Leaving aside the fact that the lawsuit isn't strictly related to the profiling or police investigation, and focuses instead on the subsequent public smear campaign orchestrated by the Irving city government and mayor's office against a middle school student, the comparison is inapt because Ahmed wasn't guilty of anything more than passing off a disassembled/reassembled clock as an original. Most of the time racial profiling is used in this manner, it ends up with results like that. Or a black female business executive reported by a concerned neighbor as breaking into her own apartment. 19 police officers showed up and removed her at gunpoint before she was able to prove she lived there. Or a dead Trayvon Martin, clutching his Arizona Iced Tea.
Racial profiling isn't a great idea because there end up being a lot more Trayvon Martins than there are Syed Farooks. Despite the fact that 84% of those detained in the NYPD stop-and-frisk program were black or Latino, they ended up being caught with weapons at half the rate of whites that were detained. They were a third less likely to be caught with contraband like narcotics. Twice as suspicious, but only half as guilty. It's a waste of resources, it's ineffective, and it's cruel and un-American.
And what did Farook's neighbor see anyway? As best as I can tell, it basically boiled down to "six Middle Eastern men [moving] onto the street" and "getting lots of package deliveries." If that was really all he saw, then reporting it to the police would be inappropriate racial profiling. Getting UPS deliveries while Middle Eastern isn't against the law. It's not like the other five men he saw getting suspicious deliveries are also under arrest or dead on the side of the road. But here's the thing: even had the neighbor called the cops and they had shown up, it's entirely believable they still wouldn't have found anything illegal.
You see, under American law, it is completely legal to amass a personal arsenal capable of mowing down a Christmas party in minutes. You can buy what some refer to as "assault weapons," with foregrips to allow better control when hip-firing at dispersed groups of people, retractable stocks to allow better concealment under clothing, and large capacity magazines so reloading can occur as conveniently as possible. You can buy ammunition, thousands upon thousands of rounds, hollow point rounds, armor-piercing rounds, and stockpile them in peace and without consequence. You can order tactical vests, boots, helmets, masks, and possibly protective armor, shipped in suspicious but legal Amazon boxes, free, with a Prime membership.
The bombs didn't have to be assembled until the last minute. And they didn't need or use bombs to assist in the carnage. Neither did Planned Parenthood shooter Robert Dear. Or Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook. None of them broke the law until they walked onto the property armed and with ill intent. If the "no more gun free zones" folks had their way, Farook and his wife wouldn't have broken the law until they pulled the trigger.
There is one other thing that bothers me. There is, right now, this weird Schrödinger's Cat kind of thing going on in San Bernardino. To some extent, it looks like what we classically refer to as "terrorism." They are Muslims. They had bombs. They went to Saudi Arabia. They may have been in contact with foreign terrorists. But a Postal Syndrome situation really does seem plausible too. The target is so strange and personal: a holiday party for county employees, for co-workers. Not the usual ISIS fare. There's the argument that allegedly took place, setting the scene. The fact that it appeared rushed, with most of the bombs left at home for the main event. And, after all, lots of Muslims aren't terrorists. People go to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj. We won't know for sure until the investigation progresses further, if we ever know for sure. We're still waiting on a motive in Aurora.
There are many people who would say that the point is it doesn't matter what the point was. There is no difference in between the slaughter in Colorado Springs and the one in San Bernardino. Had the police shown up at Robert Dear's door the day before the Planned Parenthood shooting, they'd have left empty handed. Robert Dear wasn't breaking any laws. Neither was Syed Farook. He was an American citizen, born and raised, exercising his Second Amendment rights. They did, indeed, have to pry the gun from his cold, dead hands. These same people have had enough of Robert Dears, and they've had enough of Syed Farooks. They want it all to stop.
Others seem to see the events as profoundly different because of the differing motivations. Farook could have been caught if only we weren't so PC. Eric Harris, James Holmes, and Adam Lanza are all maniacs. The Robert Dears are always crazy, the Syed Farooks always perfectly sane. With one kind of mass shooting we throw our hands up and say that there is simply nothing to be done, that no curtailing of the right to bear arms can be tolerated, and with the other we demand the profiling of American citizens. The opening of internment camps. The conducting of warrentless wiretaps. We'll suspend all kinds of liberties in the defense of freedom, so long as those suspensions are targeted at the right people and the right liberties. You know: the expendable ones.
Political correctness didn't cause this massacre. Islam didn't cause this massacre. Ahmed Mohammed's clock didn't cause this massacre. Whatever was responsible for the University of Texas, Columbine, Sandy Hook, NIU, it was that same thing that was responsible for San Bernardino. They are the same thing. They're not special because Muslims were responsible. If we're going to do anything to stop this or at least slow it down, it's going to have to start with facing the fact that these events are all rooted in the same, exceptionally American problem, and that parsing them out based on who did what and for why, and who can score points with it and who has to offer only thoughts and prayers about it, we're going to have to keep facing these atrocities, one or more, every day.
Every day.
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