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Vancouver Area Teen Sentenced To 16 Months For Swatting
An anonymous reader writes: A 17-year-old from the Vancouver area in Canada has been sentenced to 16 months in youth custody and 8 months under supervision in the community after pleading guilty to 23 charges including criminal harassment, public mischief, extortion and uttering threats. The teenager was responsible for a number of swatting calls across the United States and Canada — mostly of female gamers. The judge told him, "It appears that when real life became too hard you retreated into the online world and became increasingly socially isolated. While you may think you enjoyed greater success in the online world, that success was an illusion. You were left with severely limited social skills and a significant educational deficit."
You can recover from a SWATing in a few weeks...
Unless you are fucking DEAD.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
SWATTING isn't a light offence. When you do this there is a very real possibility that someone will end up dead because a cop gets excited, or a homeowner is armed and decides to start shooting. This should be treated as a very serious crime, and if anyone is killed, the person doing the swatting needs to get a murder one charge slapped on them.
Moreover, this kid didn't do this once, but many times, demonstrating that this isn't a spur of the moment 'crime of passion', but that he possess a consistent and dangerous disregard for life. I am all for lighter sentencing for a lot of things, but this is something that you need to come down heavy on people for. Grafitti is stupid teenage hyjinx. SWATTING is really dangerous behavior.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I'm all for a massive reduction in police militarization and very nearly eliminating SWAT teams given how rarely they're used for what they were originally intended for. That being said, the problem with using this issue as a lever is that there will always be some fringe situation that calls for a swift armed reaction of some sort. These kids can literally say whatever they want, so there's always going to be a way to provoke a dangerous response as long as there's any conceivable situation that warrants that response. This is just one of those cases where there should be a panic button. It should be really difficult to hit and you should punish the living shit out of people who treat the panic button like it's a toy.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Or have PTSD from nearly being made dead. People who claim that an armed paramilitary raid of your home is no big deal obviously haven't had it happen.
It should not be possible to make 911 calls and spoof the source as somewhere else. I'm sure "swatting" never occurred as a potential threat to anyone when the 911 system was being built, but it's pretty dang obvious now, and the vulnerability needs to be closed before some idiot's use of it gets someone killed. (Or someone else killed... have there been any deaths caused by swatting? I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't recall one.)
I don't believe someone needs to die to warrant a bigger sentence. The fact is, this psychopath put many people in harms way and got their doors broken down and live guns pointed at them. The fact that nobody died is a miracle - certainly not attributable to this cretin's restraint but more to the restraint of the officers involved. It could easily have gone another way. Misuse of resources, false police reports, endangering lives - the guy deserves some real prison. After all, you aren't going to "correct" the behavior of a psychopath easily. You have to punish them enough that they don't do it again because of the potential punishment.