David McElroy

When the two suspected Boston bombers turned out to be Muslims from another country, the drumbeat of the ignorant started again.

“The Muslims are out to get us,” they ranted. “If we close the borders and quit letting foreigners in from those countries, things like this won’t happen.”

Let’s assume that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are the Boston Marathon bombers. They came to this country about a decade ago after leaving Chechnya, a region controlled by Russia, but filled with an ethnic group that’s mostly Muslim and that has a deep desire to become independent. So for those eager to close the borders, we have the things they seem to hate the most: Muslims from an ethnic group that doesn’t look like white Americans, who were born in another country.

So is this the quick cure for ending mass murder? Keep Muslims out? Keep out ethnicities that don’t look like most of us? Keep foreigners from moving here?

Unfortunately for the people who seem to imply this would fix everything, their narrative falls apart quickly.

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The available evidence leads me to believe that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was one of the people who bombed the Boston Marathon last Monday. I certainly can’t prove it — and I would want to see first-hand evidence if I were on a jury trying him — but I’m comfortable assuming he’s guilty for now.

If he’s guilty as I assume he is, he’s a cold-blooded killer. A monster. A selfish murderer with no regard for other people.

Despite that, I’m very concerned that police don’t intend to read Tsarnaev his Miranda rights. He’s injured and can’t speak right now, but when he’s finally questioned, he’s not going to be told that he has the right to remain silent. He won’t be told that he has the right to an attorney to represent him. It will just be up to this 19-year-old to happen to remember for himself what his rights as an American citizen are. (And you can bet that police and the FBI are going to work hard to convince him he has no rights.)

If you want to know about the history of the so-called “public safety exception” to reading a suspect his rights, take a look at this article in Slate. I’m not going to rehash the legal history of the matter, but you’ll understand the issues better if you read it.

I only want to emphasize one thing about this. If we’re supposed to have rights that are guaranteed to be honored by government — but those rights can be set aside at the sole discretion of that same government — those aren’t really recognized rights. Those are just privileges that we’re allowed to have when it’s convenient for government to allow them.

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When eighth grader Jared Marcum got to school Thursday morning, one of his teachers objected to the shirt he was wearing. The Logan, W.V., school doesn’t have anything in its dress code forbidding pictures of weapons on clothing, but he was suspended from school and then arrested by local police. He faces two counts, for “obstruction and disturbing the education process.”

“I never thought it would go this far because honestly I don’t see a problem with this, there shouldn’t be a problem with this,” Jared told WOWK television.

Jared’s father, Allen Lardieri, is completely supportive of his son’s position and says he can’t understand why anyone would object to the shirt. He’s angry that he had to rush away from work to pick his son up at jail.

Didn’t we settle this sort of free speech argument long ago? In 1965, five Iowa students were expelled from their high school because they wore black armbands to show their opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war. The students and their families sued the school and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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