Ziggy - 04.20.2007

Ziggy isn’t the first place I’d look to find political commentary, but sure enough, here it is. Usually, Ziggy’s the one taking the brunt of all the misfortunes life dishes out. In this case, it’s the station manager who dared to give his opinion on television getting put in jail.

You would think that in this enlightened age, people would never be put in jail for something they said or an opinion they gave, but it does happen. Even as recently as last week.

University of Colorado student Max Robinson Karson was participating in a class disussion about the tragedy at Virginia Tech. During the discussion, he said some things that surprised and disturbed the other students in the class. His statements in the class included “If anyone in here says that they’ve never been so angry that you wanted to kill 32 people, you’re lying.”

He also mentioned that the decor of the classroom they were in made him angry, and it he could see how it could set someone off on a rampage.

Obviously, anyone listening to this may think he was disturbed, and I think anyone would have been justified in reporting his statements to campus officials or even police. Without context, there’s no way to know if his statements had anything behind them, if he was joking (in extremely bad taste), etc. Based on his statements, it’s certainly reasonable to think he could be a threat to others, and a discussion with a psychiatrist may be warranted. If he had been asked - or even required - to be checked out by a shrink to make sure he was not a danger to others, it would have seemingly been justified.

Nowhere in his reported statements did he threaten anyone. He simply said he could understand how a person could get angry enough to do what the Virginia Tech shooter did. As abhorrent as that may seem, it’s certainly not illegal to say such things. Right?

Wrong.

Karson was arrested, fined $750 dollars, and faces six months in jail. Additionally, he is barred from the University of Colorado, essentially expelling him from the university, since he is no longer able to attend classes.

Keep in mind that this all happened on a college campus, supposedly a bastion of open discourse and ideas. I guess the boundaries of free speech only extend as far as popular opinion. If he had said that he understands what drive suicide bombers to kill themselves and others, or that he could empathize with foreign dictators crushing political opposition, would the reaction have been as extreme?

Would he still have been arrested if he had chosen to empathize with another killer whose atrocities weren’t so fresh in everyone’s mind? I find it hard to believe that he would have? As such, this is just another example of free speech being shut down due to knee-jerk reactions of the government and the public, and that scares me just as much as the comments he made.