No Amount of Money Is Too Much...

...to spend to give people the illusion of safety. From War On Guns comes this bit of official legerdemain. Seems one of the more tech-savvy burgs in Massachusetts spent a dumptruck load of dough (actually the last time I priced construction equipment, I think it's two dumptrucks worth) on the vaunted Shot Spotter anti crime system.

The first thing I noted was the disconnect between the headline and the body of the story:

Headline: "Police use ShotSpotter technology to combat gun violence"

Actual story: "Police used the ShotSpotter system to locate a shooting victim Oct. 14th near this intersection of Pine St. and Cedar St. in Springfield."

Lets review-- a $450,000 doodad that lets you quickly locate a perforated corpse, is not the same thing as one which prevents said corpse from becoming perforated in the first place.

Next is the admirable restraint shown by the reporter in refraining from editorializing when the police spokesflack said that in the four months of operation the system has netted an impressive zero arrests but it was only a matter of time till it did so.

Were I in in the reporter's place, the sentence after would read approximately ,"The department spokesman let it be know that the data from the new system would be sent directly to the bat cave, and soon, evil doers all over the city would be left neatly tied up and labelled with pithy notes describing the particulars of their crimes, so this whole crime thing was licked like a stamp."

Citizens, you can rest easy; your bullet-riddled corpses will no longer go unfound - Shot Spotter is on duty.