Reflections On Conspiracies

Not a far distance from my house, well within the limits of the city I inhabit, 3 teens were recently arrested for conspiring to perpetrate a Columbine style school shooting. According to reports, articles, and interviews on tv, radio and in the paper, they’d been planning this attack for years, had amassed an arsenal to rival that of Frank Castle, and were training to, among other things, commit mass murder on a grand scale and blow up their school.

The newspapers waxed horrific about the dozens of weapons found at the kids home, the bombs, the training sessions, yadda yadda yadda…and I must’ve seen the same footage of the box of guns being carried out of one of the kids’ home a gross of times.

If you will pardon the pun, I’m about to shoot a few holes in this story.

First off, the majority of the “weapons” the kids had were BB and airsoft guns. Easily identifiable in the tv clip by their bright orange muzzles. The remainder of their weapons were single shot .22s, a shotgun, an SKS, and .40SW handgun. If the mayor and the police chief consider that enough of an arsenal that a televised press conference is desperately required, they’d have a heart attack if they looked under my bed most nights, never mind the basement shelves. (By the way, if anyone from the Green Bay Press Gazette is reading this, you can't use AKS rounds in an SKS. But what I'm sure you meant to confuse the issue by confusing the AK47 with the SKS. Leave the paper, grow a brain stem, and THEN go back to journalism.)

Second, target practice for these young reprobates consisted of firing airsoft pellets into Styrofoam heads. This is to target practice what writing a letter to granmaw is to winning a Pulitzer. Their “bombs” were toilet paper tubes filled with bbs and gunpowder, detonated by firecracker – certainly capable of causing injury, but if you’ve ever spent the weeks leading up to the 4th playing with all manner of fireworks conceivable, you know that single firecrackers have about the same fuse time as a sneeze. Yeah. Blown up criminals.

Their much ballyhooed napalm was gasoline and Styrofoam shavings. That ain’t napalm folks, that’s a cheap imitation.

I certainly hope the mayor wasn’t watching that night we buried artillery shells in the lawn and used them to launch bricks and basketballs…they'd probably get the electric chair out of mothballs just for me...

And the “years” of planning…three kids plan an attack on a highschool for years, even before they get there? You know what that means? They were THINKING about it. “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…” And they never had the guts to do it. For years. If thinking about something earns you a conspiracy charge, we’re all in deep trouble. Calvin of Calvin And Hobbes fantasized one Sunday about nuking his kindergarten with an F-16. Innumerable fiction writers have written innumerable books describing in graphic detail terrorist and criminal acts. I myself am currently engaged in writing a novel about the start of the third American Revolution.

Obviously, these kids were seriously disturbed individuals. They could’ve done some seriously bad stuff, had “luck” been on their side or if they’d been a hair more competent. We can’t do a catch and release here, they WERE planning on trying to hurt a whole bunch of people. That’s unacceptable. They need to be punished. But the question remains, what is the best punishment for coming up with a half***ed plan to kill your classmates with contrived and unworkable bombs, fewer and lower-quality weapons than the average Texan household, and chickening out on it a dozen times?

How do you punish evil defeated by one's own cowardice?