[greymule]

Dave: I understand your point, and believe me, I'm a law-and-order man. But courts usually do give first-time offenders a break, whether it's an attack on an official or a burglary or a disturbing the peace. (My town contains a number of guys who have been given seventeen or more breaks, a policy I heartily oppose.) I think the problem is that many judges assume that when assaults involve sports, well, anybody can fly off the handle in the excitement, and if everybody shakes hands, then everything will be OK, save the jail cells for the real criminals, etc. Assaults on officials must be taken as seriously as assaults on anyone else—but not more so. Maybe they could add a penalty for interfering with an official in the performance of his duties, something like that.

Your point with the speeding tickets is well taken. Everybody around here knows that if you're going 10 over the limit in town, look out, but if you're going 10 over the limit out on Route 95, you'd better be in the right lane. There is obviously selective enforcement; however, I don't think the situations are quite parallel. Mandatory sentences were introduced because some judges had been preposterously lenient with vicious criminals. Zero tolerance sure sounds good to voters. But both have backfired, producing unfairness and well-documented absurdities.

So my polemic follows:

I see today that some high school kid in Georgia was suspended from school and can't play in the homecoming football game because some administrator saw him give his girlfriend a peck on the forehead. Zero tolerance. Yet more than one kid around here has been caught with a gun in school, only to have zero tolerance for guns trumped by laws that make special cases for certain classes of people. Their lawyer simply finds a shrink who'll say they have low self-esteem, which makes them "disabled," which in turn makes them immune from discipline. As the president of the American Federation of Teachers said, "They can bring a gun to school every day. All we can do is take it away from them."

I think we have gotten ourselves into real trouble by dividing society such that certain people and groups enjoy different levels of protection and privileges. Before the law, some of us are now more equal than others.