Crime and Punishment

The cable news networks are all abuzz about a reported shooting at The Rayburn House Office Building, one of the complex of buildings that house US government offices around the US Capitol in Washington, DC.

According to the talking heads sitting at their desks in the TV studios, someone called the Capitol Police and reported the sound of gunfire on the underground garage level. The police reportedly didn’t find anything, but they did sniff the distinctive odor of cordite (modern gunpowder). The cops locked down the building, refusing to allow anyone to leave, and now they are making a room-to-room search.

This is the proper response, of course. Footage shot by reporters being escorted out of the building by way of the parking area show it to be really huge, taking up more than one level and stretching for some distance. If somone ripped off a few rounds from an autoloader, it will take a fair amount of time to find the spent shell casings. They could have used a revolver, though.

There would be shell casings only if some shots were fired in the first place. I routinely hear distant sounds that I could swear are gunshots while I walk my dogs in the wee hours of the night. It turns out that it is only garbage trucks emptying dumpsters.

This could be a false alarm. We will see.

I have decided to watch the Fox News Channel. The reporters are able to phone elected officials trapped in their offices by the lockdown to get their impressions. Pretty neat.

There is going to be a press conference in 20 minutes.

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A new scam is running around. A bank account is cracked, real checks are printed, sent out in large numbers, the checks are deposited by people thinking they are for payment of “taxes” for a lottery and the “tax payment” is sent via Western Union / Moneygram to the “tax agent”, in other words, the scam artist. The name, bank information, routing number, security features on the check are all entirely legitimate. This way the group gets money sent to them without ever actually having to touch the bank.

I just got the 2nd one of these in a month and it’s ticking me off. My local police are too lazy to follow up on reporting this sort of scam (the route I took in the first case) so I’m throwing this out for a bit of international justice. Is there a coalition of the willing out there willing to bust scammers?

The “agent” gives a number of 011-491-60-91-92-39-92 which seems to be Germany. If anybody could trace this to a locality and get the police to act, I will press charges.

I was in Canada the first time someone pointed a gun at me.

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There are some fascinating posts that I’d like to bring to your attention. The first one is to be found at Glenn’s. He discusses a book where a woman successfully disguised herself as a man in order to gain insights into how the other side lives. One passage that made an impressions was where the author entered the dating world, only to find that many women were distrustful and downright hostile to any man because they had been through failed relationships where a man had treated them badly.

Glenn links to a post at Dr. Helen’s, his wife’s blog. The good doctor was surprised to find that many men are shunning marriage, fearing jail due to false accusations about being an abuser if the relationship goes sour and a divorce is necessary.

Dr. Helen links to this essay on a blog called DADvocate. The author discusses why he and many other men are no longer interested in marriage. The potential penalties are too severe, while most women don’t bring enough to the table to make it worthwhile.

The posts are all interesting. Click on the links and give them a read. But what I want to talk about are the claims that men are risking jail time every time they tie the knot.

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I recently posted some casual comments about crime rates. One thing I noticed was that NYC’s statistics looked pretty good compared to those of other large US cities.

Now I am reminded, via this post on David Hardy’s blog, that there is a reasonable case for suspecting NYC of cooking the books. I don’t know to what extent the NYC government really did that, but it certainly appears that the City’s crime-reporting system created strong incentives for police to falsify reporting.