THOUSANDS A DAY!! EEEEEK!
An idiotorial in today's
campus newspaper
bemoans how society's priorities are warped because the reward
offered for a recently kidnapped child
is a mere $15K while the reward
offered for the killer of a dog (i.e. someone who pulled a woman's
dog out of her car and threw it into three oncoming lanes of
traffic) is a whopping $109K.
(As an aside, the headline for one of today's front page stories
is "Senate fails to Constitutionally protect American flag" in a paper
called a "liberal rag" by the undergrad population I like to call
the Aggie Youth Corps.)
Anyway, while reading this on the can I knew even before I
finished the "Golly ain't it horrible how a dog's life is valued more
than a human's!?!?!" part that she'd (the idiotorialist) eventually trip lightly
and paralogically from the kidnapping in her first paragraph to
"2100 children missing a day."
One's first, braindead response to such a number - and the
reponse the writer's deliberately trying to provoke - is "Holy shit!
Thousands of our precious chillun are being snatched from
our loving arms daily!! Call out the National Guard, and where
the hell is Batman when you need him!!!!"
But the desire to fire up a lynch mob dies as the first
neuron kicks in and you do a little math. Lessee - 2100 per
day times 365 days per year equals 766,500 kids per year.
What!?! No way. Let's see exactly what she said: "Last year,
there was an estimated 2,100 children reported missing per day
to the police and the FBI's National Crime Information Center
according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children." According to the
NCMEC's
most recent Annual Report:
From October 1984 through December 1998, 64,114 cases of
missing children have been called into NCMEC's Hotline.
This includes 43,764 cases of runaway children; 15,823 children
who have been abducted by family members; 2,558 children who
were found to have been lost, injured, or otherwise missing; and
1,969 children who were taken by a nonfamily member.
A wee bit of math gives us, for that 14 year period:
runaways - 68.2%
kidnapped by family - 24.7%
lost, etc. - 4.0%
kidnapped by evil "others" - 3.0%
I searched the FBI's NCIC pages for the "2100 per day"
figure but didn't find anything more about missing children than
a pointer to the NCMEC site.
In other words, about 140 children per year are kidnapped by
evil strangers. Not 766,500 per year; not 2100 per year; but
140 per year. I couldn't find the stats, but I'll bet
that more than that die per year from being beaten by their
parents. That is, when they're not being kidnapped by one
parent or another (1130 per year), running away from one or
both of their parents (3126 per year), or just plain being lost
by their caring parents (182 per year). To put it bluntly, a child
is in greater danger of being lost by mum and dad than of
being kidnapped by a black man in a stocking mask.
And, as to the additional aspect of sexual abuse that's usually
thrown into the mix (with the recent addition of the Internet-related
hysteria about how TCP/IP was the genesis of child
molestation), find out for yourself why a lot of children run away,
and just what percentage of those "evil child molesters" aren't
related to their victims.
There is a great, dark secret here, although it sure as hell isn't
the phoney one being flogged on milk cartons and trash TV about
how all those evil fags, liberals and folks with suspiciously
dark skin are endangering our precious chilluns.
No, the secret is that lil' Jimmie and Susie are probably quite a bit
safer out of the house than in it.
As to the idiotorial's broad generalization - from two specific
examples - that society values dogs more greatly than people ...
well, let's just say that if someone managed to get so far as to even
attempt to chuck my dog into traffic there'd definitely be at least
one additional grease spot on the highway come the morn.
posted by Steven Baum
3/31/2000 03:29:38 PM |
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