Rocket Bomber - article - comics - commentary - A special comment where I draw spurious and perhaps false parallels and analogies and yet still manage to make more sense than an office full of Alaskan Prosecutors

The Alaskan legislature (at the urging of an assistant DA from Anchorage) is considering whether or not to ban some types of comics and other illustrated material because they are obscene. Sure, fine, protect the kids and all that. The thing is

Drawings of people aren’t people.

##

Dear Alaskan prosecutor Aaron Sperbeck, et al.:

Claiming that seeing offensive comics (which aren’t people) will lead to someone doing nasty, nasty things to real people is like saying shooting and field dressing animals (which aren’t people) will lead to someone doing nasty, nasty things to real people.

Of course, comics fans are pale, pasty geeks who spend too much time indoors avoiding other people,

While hunters own guns and knives and have experience in, for example, stalking prey, killing, watching a wounded creature die without feeling sympathy, inserting a knife into a hip and working it to pop the joint and sever the tendons so the haunch can be removed from the rest of the rapidly cooling carcass, skinning their kills, and eating the roasted flesh of their victims.

And I’d be willing to bet more Alaskans own a rifle than a single volume of pornographic, drawn material of either Japanese, European, or Domestic provenance.

But hunting is just good fun, while comics are evil?

I’ll skip the PETA links, y’all know they’re going to lie distort things to their advantage. Let’s go with statistics from the International Hunter Education Association — a group that is pro-hunting and also in the business of teaching hunters not to shoot people. They report 19 Fatalities from hunting accidents in 2007 out of 239 total ‘incidents’ in 2007 — 239 incidents that also included 66 self inflicted wounds, 30 cases of people ‘out of sight’ being shot because, you know, bullets go through things and travel a mile or more unless they’re stopped, and one case in Kansas of a 43 year old shooting a 15 year old with a rifle because of ‘apparent use of intoxicants/drugs’

Non-fatally, thankfully. But here’s a case of a middle age guy hurting a child. Documented. By a hunting advocacy group.

I know you’re a prosecutor, Mr. Sperbeck, so obviously you must believe in the evidence: can you cite a similar case where the possession of comics led directly to the harm of a minor, along the lines of the Kansas hunting case cited above? One? Hm? Took me all of 10 minutes on the internet to find the IHEA and their reports — you have a lot of case law and court transcripts and a 2002 Supreme Court Decision (saying that you’re wrong, by the way) and yet you and other opponents of risqué comics always speak in generalities and what might happen.

per the IHEA report linked above: in 2007 an 18 year old shot and killed a 14 year old in Georgia. 27 minors were involved in ‘incidents’; two of them were killed. The youngest was 9 years old. In one case one 12 year old shot and wounded another 12 year old.

And I’d like to note: per your own state’s Department of Fish and Game, “Alaska is one of the few remaining states that does not provide information to the national database” (page 5, Proposal 8) — and the ADFG doesn’t report the statistics independently either. How many people have been shot in hunting accidents in Alaska? How many children?

No one is saying, but I’d bet it’s more than the victims[sic] of Comics.

“In her five years on the job prosecuting child pornography cases, [Alaska Assistant U.S. Attorney Audrey] Renchen said she has not charged anyone with possessing anime images.” (Anchorage Daily News, 11 October. The Anchorage Daily News also seems to be the primary source that spurred so many to link and comment)

So I can point to 19 documented hunting deaths in one year, and one of the prosecutors pushing for this measure hasn’t even thought to prosecute anyone for naughty comics under current obscenity laws for the past five?

##

The abuse of children is no joke. But comics are so peripheral to the debate it’s almost laughable. I’ve yet to hear of the case where an abuser (or potential abuser, caught before the act) owned only comics. Instead of hypothesizing about the use of comics in ‘grooming’ potential victims (one reason cited by prosecutors in the Anchorage Daily News article) maybe they should be looking into how these creeps manage to get time alone with the kids to begin with. There is plenty of real child porn out there; why not concentrate on that? After two or three years without any victims of skeezy photographers or Real children caught up in Real Bad situations, we can revisit this issue of drawings and whether or not anyone is hurt by them.