https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/21/us/mass-shooting-threats-tuesday/index.html
It's happening, we are finally offering people something besides thoughts and prayers, we are not 'turning a blind eye' anymore to these unlawful threats, we are not settling for the status quo. I myself am guilty of holding my tongue once long ago, when I was in the presence of a person who verbally threatened to commit a massacre. I took them to be kidding, again, this was long ago. I turned a blind eye instead, and didn't call the police. While it is fortunate that they never did act on that threat, it doesn't change that they committed a crime in making it.
But finally I think many more people are not making my mistake anymore, and we are taking the chance that we'll be thought overly dramatic or easily frightened, and call the police, when someone makes an overt threat to massacre. Now finally it's worth the risk, if we hear someone do this, threaten to massacre, which is a crime, we alert the police, because it's a crime, not because "maybe they'll really do it," but because it's a crime.
It is not protected, lawful, free speech, to credibly threaten to massacre, or to menace. It is a crime, and many massacres are preceded by this crime, and it is now happening that America is choosing against 'turning a blind eye' to it. We just need to keep this up, and things will actually improve, on the massacre front. They give themselves away, frequently, all we have to do is follow through.
Things have already improved. 'Supra,' the link.
So my natural dilemma is, I need to 'turn in' my friend. That's the dilemma that we all face together, all those who are friends with someone who made a threat to massacre that might not have been said in jest or in another exercise of lawful wit (which is right and just exercise of the human right to free speech and to free press and to free ideas, etc.).
We know our friends, and we know their anger, and we have to judge whether what they just said, was worthy of calling the police. Was it a crime, what my friend did? I think so, but I worry that I'm only being over sensitized to such threats, due to being American, where guns that can kill very rapidly and from far away (Las Vegas), are not 'easily enough' available, but are still easily available according to, a hypothetical typical centrist, politically.
It could be, that in every other country, being unable to acquire the firepower that we Americans can acquire, through, in relation to what it takes to drive a car licitly here, proportionally fair ease, there is 'ceteris paribus' more freedom to threaten to massacre. It is a price that Americans only must pay if such is the case, due again to the aforementioned relatively easy access to weapons that can massacre a lot of people from far away (Las Vegas).
We are not free to threaten to massacre. Not like the rest of the world. It's what we give up in order to enjoy our natural human right to bear arms, and as such if you follow the logic therefore we don't actually possess a right to threaten to massacre. That is not lawful exercise of your right to free speech, but is a crime, it is called threatening or menacing, a literal crime. No right exists to commit a crime, and there is no right to steal someone's rights either.
In all the other countries where the right to bear arms is 'perverted beyond all recognition' (an homage to a right and just WWII-era American acronymic neologism), it is possible that, when their people make threats to massacre, it is statistically less likely to result in massacre, than in America. It could be that Americans have been trying to live for too long under the rules the rest of the world lives under, instead of the rules dictated by the classical liberal bones of America the greatest idea in political philosophy since the dawn of our species, and this has been a horrible way to learn a very hard lesson, that to properly exercise the right to bear arms, you must take threats to massacre seriously, more seriously than you would like to, because it's uncomfortable to consider 'turning in' my own friend.
But the other trouble caused by living according to European or other Western Industrial Democracy's rules, where the right to bear arms is pubar (perverted beyond all recognition, an homage), is that people wouldn't threaten to massacre, if it was plainly fundamentally illegal to do so, and this would immediately drop the massacres, because of the recognition that we are going to call police more quickly now, if you ever threaten to massacre, or menace.
And you, knowing this, will censor your speech in response, if you're a safe person, and if you don't, then you will be arrested for committing the crime of menacing, or credibly threatening to massacre. What I'm getting at is that my friend wasn't given the same conditions then, as they would be today, in a world where we are beginning to learn how crucial it is that we do not permit people to freely commit the fundamentally criminal, threatening to massacre.
If my friend were given today's condition, where people are beginning to wake up to how very vital and important it is to call the police when someone credibly threatens to massacre, then they would have censored themselves, but that very strong sanction didn't exist back then, so long ago, but now we are trying to strengthen the sanction, by actively participating in the process of our police prosecuting this crime, by 'turning in' our friends.
So because we weren't then, and weren't ever until recently, taking credible threats to massacre, and menacing, for the serious and natural crimes that they are, we created and fostered a false world in a way, that improperly rewarded people for doing the wrong thing, inadvertently. That is not a fair test of a person's character if we compare theirs to ours, without acknowledging and properly weighting the definite absence of the 'ceteris paribus' condition.
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It is this above, the sort of reasoning you can hear yourself telling you, as you ponder what to do about a friend who's credibly threatened to massacre, even though it was long, long ago, and they never did anything remotely resembling anything like what they threatened since, and whether to call the police. On the one hand, is this overthinking it? And if so, then what is the obvious thing to do? To continue to do nothing, the status quo, and not call police? Or the opposite?
I want the right answer to be that I shouldn't call the police because the times were different, and given the same set of conditions long ago, that some people today who would never menace because the presently strengthening sanction against menacing works for them, would menace if the situation was like it was long ago when my friend said something that I still think about.
Would my friend actually do it? is a tempting question, but that's just the wrong question. That's the type of question people would ask themselves when learning that someone they knew and trusted and respected was abusing children. "Would they really do that? No!"
Wrong question. We're too close to make a good judgment anyway, and that's OK, because our criminal justice system has been running quite well for centuries now, and it only gets better as the decades pass by. It's focused on finding facts, and it specializes in sifting facts from fiction. If it is a fact that a person really wants to massacre, then that is just what our criminal justice system is very good at determining.
If it is found that it was a false alarm, we are naturally relieved and hope the person either learned their lesson, or was able to address the conditions that led to their involuntary infraction of the law. False alarms are good news, and would reinforce the current law forbidding menacing, and threats to massacre.
