How about not locking up children for life? How about not making snap judgements based on a short article?

There are plenty of other, longer articles about him discussing how he's swatted a dozens of mosques, temples, synagogues, and others.

He's also not a child. He's 17 years old, and fully capable of understanding the risk of harm he exposed hundreds of people to.

Yes, I read that the other day. I never claimed he is innocent, but "life" is a long time. I don't know the kid or any details, but are you really sure he's still going to be a danger in 10 years? Or 20 years?

> He's also not a child. He's 17 years old, and fully capable of understanding the risk of harm he exposed hundreds of people to.

It's not. Brains keep developing until the age of 25 or so. Age of consent and age of $lots_of_things is 18 (arguably too young, IMHO).

Trailing people as adults when they're considered too young to vote, buy alcohol, etc. is quite frankly ridiculous.

It's not like he just did this once or twice. He has apparently engaged in this activity some hundreds of times. Purposely putting people's lives at risk, probably specifically hoping to cause as much harm as possible. He literally offered his "swatting" services on Telegram. This isn't like some one-off bad decision, this was a persistent extremely malicious intent and could have resulted in substantial loss of life. Yeah, I don't think he should be jailed for life, but this is a person who should not be walking free in society until he has proven substantial fundamental change.

> I don't think he should be jailed for life, but this is a person who should not be walking free in society until he has proven substantial fundamental change.

Fully agree with that; obviously this is all very serious. But that is a fundamentally different position than "he should be locked up for life!"

Yeah for real, a life sentence is a pretty over-the-top suggestion.

Sociopaths cannot be cured.

SWATing is literally equivalent to shooting at someone with the intention to kill.

Until there is serious consequences for people who do it, it won't stop.

I never said there shouldn't be serious consequences. Ya'll treating this as some sort of binary choice between "lock a teenager up for life" vs. "give him a slap on the wrist".

It's far from certain he actually is a sociopath. Half the teenagers out there are semi-sociopaths on account of being teenagers. And it's really not the same as shooting at someone, much less "with the intent to kill". SWATting is SWATting, and comparing it to other things is silly because other things are, well, other things.

Neither is being a child or an adult a binary. Yes, the law generally makes a sharpe distinction based on age, but it does sometime recognize that someone who is close to the age of adulthood and who has been charged with particularly high impact and violent crime can be treated as an adult.

Whether an adult should or should not be imprisoned for life is a different question, but I cannot see treating this person a “child” appropriate.

What an absurd position. Comparing things helps calibrate the response. You compare situations to others you've experienced in the past to come up with an appropriate reaction.

What's the intent of SWATing? It is attempted murder.

And no, half the teenagers are not sociopaths. Sociopathy is a well defined condition that cannot be cured.

You're clearly neither a doctor nor a lawyer and have chosen a weird hill to die on, but carry on.

> but are you really sure he's still going to be a danger in 10 years? Or 20 years?

Nobody knows, but the person lost the chance for society to give them the benefit of the doubt.

They know it’s wrong. They did it HUNDREDS OF TIMES.

I’m a victim of a SWATting. You cannot imagine the hell you get put through until it happens to you. This kid deserves life.

I'm sorry that happened to you, but two wrongs don't make a right and vengeance is not justice.

Vengeance? Where does vengeance enter into this?

This kid has demonstrated a fundamental incapacity to feel empathy and remorse for the lives he ruined and the people he purposefully and repeated placed in lethal situations.

Such a psychopath is a menace to society and needs to be locked up.

You can't make that assertion based on this article because it doesn't have enough information. People – especially children and teenagers – can commit crimes, even terrible crimes, and still have the capacity to feel empathy.

It's these kind of wild views that see all criminals as irredeemable Hannibal Lector type monsters that barely qualify as human that led to the militarisation of the police in the first place. Well, one of the reasons anyway.

Hundreds of SWATtings. You can infer a lot from that alone.

Society being unable to self-regulate and deal with problem people like this is a purely modern issue. I hope we find a solution because, otherwise, I don’t see how things stay together.

What?

People commit crimes that have negative impact on people, possibly causing death

They go to prison for committing these crimes

It’s not like the guy accidentally ran over a dog

He swatted people for money

I never said he shouldn't go to prison. I also never said this wasn't serious.

Can you elaborate on the hell you get put through when SWATting happens?

My understanding was that SWATting means someone calls the police and says that you have a bomb in your house or something to that effect. I imagine that the SWAT team breaks down your door and arrest you and everyone else in the household.

Soon enough, they must realize that you are all good, right? SWATting is common enough that they must be aware of it and take it into account. If they started arresting and prosecuting people who were victims of SWATting, there would be big court cases against the police.

To clarify, I am not trying to underplay what you went through. I just want to understand what you went through that made you describe it as "hell".

I feel a need to point out that a force of armed men pointing guns at you with their fingers on the trigger is very much a deeply traumatizing and frightening thing to go through. We also have occurrences of swatting incidents leading to the deaths of innocents (links below). I also want to add that during a swatting incident, having your dog shot on sight isn't irregular, as they are considered a threat while sweeping through your home.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Wichita_swatting

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-man-targeted-...

> having your dog shot on sight isn't irregular

That's a bad way of phrasing it. Shooting the dog is POLICY. The very first thing they do.

You can start by imagining how traumatic is it to have a huge team of armed men break into your home and violently restrain you or a loved one. If you've been SWATted you don't know why these people are there. Heck even if you recognize they're SWAT, you're not going to have any clue if they really are or of they're people posing as SWAT to kidnap you for ransom or worse.

Also that SWAT team isn't just going to come in, realize you're not armed, and laugh at the situation before letting you go. For all they know, you are as dangerous as the person who called in said and were just putting on an act when you saw the SWAT team roll up. So now you're at least going to deal with questioning which is going to be extremely difficult to deal with in a state of panic and confusion.

And no, it's very unlikely that the SWAT team would be held responsible for anything. Police have too much protection against that. To spin it for them, they were operating in good faith on the assumption that they needed to raid the house in the manner they did otherwise people would die.

And in this particular case, all while your elderly mom is ziptied on the ground in the front yard wearing just her underwear in freezing, raining weather at 1:30 at night, will all her (now very much awake) neighbors looking on.

He has exposed a critical security flaw in the system. Give him a bug bounty!

He will: free room and board for many many years.

Unfortunately the flaw isn't getting fixed. Punish the hacker!

Every criminal by definition exposes a critical security flaw in the system. Should we pay them all?

They should have at the very least sent a SWAT team to break fown his door at 6 AM, arrest his parents etc.