Justice for victims of swatting: An opinion
C.J. Eldridge, Editor-in-Chief
Oh, swatting – a strategy for terminally online geeks tired of losing to someone in a video game and psychotic leftist’s newest kick for threatening conservative journalists.
For those unfamiliar with the term, swatting is when someone purposefully contacts emergency services, like police, and makes a false report that someone else is committing a serious criminal act, which puts lives at risk.
If police actually catch those making these false police reports in an attempt to cause harm – and that’s a big if – they aren’t likely to get more than one year as a punishment. This person has effectively sent a trained hit squad to someone’s home, and the justice system is giving them a year.
That is simply unacceptable.
The minimum charge for swatting someone should be equal to that of first degree attempted murder – and if we really want to have fun, it should be the same as the crime they have accused someone of.
This would carry up to 30 years in prison, according to South Carolina’s code of laws.
Why in the first degree? Because it’s premeditated; it takes planning; it takes so many steps beyond a freak murder on the side of the road. It is someone formulating a story, lying to law enforcement to purposefully get them to send out a heavy response to someone’s home, knowing, with any common understanding, that this could lead to someone’s death.
For instance, let’s say I call in and say John Doe has just murdered someone in his home or is holding someone hostage; these are two common accusations made during swatting. The police will have a heightened response to that call.
They have to. To them, someone is about to die or already has.
It takes someone actually dying during a swatting event for the swatter to even get 15 years, but that’s too late. A life has been lost already. It takes someone getting seriously injured for the caller to just get five years.
But what is five years to a deranged activist bent on harming those he deems an enemy to the cause? We do have very high rates of criminals returning to crime once out of prison in the U.S.
What if people understood before they made that fake report to law enforcement, before they threatened the lives of others, that no, it won’t be a year at the most – it will be decades of your life or maybe an electric chair or firing squad.
Now that is a lot more threatening to face down in a courtroom.
But C.J., that’s just too harsh. We can’t lock someone away for that long for just making a phone call.
Yes, we can. That is justice prevailing. Justice should not be nice. Justice is making sure that the evildoers are punished. If people are punished to the fullest extent of the law and not just given a slap on the wrist, it sends a message.
It says we will not tolerate this misuse of law enforcement resources. It says we will not tolerate a coward sitting behind his desk sending men off to possibly kill each other. It says we will not tolerate murder.
Murder? What the swatter is doing is not murder.
Sure it is. To make you think about that response, I have not a bombardment of chastisement – although I would like to – but a series of questions.
Is the one who makes the call, who sets up the event to begin with, that leads to someone’s death or harm not equally responsible, if not more so, than the one who pulled the trigger?
If I look at you and ask you to kill someone, and you carry out my request, have I not just orchestrated the kill?
If you were to have police surround your house in the middle of the night, guns drawn, and you have to crawl on your hands and knees out of your home, not even sure what is happening, would you really only want the one responsible to get a year?
What if we take this same person, this swatter, and we instead take them from behind the phone and place them behind the gun. Instead of the police unwittingly doing it for them, they have just shot someone you love or yourself. Now what?
Genuinely, I ask you to go through these questions. If your answer is that you still think it is too harsh to up the punishment for swatting, then what do you think we sentence people for?
I’ll tell you. We sentence people to remove them from polite society. We do it to protect others. We do it because once you commit a serious crime, you are no longer fit to live among us. You have signed away your rights and maybe even your life because you do not value the life of others.
I would encourage anyone reading this to look into some recent swatting incidents. It is all over the news and wouldn’t surprise me if we see legislation come about that does increase the punishments for such actions.
If that is the case, support it. Contact your representative and tell them to vote for it. Because in a political climate that is ever increasing in temperature – that is already on the edge of a cliff, about to fall off – we could see a lot more of these crimes.
Don’t let them go unpunished.
Feature image courtesy of Logan Weaver on Unsplash
