Hacker News Reader

Comment by corresation | Hacker News Reader

The comments (and moderation) on here overwhelmingly lean towards the "it was all a joke...freedom!" angle, so I'm not sure which HN you're reading. The very few counterpoints are in light gray.

The police dispute whether the "jk lol" part happened. The only person who vouches for that is his father.

Is his initial threat credible? Perhaps not, but it absolutely does deserve a visit from police (many school shooters have made the same sort of at-the-time humorous comments beforehand), and I doubt many who claim otherwise would stick to their positions had he actually then moved to violence. What the police actually discovered we don't know, but apparently it was enough to make the police, the prosecutor, and a judge escalate the situation.

View on HN

I would stick to my position if it escalated to violence. The best strategy to counter terrorism is not to give up freedom. Giving up freedom is society acting as if it is terrorized. Acting terrorized is exactly what terrorist want.

Whether he wrote a song, a poem, a joke, a virus infected his computer and posted it, a friend wrote it while he wasn't looking, a hacker got in and wrote it, or any one of a million ways it could have come into existence or be interpreted, the government does not have to right to suppress his speech, set excessive bail, and seize his person. That is why we have the 1st, 4th, and 8th amendments. If all speech was happy-go-lucky speech, it wouldn't need to be protected.

I would rather die in a terrorist attack, then live without liberty. Look up the number of deaths caused by smoking, cars, alcohol, and obesity and then compare them to the deaths from terrorist. Then explain to my why we can't risk having a kid express himself. When did we become the land of the oppressed and the home of those scared by words?

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Really think about that. Think about what it means, why it was said, what the logic is behind it, what the philosophy is behind it. Say it over and over to yourself. Say it to friends and family. Memorize it. Live by it. It is the quintessential wisdom for our time, and for all time.

There have always been restrictions on speech -- specifically as it relates to threatening others -- for time eternal, having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. I'm actually Canadian, and here we have limits on hate speech, and I'm entirely for that.

We all need to live together, and rote recitations of absolute rights -- cast as if it's stark choices of blacks and whites -- doesn't match a reality that the world is a series of grays, and that your rights are perpetually in conflict with the rights of others (the rights of someone to make ill-conceived threats, versus the right to live peacefully and safely).

I also find it remarkable how many people cast this individual as a "kid". He is 19. At 19 many of us were living on our own, attending university, and there was no absurd notion that threats to schoolchildren would be treated as a joke, lol jk rofl.

Neither of us know why the police, judge and prosecutor decided to treat this so seriously, and it may absolutely be a gross overreach of the law, but at the same time the reflexively opposite reaction that holds his as an innocent joke of constitutional protected threats seem ill considered.

I specified Ars Technica as an example because I don't think Hacker News is bad here. In fact, I think HN's discussion about this issue has been great.

Whether or not the "LOL" "J/K" happened, the joke is obvious comedic hyperbole. I've had friends make really similar jokes. I'm sure you have too. My housemate shouts things like that over Skype while playing League of Legends. School shooters may write things like that, but so do plenty of perfectly well-adjusted teenagers.

I don't really have a problem with police making a visit, either. I don't think it's necessary, but if the police wanted to stop by and ask if everything's alright, no harm done. Still, there's a big jump from a police visit to searching his house and arresting him, and they seem to have done all three on the basis of a Facebook comment.

And if they found something really worrying, then they should be charging the kid with that. The fact that this is all they have implies that they haven't found that he's anything illegal. And if he hasn't, he obviously shouldn't be charged.

> Perhaps not, but it absolutely does deserve a visit from police (many school shooters have made the same sort of at-the-time humorous comments beforehand)

It's not how reality works.

Just write it like this:

P(shooter|makes-a-joke) = P(makes-a-joke|shooter) * P(shooter) / P(makes-a-joke).

And try to look at it, even qualitatively.

Even if every shooter was known to have made those kinds of jokes ( P(makes-a-joke|shooter) = 1 ), there are many, many more kids making those jokes who don't end up shooting anybody ( P(shooter)/P(makes-a-joke) ~ 0 because P(shooter) will be around 1/10^6 (several hundreds shootings so far over hundreds of millions of children being alive at those times) ).

Therefore a visit from police is absolutely undeserved because this test has mind-bogglingly huge potential for false positives. You'd probably had to interrogate thousands of kids per a school shooter to be found.

It's the same reason when you get "positive" on cancer test that has 99% chance of being right if you have cancer, that doesn't mean you have 99% chance of having cancer. It probably bumped up from 0.001% to 2% or something.

> and I doubt many who claim otherwise would stick to their positions had he actually then moved to violence.

Those who wouldn't shall be considered unwise and taught how the world works until they understand causality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com