I am grateful for my life to date, for my long marriage, for the fact that my clients still need me as much as ever and keep me employed. I'm grateful for the lives of my children and for the experiences they have had that help them to grow and mature, for all that God has thrown their way, and ours as well, and I am extremely happy that I was born in the USA.
I am grateful for many, many things. Today, though, I am thankful for how utterly dumb some people are, including those who commit certain crimes.
This is not about the stupidity that they show in actually committing the crime; that's less a matter of stupidity than immorality, godlessness, contempt for one's fellow man. That's pretty miserable, but it isn't stupidity. There are plenty of otherwise less-intelligent people who have also managed to be good and decent people, respectful of their fellow man.
No, this is about the types who manage to get caught by doing something moronic during or after the commission of the crime. If you are familiar with the Darwin Awards (if you are not, try here), you know that the survival of the fittest leaves a few prizes in the rear-view mirror of evolution. Some of those, of course, are criminals who have done something idiotic in committing their crime, including sowing the seeds of their own demise. But mostly about those who sow the seeds of their own arrest.
As I have probably mentioned, my older son is the owner of several "vape shops", which sell the equipment used in the practice of vaping (inhaling water vapor, with a flavor and generally a nicotine level that can be adjusted). While he is a retail shopkeeper for all things vaping, he particularly encourages use of, and markets his products, as a smoking-cessation habit. He has been successful doing that.
One of his stores was the subject of a burglary last week. Located in a 19th-Century log cabin, the store was broken into in the middle of the night, where the perpetrator entered and apparently wandered around for over an hour. He showed his understanding of the marketplace by focusing on stealing the highest-priced vaping devices, including some custom-made and unusual products, and pretty much leaving the "juice", the liquid heated in the device, alone. Let's leave it at that.
Now, we on his "team", employees and parents alike, were devastated by this happening. It is a violation in every sense of the word, and I'm pretty sure we all understand what that means. As you know, insurance companies make it pretty difficult to value the losses, and require an inordinate amount of time to put together the information they need to make what is generally an inadequate settlement. There was a lot of pain for several days.
Of course, my best girl and I are both old enough to have lots of cubbyholes in our aging brains. So while we were all rocked by this having happened, and the possibility of our son taking a total loss on the stolen merchandise, we at least were more hopeful.
You see, criminals are mostly stupid, unlike the type you see on TV -- the Darwin Awards types are a lot more representative of your daily thief than the folks on The Catch, if you get my drift. So we tried to explain to our son that the thief was pretty stupid, likely, and would try to sell the merchandise in a way that would expose him, probably pretty quickly.
Be comforted, we told him, and consider how one of his customers or competitors (and it had to be one of those, given the knowledge of the shop and the product line) would try to dispose of the loot. Our son is a pretty bright fellow, and a fairly well-known name in the business in that area. He also has a solid foundation in social media, so he had a pretty good idea of what would happen.
As it turned out, he was quite right, and so were his parents. Last night, less than a week after the robbery, we got a text and a call that the perpetrator was in custody. Want to know what happened? There was an anonymous tip from someone who had seen a posting online that you may not believe.
There, on the thief's Facebook or other social media site, was a picture with all of the stolen devices, including the custom, one-of-a-kind products, laid out on his bed. He had taken a picture of them and posted it online, as if to say, "By the way, duh, if you weren't aware that I was a moron before, well, let me show you, so you can be sure I am, ga-huk, ga-huk, ga-huk."
Needless to say, the cops paid his house a visit and he was charged with whatever felony is appropriate when you break into a store and lift thousands of dollars worth of products. And the principle that you don't have to be an idiot to be a criminal, but it seems to go together, well, that has been borne out classically.
We are all grateful for the association of criminality and idiocy today.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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