Paranoia Runs High After Virginia Tech Shootings
by Jeff Davis
American law and society has a long tradition of responding to serious events by attempting to lock the barn door after the horse has already been stolen. Every time some individual of any race snaps and goes berserk with a gun, the sluggish and senile American legal and social engineering systems lumber ponderously into low gear in an attempt to “prevent” something that has already happened. Usually, this takes the form of some new attempt to sabotage and revoke the Second Amendment, but increasingly, the First Amendment is coming under attack by these government bureaucrats and politicians who are perhaps afraid of retaliation from the millions of people who have been over-taxed, reverse-discriminated or victimized in some other way by the Feds.
The Chicago Sun Times reports: “Police Thursday released portions of an essay used to charge a Cary-Grove High School student with disorderly conduct, leaving several experts puzzled at an arrest based on such schoolwork. Asked to write about whatever he wanted in a creative writing class, would-be Marine and honors student Allen Lee, 18, described a violent dream in which he shot people and then ‘had sex with the dead bodies.’ ‘’ (You would think every Oriental student in America would be concerned about looking anything like the Virginia Tech Shooter, but not this guy. In the aftermath of a shooting incident, there is naturally some paranoia, but could this paranoia become a permanent condition with writers dragged off in handcuffs for the slightest mention of violence or politically incorrect thought?)
The Sun-Times goes on: “Cary-Grove High School senior Allen Lee was arrested Tuesday for an essay he wrote in a creative writing class. ‘There definitely is violent content, but they’re taking it out of context,’ he said Thursday, later adding, ‘I have no intention of harming anyone.’” In view of what happened at Virginia Tech several days before, one has to question this Oriental’s judgment in writing and turning in an “essay” like this at all, but still, that’s not the point. This is America, and people are not supposed to be arrested for writing inconvenient or uncomfortable fiction. Granted, this wasn’t exactly great literature. What the Asian actually wrote was “’So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P 90s [submachine guns] and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did…’” If they don’t let this kid back in school, maybe he can get a writing gig working for Dave Chappelle or “Mind of Mencia.”
Now it gets weirder. The Sun-Times reports: “A second disorderly count accuses Lee of alarming first-year teacher Nora Capron by writing that ‘as a teacher, don’t be surprised on [sic] inspiring the first CG shooting,'’ an apparent reference to Cary-Grove High. Lee said Thursday he was completely shocked’ to be arrested Tuesday for his essay, especially because written instructions told kids not to censor what they wrote.” (”A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”–Ralph Waldo Emerson.)
Okay, there is a serious issue here aside from creepy Orientals. Allen Lee has been arrested not for anything he has actually done but for the crime of “alarming” someone. (The Virginia Tech shooter in contrast was caught stalking coeds and was ruled a danger to himself and others in addition to his deeply troubled writings.) Now, think about the implications of this. More and more, people in this society (mostly white males, lest we forget) are being arrested, imprisoned, dismissed from their employment, given bad credit ratings, kicked out of school, being subjected to malicious and baseless civil lawsuits, subjected to official and police harassment of various kinds and otherwise having their lives destroyed for “crimes” which aren’t really crimes. Two examples of this include: a whiny liberal who complained that conservative workers joking about Bill Clinton constituted a “hostile workplace environment” (no kidding) and much more seriously a gun owner in Brunswick, Ohio, who was cleaning his guns when a health care worker visited to give medical care to his wife. The health care worker apparently forgot (or didn’t care) that she was in someone’s home. She complained about the gun owner to child protective services. The house was surrounded and the father and son were killed as police riddled the house with bullets.
It’s impossible to avoid “inflicting mental anguish” on people. Some liberals panic at the sight of a gun in the gun owner’s home. Some Blacks will claim anguish because someone called them “nappy-headed hoes.” There is in fact no such criminal offense as “alarming” someone without a specific threat like pointing a gun or making a direct threat of physical harm. But now young people can apparently be arrested and brought into the system for “causing alarm” simply by writing a school essay, not actually DOING anything. Writing an essay in which the kid was told by his teachers specifically to let it all hang out is in fact a form of entrapment.
In a larger sense, like hate crime laws, this involves the creation of a legal offense which amounts to what George Orwell referred to as a “Thoughtcrime”–being penalized not for anything you do, but because you are thinking unauthorized or disapproved thoughts. Given the abundance of violence in movies and Nintendo games, it is not surprising that some people may write fictional stories about such things. In the case of the Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, the key issues are Third World immigration and the fact that Cho was mentally ill and still allowed to attend college. Our federal government however would like to change the focus to gun control and thought control. For them the solution is always more government control and never putting the blame on the guilty individual.