Judge Sets $25k Bail for South Carolina Mall Shooting Suspect and Lets Him Go Back to Work – Opinion

According to several news agencies, a suspect in the South Carolina shooting which injured 14 was taken into custody on Sunday. That’s the good news. His bond is set at ridiculously high $25,000. And – get this – he can go to work if he wears an ankle bracelet. Seriously.

#ColumbiaPDSCUpdate: A judge issued a $25,000 bond in court for Jewayne Price, the shooting suspect. He is also on house arrest & ordered to wear an ankle monitor. Price can travel to and from work during certain times, as per the order of the judge. pic.twitter.com/I9RwY9dP5Z

— Columbia Police Dept (@ColumbiaPDSC) April 17, 2022

CBS News reports:

W.H., Chief of Columbia Police “Skip” Holbrook said 22-year-old Jewayne M. Price, who was one of three people initially detained by law enforcement as a person of interest, remains in police custody. According to the Columbia Police Department, he was charged with illegally carrying a gun.

Columbiana Centre was the scene of the shooting. At least three people were suspected to have been involved in it. The victims ranged in age from 15 to 73. “We don’t believe this was random,” Holbrook said. “We believe they knew each other and something led to the gunfire.”

Jewayne Price is the suspected in the attack on the mall. Attention: The following link will take you to a page that has a large image. His name is listed on a Facebook profile, which remains active at the time of writing. It lists Columbiana as his hometown (where the shooting occurred). His profile photo shows him giving the camera his middle finger. I’m guessing the account will be inactive by the time you read this, because he’ll probably put on his ankle bracelet, run home, and immediately erase all his social media.

Daily Mail published his mugshot

South Carolina mall shooting suspect, 22, will be allowed to return to WORK with an ankle monitor while out on bail https://t.co/JqLJgvlfhZ

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) April 18, 2022

If you believe it, the next 24 hours will be less than 24 hours. AnotherSouth Carolina was the scene of a mass shooting. Nine persons were reported to have been shot. However, there is no report of any fatalities. This incident took place at a local restaurant about 50 miles northeast of Savannah.

Is there something going on? Joe Biden believes it must be ghost guns. For Chuck Schumer, it’s just another opportunity to push billion dollar gun control bills.

Economist Malcolm Gladwell argues that the increase in school shootings is because of a lowering threshold of what’s acceptable. The National Review’s David French summed up Gladwell’s theory thusly.

He argues, at the risk of simplifying a complicated argument, that every mass shooting lowers its threshold for the next. He argues, we are in the midst of a slow-motion “riot” of mass shootings, with the Columbine shooting in many ways the key triggering event.

This argument is valid and must be taken into consideration. We have seen such a rash of violence across the country in the last two years that it’s almost becoming “normalized.” We’ve become numb to the news.

However, Gladwell’s article was written in 2015, and a lot has changed since then.  What’s behind the current explosion of violence is more easily explainable: we are letting out dangerous criminals in ever-increasing numbers, and in almost every awful case we’ve read about recently the perp is a recently-released or paroled career criminal with a long, violent rap sheet. Waukesha massacre at Christmas. Last week’s mass casualty shooting on a Brooklyn subway train. A woman was pushed to death by a subway car. Los Angeles Nurse Jacqueline Avant was brutally beaten to death at a bus station. Jacqueline Avant was home invaded and murdered by her LA-based philanthropist. An unprovoked fatal stabbing of a 24-year-old woman who was working alone at a Hancock Park store.

It goes on. The list goes on. These heinous crimes share many similarities. The first is that they all occurred within the last year.  The perpetrators were found to have been released from jail or prison early, on parole and had a long criminal record. These criminals shouldn’t have been on the streets.

We don’t know much yet about the criminal histories of the shooters in the weekend’s two mass shootings in South Carolina.  But with the judge releasing the suspect on only $25,000 and sentencing him to mere house arrest, it’s certainly hard not to come to the conclusion that our justice system is broken.