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Hopefully the irony of people on HN freaking out about a rare event -- that is, the enforcement of a law designed to protect children from rare events -- is not

Hopefully the irony of people on HN freaking out about a rare event -- that is, the enforcement of a law designed to protect children from rare events -- is not lost on anyone.

m_mueller 12y ago
It's certainly lost on me. In my eyes every law is supposed to protect a society from rare events - for everything else we have something called common sense and shouldn't need lawyers explaining to us what should and should not go. If there's too much of a mismatch between that and the law, well, you got a problem with your law. ~1% of population imprisoned certainly points towards that as well.
- function_seven 12y ago
  The irony is that it is rare for children to be snatched off the street, yet that is what these helicopter parents are afraid of. Likewise, it is rare for parents to be found neglectful when allowing their children to walk alone, yet that is what we HNers are screeching about. The linked news story is news because it is a rare event. Hundreds of thousdands of kids walk alone from/to school each day and don't get the cops called on them.
  - ggchappell 12y ago
    You make a point. However, I suggest that the two situations are not really parallel. Suppose a child is snatched off the street. That's an outrageous thing to do. Say we find out who did it. We would expect charges, a trial, and punishment. In this story we have government employees finding a couple to be a weird sort of semi-guilty for doing nothing wrong. Said government employees made a credible threat that they might, in the future, steal the couple's children. These are also outrageous actions. Have these people been investigated or punished? Have the policies that let them treat the couple this way been changed, or even officially questioned? Both answers are most likely "no". It appears that these -- perhaps rare, but also outrageous -- actions are business as usual for the government. The equivalent for the first situation above, might be a prosecutor failing to bring charges against a child abductor, and, when questioned about it, stating that such abductions were generally things he wanted to encourage. That, I think, would also be worthy of a new article.
- obstinate 12y ago
  We're talking about a level of rarity far beyond "1% of the population" here. We're talking about events that might not even have an incidence of one in ten million, based on the news stories. Don't get me wrong. I think these cases ought not be prosecuted. But I'm not scared of being prosecuted in one of these cases, nor would I even consider avoiding travel or living somewhere else because this happened to one person in a city across the country from me.
  - visarga 12y ago
    > But I'm not scared of being prosecuted in one of these cases So you have a lot of free time and money to spend on lawyers?
    - obstinate 12y ago
      You are completely missing the point. I have better chances of being struck by lightning than ever having to deal with this or for that matter knowing someone who has to deal with this. I don't need free time or lawyers because it is, to a fairly high degree of certainty, never going to happen to me.
  - glenra 12y ago
    Whether you should be scared depends crucially on whether you have (or plan to soon have) small kids and whether you intend to give them a reasonable amount of autonomy of the sort that we ourselves had when we were kids. Anyone who wants to let their kid walk to school alone at age 5 or 6 or 8, or ride the bus or subway alone at 8-10, probably ought to be scared of these cases.

Hopefully the irony of people on HN freaking out about a rare event -- that is, the enforcement of a law designed to protect children from rare events -- is not lost on anyone.

m_mueller 12y ago

It's certainly lost on me. In my eyes every law is supposed to protect a society from rare events - for everything else we have something called common sense and shouldn't need lawyers explaining to us what should and should not go. If there's too much of a mismatch between that and the law, well, you got a problem with your law. ~1% of population imprisoned certainly points towards that as well.

function_seven 12y ago
The irony is that it is rare for children to be snatched off the street, yet that is what these helicopter parents are afraid of. Likewise, it is rare for parents to be found neglectful when allowing their children to walk alone, yet that is what we HNers are screeching about. The linked news story is news because it is a rare event. Hundreds of thousdands of kids walk alone from/to school each day and don't get the cops called on them.
- ggchappell 12y ago
  You make a point. However, I suggest that the two situations are not really parallel. Suppose a child is snatched off the street. That's an outrageous thing to do. Say we find out who did it. We would expect charges, a trial, and punishment. In this story we have government employees finding a couple to be a weird sort of semi-guilty for doing nothing wrong. Said government employees made a credible threat that they might, in the future, steal the couple's children. These are also outrageous actions. Have these people been investigated or punished? Have the policies that let them treat the couple this way been changed, or even officially questioned? Both answers are most likely "no". It appears that these -- perhaps rare, but also outrageous -- actions are business as usual for the government. The equivalent for the first situation above, might be a prosecutor failing to bring charges against a child abductor, and, when questioned about it, stating that such abductions were generally things he wanted to encourage. That, I think, would also be worthy of a new article.
obstinate 12y ago
We're talking about a level of rarity far beyond "1% of the population" here. We're talking about events that might not even have an incidence of one in ten million, based on the news stories. Don't get me wrong. I think these cases ought not be prosecuted. But I'm not scared of being prosecuted in one of these cases, nor would I even consider avoiding travel or living somewhere else because this happened to one person in a city across the country from me.
- visarga 12y ago
  > But I'm not scared of being prosecuted in one of these cases So you have a lot of free time and money to spend on lawyers?
  - obstinate 12y ago
    You are completely missing the point. I have better chances of being struck by lightning than ever having to deal with this or for that matter knowing someone who has to deal with this. I don't need free time or lawyers because it is, to a fairly high degree of certainty, never going to happen to me.
- glenra 12y ago
  Whether you should be scared depends crucially on whether you have (or plan to soon have) small kids and whether you intend to give them a reasonable amount of autonomy of the sort that we ourselves had when we were kids. Anyone who wants to let their kid walk to school alone at age 5 or 6 or 8, or ride the bus or subway alone at 8-10, probably ought to be scared of these cases.