NezumiiroKitsune said:
Therumancer said:
So you're saying without this extreme deterrent people might try to do it again? Since I saw nothing wrong with this initially, I hereby actively support the creation of material alike this for entertainment purposes to be distributed however they may please. I encourage and condone it, and think the world would be a poorer place without it. When someone edits innocent film to create something genuinely disturbing and not just offensive, then some sentence should be employed that is this fittingly severe.
Your example applied outside of context could make for some insane punishments, like putting people on trial for murder when they only animated a murder or maybe committed aggravated assault. Convicting people of stalking for following people on twitter AND facebook. His crime shouldn't be tried on the potential for someone to do something worse.
Okay, I've received 5 posts similar to this one, and most rely on absurdities, but still I'm going to respond to the central point.
What a lot of critics don't get about my arguement is that I do not support the child porn accusation, I do however believe what the guy did was illegal. It's also noteworthy that part of my point is that this comes down to the scale of the crime. People are viewing this as a single incident, one crime, from a legal sense that's not really the case. Simply videotaping a kid without permission and editing the video for personal profit might be a slap on the wrist offense, but when your dealing with a case of doing it to tons of kids and see 20+ counts of the same crime being brought against the guy at once, that's something else entirely. To argue otherwise is to say that the parents of some of those kids don't deserve justice and their kid is less important than the others if he doesn't warrent a specific charge.
In a case where you have a teacher sleeping with a student and getting less than 20 years, understand that in that case the teacher has committed exactly *1* crime through that act. Had there been multiple victims in the same incident, the case would change, and the penelty would go up proportionatly.
Another example would be akin to someone littering, dropping a piece of trash is pretty much a slap on the wrist offense. The ticket you like $200.00 or whatever the state demands and that is a deterrant. However where you drop trash, and how much can also change things. You litter near a state resevoir, or on protected land, and the penelty gets substantially stiffer. If the crime goes from dropping a Mcdonald's wrapper on the sidewalk, to say dropping a truckload of garbage off the side of the road near resevoir the penelty goes up substantially, you might actually do 20 years for something like that depending on where you are... and the knowlege of it s why people don't do it, which is exactly the point.
Now if people ever passed a law that DID make killing someone in fiction the same as killing them in real life, or make littering a death penelty offense, by all means it should be enforced. The people are simply idiots for having passed the law, but that doesn't mean you should simply ignore it for the sake of conveience. If people are that stupid, by all means let them pay the penelty for it. Consider it social darwinism. People killing themselves with their own stupid laws, and of course people who lack the self control to not do something easily avoidable being removed from the gene pool. I mean if someone puts a death penelty on something this idiotic and a guy draws a picture of a stick figure stabbing another and shows it off or whatever, he's kind of a mouth breather who is going to wind up getting what he deserves.
Given the very limited nature of punishments allowed in our system, it's also understandable that "degree of punishment" becomes difficult. We simply don't have middle ground penelties like corperal punishment availible like our founding fathers intended. Their protection against cruel and unusual punishment was far differant than how we interpeted it today, and they practiced things like flogging, and putting people in the stocks. I have very mixed opinions of such things (so don't get me wrong) but being able to say put someone in the stocks for a month to be jeered at might be more appropriate in many cases than say 20 years in prison, but we don't have those kinds of tools availible in a system that simply allows fines, prison, death and nothing else. This gets off into an entirely differant discussion however (and a very touchy one).
At any rate, my basic arguement is that this guy is probably getting a slap on the wrist by the current laws. It's just he's getting slapped on the wrist multiple times, as every child involved in the incident is a seperate crime, and every family deserves their justice. The child porn arguement being stupid, but the issue of him recording this stuff in schools not being. A 1 year penelty is a minimum for a felony, and considering that what he did is in a school, probably in violation of laws about recording in that location without express permission, and simialr things it's definatly a felony convinction.
