Apparently Someone Was Hit In The Head With A Crate Of Sam Peckinpah Films

[filkertom]

LAS CRUCES, New Mexico (AP) -- Police warned Las Cruces residents that they've received two letters threatening random shootings if city leaders fail to hand over a "substantial" ransom.

I'm sorry, but whoever is threatening this, besides being evil, is a bonehead. I'm very specifically thinking Richard Pryor in Superman III-level stupid. "Hey, Clem! Where'd ye get the Hummer?" "Uh, found it."

Comments

[r-caton.livejournal.com]

If I lived there I'd be investing in some Kevlar underwear I'm a-thinkin'...

[archanglrobriel.livejournal.com]

Greeeeeeat. That's my home town, where my parents, sister, and nieces live. The only thing that makes it a lot less worrisome is the fact that there is so much stupid involved in this particular threat that even the Las Cruces police department -may- be able to catch this person before he or she does any harm to anyone. On the other hand, the police in L.C. are not exactly a crack force. The LCPD are the same group of people who, after an extremely nasty multiple homicide involving children at the local bowling alley about ten years ago, couldn't figure out that they should mmmmm....I dunno...put up roadblocks on the only two highways leaving the town. They never caught the perpetrators.
I hope they're better now than they were then.

[dragonscholar.livejournal.com]

My old hometown had a shooter, and they managed to find him despite mass incompetence. With advanced warning, this idiot could be in a world of hurt much easier.

I'm not attached to the death penalty. I think it's often misapplied. I can easily do without it. But I'd shed no tears if it was applied to whoever decided to threaten an entire city.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

You say whoever sent the demand was stupid. Was there some detail in the report you linked to that I missed, or do you have other information that wasn't in it? I think it's a despicable terrorist tactic, but it's only stupid if the ransom notes are traceable. Actually collecting the ransom would have to be either stupid or fiendishly clever (as determined, ultimately, by whether he gets away with it), but I don't have enough information to know if he actually thinks he can collect the money, or if he's just using the demand to draw attention to his attack.

By just sending the letters, even if he doesn't have the means or the will to carry out the threat, he's scaring a lot of people and getting a lot of media attention. And if a couple of people show up dead next week, he'll have started a huge panic. If he wants to scare people because he's evil, or if he just wants to be covered in the media because he's genuinely psychotic, this could be quite effective.

Really, the only stupid I see in the piece is that the Las Cruces government told the public about it. That's stupid because it's doing *exactly what the guy wanted*; even if they catch this guy, we'll probably see a dozen copycats, because they'll look at what happened here and see that it worked: send a couple of threatening letters and you can shut down a city! Whenever any sort of criminal is trying to manipulate you into doing something, you become an accomplice to the crime if you realize what he's trying to do and you do it anyway. Consider how popular ransom kidnapping would be if anyone who paid a ransom were subject to the same penalty as a kidnapper. Consider how much better off Israel could be if they didn't have decades of history of walking away from the peace negotiations of the day every time there's a terrorist provocation, in light of the fact that that result is just the result the terrorist provocation was trying to produce.

[ravenclaw-eric.livejournal.com]

Didn't this tactic also appear in _Dirty Harry?_