated that company policy forbade employees from being armed.

Most companies have such policies, and I think the reason for such policies easy to discern: An employee or customer murdered by a criminal costs the company far less than a lawsuit caused by an employee defending himself.

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The Anti-Brian Lambs

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At WSJ we see what a free market of ideas is – and what it isn’t. There, too, Strassel describes an elitist (sentimental, self-righteous) press which quickly bought the argument of yet another politician that he (and he alone) is “for the people” (“for the children” and “for the poor” are of course versions of this); that this populist argument leads inexorably to power-grabbing hubris should be clear by now. Self-righteousness is a dangerous drug because it so easily quiets not just others’ doubts but our own. Spitzer is an argument, of course, for checks and balances applied by a free press. But we might also remember that any call to our baser instinct to covet another’s success should be suspect.

Update:        Gay Patriot    suggests  three offices often  obviously  motivated by something other than justice:   Spitzer,  Nifong and Ronnie Earle, who began earliest and remains in office.   That may say something about Austin and I’m not sure it is good.  

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