At Reason, Jacob Sollum writes that “we’re all hostages to the dopiest person with an iPhone.”  This comes from a story about two women in Nordstrom’s who “saw something and said something.”

[A]t a mall in Burlington, Massachusetts, when they saw a guy carrying a novelty umbrella that resembles a samurai sword. They called 911 and reported that a man with a rifle was walking around the mall, whereupon “federal, state, and local police descended on the mall,” which was evacuated and closed while police interrogated short white men wearing gray sweatshirts, black pants, and a black backpacks. Eventually the umbrella carrier, recognizing himself from this description, came forward and confessed that he is a total geek, at which point the mall was reopened.

Naturally, the police praised these eagle-eyed busy-bodies for phoning it in. 

The article focuses on the stupidity of this situation, reflected in the comments of Boston talk radio host Michael Graham:

Please, folks, just stop. Stop making yourselves look even more stupid by defending this stupidity. Just admit that the cops should have investigated the report first, then decided if they needed to unleash the SWAT teams and the helicopters. 

Instead, by saying “Damn straight, and we’d do it again!”, you’ve just empowered every attention-seeking nut and prank phone caller to shut down businesses at will.  If all it takes is for someone to say they THINK they saw something that LOOKED like a rifle to shut down streets and close businesses, then we’re all hostages to the dopiest person with a phone.

The problem is that it doesn’t merely turn the rest of us into hostages, but targets.  Every person in that mall that was subject to interrogation and search became a target, despite having done nothing to warrant any interference with their otherwise pleasant day of shopping.  If there was a little something in their backpack that they didn’t want the police to see, there was not good reason to demand inspection and, once found, subject them to seizure.

What if someone took umbrage with being stopped and questioned without having done anything on their part to justify a significant intrusion on their constitutional right to be left alone, and balked.  Arrest?  Taser? The wrong “aggressive” gesture at the wrong moment, and a bullet in their head?

Despite protestations to the contrary, we all have different levels of tolerance, or sensibility.  What one person sees as a fun or interesting, another sees as dark and threatening.  We pretend that there is something common between us, what we like to call “sense,” when the hard reality is there is no such thing.  Whatever we think is obvious we impute to the rest of society, since we’re all normal and it’s those other weirdos who just don’t get it.

Graham says we’re hostages to the dopiest person with an iPhone.  Certainly, these women could qualify, but the government has fostered and empowered hysteria, whether it’s the product of stupidity or fear.  While the stupidity factor makes this story funny, in the sense that no tragedy followed and so it’s just another tale of dopiness, it reflects how low the threshold has fallen that controls our freedom.

When the police descended on that mall, they were fully and lawfully empowered to take whatever action was necessary to find their rifleman.  Indeed, had they failed to do so, and a guy shot up the mall and killed a bunch of shoppers, it would be a national tragedy.  A properly so, despite rising prices and diminishing quantity.

We’re working with the thinnest thread of sanity and intelligence here.  We were always subject to the lowest common denominator, but historically those people on the bottom wrung of the sanity and intelligence scale were treated officially as outliers, lunatics and morons.  People who weren’t quite sure they saw what they saw, or knew what they knew, would be reluctant to say anything, no less reach out to police to close down a mall.  Not anymore.

Most of us have seen a package unencumbered by a hand sitting in a public place.  Watch for a few more minutes and someone comes back, maybe a nice mother with some wayward children who required collecting.  They clutch the package and walk away holding hands.  No terrorism here. 

We wait and watch.  Rarely is anything so askew as to demand immediate action.  We can distinguish an umbrella from a rifle.  We don’t rush to assumption of the one in a million occurrence with nothing more than a flash of a fear to push us over the edge.  But then, we aren’t the ones phoning in reports to police from Nordstrom’s.

The heroes of this episode are the hysterics, and there are more of them than anyone realizes.  By elevating them from lunatics and morons to heroes, they are empowered to give voice to their crazy fears.  The years of inhibition, concern that the rest of the world not learn that they are the crazy people walking among us, are over.  They are the new protectors, their silly fears now the only thing standing between us and the terrorists.

And as long as the crazy people keep iPhoning it in, the police will have everything they need to search us all at the mall.  Or on the street.  Or anywhere else we go.  If you see something, say something.  Don’t worry about how stupid or crazy it seems.  It’s all good.