Graffiti is NOTHING like this. Graffiti, whether someone considers it "art" or not is VANDALISM. It is doing damage to something SOMEONE ELSE OWNS. I mean, would the issue be that hard to see if I threw a ROCK through your window? Should I say "lay off me, that was performance art, expressing my contempt for consumerist society"? Would Michael Atherton get weepy about free expression if he read such pap? I suspect not.
It is malicious damage no matter how you try to cut it, folks. Maybe the police are frustrated because society is doing no better a job of enforcing this than parking regulations or speeding regulations. But just because the police don't catch and punish all the law-breakers doesnt really change the FACT that the law was broken.
Now, I have really mixed feelings about punishing the parents. Parents fail their essential job of controlling their kids in hundreds of ways. Why is Kahn singling out this particular one? I mean, what real difference does it make if police fail to perform their control function or if parents do? How do you expect the police to control the PARENTS any more than they control the kids? I mean, the parents are out there in their cars breaking laws themselves. They show daily they have a disregard for the laws themselves. THAT is probably why the kids are scofflaws in the first place. But think clearly. The police let them get AWAY with this lawbreaking. So of what prectical value is ANOTHER LAW that has little chance of being enforced.d
Rep. Kahn, I have a better idea. Find the small handful of laws that ARE BEING obeyed, that ARE being enforced, and then do a MASS REPEAL of all the rest. No one, absolutely no one, is impressed by the mere existence of laws that everyone breaks. In fact, the general disrespect of laws is abetted by our passage of laws we won't even try to get obedience for.
I just have this inescapable feeling that the way things are progressing, vigilantism will become our only real option. Get a posse of adults, find some graffitists, and beat the living SNOT out of them. What is the counter-argument to that?
Jim Mork Cooper
"Only a LUNATIC would cut schools to buy more bombs".
"We hold these truths to be self-evident....that governments are formed, deriving their just powers by the consent of the governed" Declaration of Independence
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