I don’t know what they’re thinking. ALL 12 year olds are terrorists.
9 Likes
Sikhs are easier targets due to their head coverings. I don’t know every muslim group’s practices, but my guess is that there are fewer muslims who wear head coverings than there are Sikhs. I have a couple of Sikh friends from my home town, grew up with them. One is a dentist, great guy. Yes, we made fun of him in high school. But he took it in stride, and informed us about his family’s religion, took us to the temple and showed us around. It was considerably less vicious back then. But I am speaking from my perspective… he would be the final judge of that because the crap was directed at him. I don’t think he was ever called a terrorist. Names related to cloth, but nothing so overblown like terrorist.
10 Likes
I can vouch for that. The little shits.
(Noone is a reasonable person till their thirties, and quite possibly their fifties.)
5 Likes
Meanwhile the local authorities let this rich kid walk free after actually killing people. No ankle bracelet required and he is currently missing. WAY TO GO DALLAS/FT WORTH
13 Likes
As someone who has almost been arrested for terrorism in the State of Texas, due to an elaborate
and complex prank that involved welding car horns inside steel drums in an empty industrial park
late at night, this is fucking stupid.
It’s not exactly racism, but blind stupidity on the part of Texas Lawmakers. As one of the twelve responding officers calmly explained to the stupid, creative engineering students (about 30 of us) who were simply engineering a legal way to wake up a ton of people at 3am without pulling their fire alarms (an actual offense), Texas defines a terroristic threat by the intent of those who hear it rather than by the intent of the person making the threat–and by the effect hearing it has on the audience.
Therefore if someone had feared that our devices were actual explosives (this is closer to 9-11) and notified the police, all involved would be charged as if they had intended to actually blow people up per section 22.07 of the Texas Penal code. Wisely we informed them that we would, in that case, abandon the prank and never do it. The Texas statutes are absurd, because they are based entirely on fear.
Had we been the wrong skin color, we would probably all be in Guantanamo bay
22 Likes
That… Is terrifying. A prank that annoys a bunch of people? Yeah, trim some city hedges for an hour, and don’t do it again. But terrorism?
I’d have been locked away for life and the key would be orbiting Saturn.
8 Likes
Have you been there? The big cities’ proper aren’t necessarily that bad. Quite “blue” from what I saw of it (which was mostly business travel).
Austin in particular is like the Portland of Texas.
1 Like
Given that we had a small trailer to carry the steel drums around, I probably would have arrested all of us if I was a cop as Tim McVeigh used a U-Haul full of stuff to take out the Murrah Building. The cops had a very good point. Anyhow, we were all engineering students, with a love of complicated things–including pranks. When Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors became available, one classmate of mine rigged another dorm’s main breaker such that he could trip it remotely. Another time, someone blew holes in the dorm walls with a coil gun.
And this wasn’t Austin. This was a small religious university in deep red East Texas/Jesusland. People would weld stuff together in the center of the quad I lived in. Most of those involved in the pranks are now either pilots, or highly qualified, competent engineers. I think a couple of them worked at NASA for a time.
The problem, again, is the badly written laws of Texas that disregard the actual intent of the device maker.
8 Likes
And that’s precisely why I think a gentle, “we saw what you did, knock it off” is appropriate. I don’t condone, well, anything I did with pressurized gases when I was a youngin’. But as you and your fellow engineers prove time and again we are more valuable without a criminal record. Even if some of is were dumbasses 
6 Likes
Yeah. And to do this over a solar charger is fucking stupid. I mean call a cop in, give him a slap on the wrist, let life go on. But ruin someone with a completely inappropriate felony? This is madness.
Incidentely did you know a hairspray potato gun is legally the same as a hand grenade in Texas, but a pneumatic one isn’t? I had to explain that to our residence director once
15 Likes
My forehead just hit my desk, and I can hear shaddack screaming.
19 Likes
Bail or dismissal? When people get bail, there is often outrage, but bail isn’t meant to be punitive. It’s only supposed to serve as a guarantee that you will show up for trial. There’s no such thing as an absolute guarantee that you will return, but that’s a chance we take as a democratic society that presumes non-guilt until there’s a trial. It’s forbidden in most jurisdictions when the charge is murder, but for lesser charges the judge is forbidden by the constitution from using bail as a punishment or setting unreasonable bail. Involuntary manslaughter (which I assume was the charge) doesn’t present a significant risk that someone violent is loosed upon the community. That charge can carry a sentence of as little as twelve months: You are officially stupid to become a fugitive. The bail system is actually more broken in terms of the number of people we keep in jail:
6 Likes
What about a gunpowder one? I’m serious. It’s Texas. People take their gunpowder very personally here.
2 Likes
Dear texas, Please kill yourself after you run out all the people you hate. There should be enough guns to do the job. If there aren’t enough gun just drown yourself in dumbass, there damn sure is enough of that!
4 Likes
Yes - SWATting is anonymous, and therefore much harder to prosecute, as well as not generally leading to an indictment of the victim for “crime related activities” for having been SWATted.
1 Like
For what? This isn’t like the clock incident, this was an off the shelf solar device charger
9 Likes
The relevant statute specifically mentions combustion. If you have combustion, it’s a destructive device.
By slap on the wrist I mean, take kid into private office, tell him that it’s all bullshit and you aren’t going to do anything but pretend that you threatened him. Something to satisfy the Texas Justice Boner. Then you move on.
I’m not going to pretend that Texas law can’t be changed, it should be–the whole section regarding terroristic threats needs to be revamped to include clear intent as a requirement of the offense or scrapped entirely. However that’s up to the legislators of Texas, and they clearly have their pants around their heads. Maybe a few expensive lawsuits will wisen them up.
4 Likes
Then my vindaloo is illegal in Texas. Ironic, since @awjt has hotter peppers 
8 Likes
Hey, my peppers are hotter, but you’re hotter than my peppers. I’m a bald sasquatch right now. Need to drop 30, and never seem to buckle down and do it dammit. Gotta DO IT!@!! AAAAUUUURGH!!!
4 Likes
