Okay, here’s a project for you. Take a map of your city, and set a compass at 1000 ft. according to the legend on the map. Find each school, licensed daycare center, city park, playground, and swimming pool, and draw a 1000 ft. circle around it. How much space is left, outside the circles? That’s where sex offenders can live for the rest of their lives. Are there any nursing homes or assisted living homes there? What will all these SOs do when they are old and crippled?
Keep in mind, some of these offenders are folks like the 16-year old kid who screwed his 15-year old girlfriend, and the poor schlub who was making minimum wage at the adult book store when it was raided. A lifetime sentence for that. I believe we are going too far.
[aside]This happened in South Park once. The kids were really confused until their parents came back.[/aside]
The best part of this is that the Bible is always true, because it’s the word of God. We know that it’s the word of God, of course, because it says so in the Bible.
Not that it’s only religious folks who are guilty of this either. Some people seem to be amazingly good at misinterpreting and misremembering scientific facts, sometimes from dubious sources.
Well, at least two episodes. One with the great Beyond Thunderdome (and some other movies as well) where the kids make their parents go away by using the magic M-word and one where the parents send the children away because the news tells them that the kids aren’t safe with their parents.
About burn out high school dropout, doing drugs and and robbing people to feed his habit:
“It’s such a shame. He was such a bright kid and had good grades.”
That one usually goes hand-in-hand with the Concorde Fallacy: “we have spent so much that we have no choice but to spend more to justify how much we’ve already spent”. Bad economics, especially when applied to human lives: if we don’t stay the course, our brave boys will have died in vain.
Oh, and describing every victim of a tragedy, particularly a violent crime, as “bright, fun-loving, and well-liked”. Does that mean the murder would have been less egregious if the victim had been a miserable reclusive bastard? What bearing does the victim’s personality have on the gravity of the crime?
I remember this following the Laci & Connor Act. IIRC, it was more of a token act since California already had something about the unborn victims of crime. Scott Peterson got the death penalty. Usually the [murder victim]'s Act does something that, had it been in place at the time of the crime, (in theory) would have changed the outcome of the crime. But many politicians pimped this for their own benefit. Those who voted against it were against the children and lacked compassion for the unborn.
So the citizens of Newark, OH can sleep at night knowing their children are safe. When the RSO who lives 1001 feet away takes another victim, will we move the line to 1002 feet? Often it isn’t the RSO that poses the greatest threat. It is those that haven’t been caught and/or convicted yet. IME, these kind of things are all about feeling safe rather than actually being safe.
Oh, and count me among those who loathe “Jesus, Take the Wheel.” Truth is, I don’t know what the message is nor how great it is. The song sucks too bad to allow it more than 3 seconds before I quickly find a listen-worthy song.
of course, I silently hope to myself, "Yes Jesus, take the wheel and run the car off a cliff so this song will end.
If there’s ever a competition for Most Neglected Axiom, I nominate one from military tactics: “Never reinforce failure.” Generals neglect this as much as anyone else.
Very well put, sir. Using this “think of the children” bullshit to effectively create criminal sentences that wouldn’t pass constitutional muster by themselves is pretty evil, IMO. If an offense merits the convicted being effectively exiled, then that’s what the criminal sentencing should be; that’s what criminal sentencing is for: meting out punishment. I’ve read that in many Buddist (sp?) cultures, death sentences were (are) not allowed, because they involve killing. To avoid the restriction, they used to beat a person to the point where he would die, only a little bit later; therefore, the person was not put to death by the state, but died as a result of non-lethal punishment. The two ideas practices are similar in their immorality.
The history of the Western Front in WWI in a nutshell.
By the way, for those curious about the effect of the Newark Ohio law mentioned in the OP, a followup article estimated that it will place about half the city off limits (for residence) to those designated as sex offenders. The reporter interviewed a local whose neighborhood will not be affected. He suggested extending the exclusion zones to 2,500 feet from parks, day care centers etc.