The Glade 4.0

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Breaking the law without simply getting caught is not irrelevant. We should not be making benign things illegal under the assumption that someone will only be prosecuted if they are doing something nefarious with it.

That would require citizens who could potentially report the crime to have common sense, and police officers who see an item or get a report to have common sense as well. I'm somewhat dubious that we can expect this.

Hoax devices are not benign things. There is pretty much no reason to have a cooker filled with confetti at a parade other than to induce panic with it.



Fortunately the criteria is not whether it passes your personal suspicions.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Oh my god you guys, I broke down and looked up the law.


Source: https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralL ... Section102

There you go, it's right there in the law. There must be intent, merely possessing a pressure cooker and not doing anything with it does not make it a hoax device. I think it's pretty obvious that there was intent to cause fear and anxiety here. It seems pretty open and shut.

As for possessing a pressure cooker with confetti in it... there's many reasonable explanations for having one. Maybe you're using it in a movie you are shooting and a pressure cooker filled with confetti is part of the plot. Maybe you want to take a picture of one for your blog post about this new story, so you can give your readers a visual aid. Maybe you want to sterilize some confetti for a science experiment you're working on. I could go on and on. But anyway, there was obviously no excuse in this case and this guy deserves to get the book thrown at him.

This is a common misconception that simply coming up with any conceivable explanation is reasonable. No, "maybe you are shooting a movie" is not a reasonable explanation in the absence of, you know, a movie actually being shot. You can take a photo of one anywhere, you don't need to bring it to a parade, and the absence of a camera would tend to disprove that anyhow. You don't sterilize things for science experiments in a kitchen cooker in the middle of a parade site, and putting paper in a cooker in the first place seems like a very hazardous way of sterilizing it.

It isn't just a matter of the cooker having confetti, it's also the time, place and circumstances he had it in. This "but there could be other explanations!" thinking is what teenagers try to use when they get in trouble at school, thinking that any possibility, no matter how outlandish, means that they're being "oppressed" if someone doesn't let them get away with what they were really doing.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Which gets back to intent. You have to prove intent, you can't just say "he had it" and that's it. The accused does not have to prove he had no intent.

Please. There is always a point where a jury can judge intent. If I quick-draw a gun and aim it at someone's head but am tackled before I pull the trigger, (or pull the trigger and miss) I would be hard pressed to claim that a prosecutor cannot prove intent.

The JURY gets to make that decision--the prosecutor is doing exactly their job by charging them with the crime.

Exactly. And intent is proven by showing the totality of the circumstances. Furthermore, proof happens in court, after the person is arrested and charged. Complaining that someone gets arrested for a crime by saying "but you have to prove X" is putting the cart before the horse.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Send some flour or powered sugar in a letter to your congressman or senator and you'll have to prove that your intent with that hoax device wasn't malicious. Good luck with that! All that has to be proven is that you sent it, the rest speaks for itself.

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In time, this too shall pass.

You're misconstruing what I said. We agree on everything here. The other explanations were theoretical, where someone else would actually be shooting a movie like you said. None of these excuses would fly in the middle of a parade, especially not in this particular one. This guy has no good excuse and it's obvious his intent was for it to be taken as a hoax device and scare people. So.. yeah, we agree.

None of those are situations that actually obtained.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

...

Yup, that's what theoretical means.

So... that was all irrelevant?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

*snip* for posterity.

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