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Yeah, we could do that. But when your 13-year-old gets caught stealing a dirty magazine from a convenience store, don't come crying to the court.
The sorts of stores that will still stock physical porn when my children are teenagers are the sort which won’t even let them in the front door without an ID. This isn’t the eighties.
Okay then, replace it with a six pack of beer from Sheetz, or a candy bar, or whatever the hell else you think kids steal these days.
You're talking as if "kids" as a general category are broadly guilty of shoplifting something. IME, most kids didn't, and don't, shoplift; and those who do tend to be greatly concentrated in terms of class, culture, family background, etc.; and much as with crime in general, it's dominated by a small number of repeat offenders.
It includes more people than you think it does. I can recall the following instances from high school where I was either aware of or partially complicit in theft:
One friend of mine would steal practically anything he could out of museum gift shops whenever we were on field trips. I don't even know that he necessarily wanted the stuff he was stealing. He was a good kid who got good grades and came from a good family. He's currently some kind of engineer for General Electric.
A group of us decided to whitewash the local graffiti tunnel just after all the seniors in our graduating class painted their names on it. A friend who worked at Wal Mart put several hundred dollars worth of white paint on the loading dock for us to steal. We kept joking about it being a heist. I wasn't there for the actual heist, but I participated in the whitewashing.
Two friends of mine were convicted in juvie court for stealing plants from a local nursery that they intended to give as Mother's Day gifts.
On the band trip junior year my roommates and a few other friends did a grab and run of beer cans out of the cooler in the hotel bar. My role was to create a distraction by trying to get served underage and getting into an argument with the bartender.
I was at a Halloween party and a bunch of us piled into a Dodge Neon and drove to a farm field nearby where we proceeded to grab pumpkins and throw them in the back of this one kid's El Camino. This fat, black cop who was the local fuzz showed up and started chasing us while running with a flashlight. I remember I had to jump a fence at the edge of the field and I actually stopped to let him catch up because I wanted to see how he negotiated it; he was trying to wriggle his fat ass underneath it and I started laughing before continuing running. We all had to walk back to the party, and when the officer showed up and saw all the pumpkins my friend's parents said that they told everyone to bring a pumpkin to the party.
I'm not aware of any of the people involved in the above incidents having any contact with the law whatsoever as adults. I also spent 4 years working for the Boy Scouts and dealing with kids all the time who, while I don't have any specific knowledge of criminal activities, they were the kind of jackwagons who I wouldn't be surprised if they stole something. The entitled rich kid brats who are bound and determined to see how close to the line they can get before I have a talk with their scoutmaster about my ending their participation in my program.
When people say shit like this I always get an image of the naive mom who says "well certainly my David would never do anything like that!" Kids are idiots, and if you think that the impact of harsh punishments for petty crime among teenagers would be limited to minorities and poor people, well, I have some swampland in Jersey for sale.
Sounds to me like you just hung out with a particularly bad crowd. Nobody I knew growing up was anything like this (and I come from a rather poor background, probably much lower class than yours).
Plural of anecdote is not data, personal experience not necessarily representative, etc.
The point isn't that it's representative. I did not hang out with a particularly bad crowd or anything; these were normal, middle class kids who all thought the whole thing was a big goof. The point is that normally good kids from good families occasionally make stupid mistakes when they're younger but grow out of them and are otherwise successful, law-abiding members of society. So when I hear people here unironically spouting moronic ideas like mandatory hanging for petty theft, I want them to at least pause and consider the possibility that they might be signing the death warrant for someone close to them, and for countless other people who aren't the complete trash they assume members of certain groups are.
Why do you keep blatantly misrepresenting what I actually said? At no point have I advocated for execution of teenage offenders with no significant criminal record. In fact, I have repeatedly and explicitly clarified this point, including in this very thread. It’s very easy to make somebody look “moronic” if you just lie about what they said, but do you have an argument against my actual beliefs?
he's pretty clearly responding to this post, not you.
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