At This Week, Ryan Cooper gets all snarky as he grabs at the low-hanging fruit of the sexting case against a couple of 17-year-olds, Cormega Copening and his girlfriend, Brianna Benson.

New ground has recently been broken in the incarceration of American teens, however. Several children have been charged as adults for possessing child pornography — of themselves. Apparently, moral panic over sexting means we must entrap our children in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic sandpit before turning them into hardened criminals.

Well, not exactly “recently,” as this involves phenomena that have been happening for years already.  Sexting has been a source of terrible problems for youth since its start, but that doesn’t seem to trouble Cooper too much.  He recognizes the system’s “brutal treatment of minors,” but no one is suggesting that Copening get life without parole for sexting.

[R]iddle me this: How can you simultaneously be a minor being victimized by a sex criminal (yourself), and an adult violating an innocent victim (also yourself)?

The same issue Robby Soave raised a week earlier, but Cooper takes the unfortunate route of learning nothing from the conundrum.

I imagine some lawyer will pop up to tell me that yes, it all makes perfect sense in the context of legal reasoning and precedent. But it simply beggars belief that this isn’t a violation of basic justice and common sense, if not the 14th Amendment’s protection of due process.

After all, why would a guy without a clue as to how this situation developed want to know what caused this problem, when instead it’s easier to resort to the low-brow mindlessness of “common sense” with a meaningless throw-away to due process?

As for the Copening case, Sgt. Sean Swain of the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office offers his explanation for this exercise of discretion:

“We don’t know where these pictures are going to go. We’re more or less saving the kids from themselves because they’re not seeing what’s going to come down the road.”

Destroy kids to save kids, always a sound approach to law enforcement. But his rationale, “not seeing what’s going to come down the road,” is an epidemic.  At the time the law under which Copening is being prosecuted was enacted, no one foresaw that sexting would one day be a thing.

So the law’s prohibition was of possession of sexual images of a minor, without an exception for possession by the minor himself.  At the time, the law was applauded because child porn was a plague that must be eradicated. Things change, but nobody saw what’s going to come down the road.

And if sexual images of minors was a travesty, then the law has to be broad enough to cover all minors, from 1 minute to 17 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 60 second.  Don’t let a single miscreant get away. Why should we let a single, sick, perverted, twisted pedophile get away? And that’s why images of 17-year-olds are included in the law. Is Cooper suggesting that these teens are unworthy of the protection of laws against child porn? No way.

But there are child predators, evil teens who murder and rape, wilding their way to vicious harm, but below the age of majority. How can the law treat some violent predator of 17 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds as if he were some baby. The law must impose adult punishment for very adult crimes. And so another law allowed for the prosecution of 17-year-olds as adults.

While characterizing it as making “perfect sense” might be meant as snarky ridicule, it’s nothing more than the emotional cries of heartfelt “justice” by those who rely on “common sense” rather than trying to understand the dangers of screaming about absurd situations that flow from their preference for ignorance.

These are all pieces of the puzzle that, when viewed independently or only in the context of specific cases, seemed like absolutely necessary laws to fight injustice. Except when put together, they produce absurdly wrong outcomes, because no one was willing to think hard enough to see what’s going to come down the road.

Anyway, there is a simple solution. [Red flag alert.] In many states, including North Carolina, the age of consent for sexual intercourse is 16. That drops to 14 for couples who are within four years of age. That seems basically reasonable, granting what is known about normal teenage sexual development.

Apparently, no one told Cooper about how Owen Labrie beat rape charges at St. Paul’s School because of this gaping hole in the law, that seems “basically reasonable” to him.

Putting sexting in line with that framework makes sense…[T]een sexting has become a regular part of adolescents’ sexual development — not risk-free of course, but basically harmless.

Until something bad happens, a young lady commits suicide because of it, and it’s suddenly anything but basically harmless.

A few other policies could be added — adding a bit to the sex-ed curriculum about responsible sexting (don’t pass pictures around without permission, not cool) and a law against revenge porn as well. 

And the cycle of mindless criminalization repeats itself, always starting with well-intended if myopic vision.  Every aspect of what happened to Copening, to other teens like him and Benson, seemed on its surface to be a good idea, “basically reasonable,” and “basically harmless,” until it turned out to produce ridiculous, absurd and draconian results.

And when that happens, snarky idiots like Cooper won’t want to know how the law could turn into a “Kafkaesque bureaucratic sandpit” so it doesn’t continue the cycle of stupid born of “common sense.”  That requires knowledge and thinking, and guys like Cooper aren’t interested in some lawyer popping up to explain how cries from morons like him, to come up with some simple fix to all the injustices in the world, created this nightmare.

That way, the clueless pundits can take comfort in believing that they’re not responsible for the confluence of poorly drafted, ill-conceived, excessive, hysterical laws that they sought, but which some lawyer tried to tell them were bad ideas from the start.  That way, Cooper can claim it’s not his fault because “nobody saw what’s going to come down the road.” Guys like Cooper never do.