{"id":865,"date":"2007-02-21T18:58:10","date_gmt":"2007-02-21T18:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=865"},"modified":"2007-02-21T18:58:10","modified_gmt":"2007-02-21T18:58:10","slug":"i_dont_know_whether_to_laugh_o","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2007\/02\/21\/i_dont_know_whether_to_laugh_o\/","title":{"rendered":"I Don&#8217;t Know Whether to Laugh or Cry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At first glance, this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jsonline.com\/story\/index.aspx?id=568400\">story<\/a> looks pretty funny, just the sort of weird news item I chuckle over a dozen times a day: a would-be Good Samaritan, hearing sounds that he thought came from a woman being raped, armed himself with an antique sword and burst through the door of a neighbor&#8217;s apartment ready to face an attacker, only to find that there was no woman. The only occupant of the place was another guy watching a porno DVD all by himself at a ridiculously high volume.<\/p>\n<p>Big laughs, right? So it would seem&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Then I read the coda: the not-quite-a-hero is being charged with three criminal counts, and his sword &#8212; a family heirloom, no less &#8212; has been confiscated by the police. I can&#8217;t believe this situation, an obvious (and funny) misunderstanding, couldn&#8217;t have been resolved during a 10-minute conversation between the two men and a cop as intermediary. Instead, it&#8217;ll now be dragged through the already-clogged legal system and a guy who was only trying to do the right thing faces jail time. Yeah, the screaming turned out to be nothing, but maybe next time it&#8217;ll be the real thing and passersby will choose to ignore it instead of risking this guy&#8217;s fate.<\/p>\n<p>Everybody in this country needs to take a deep breath and chill the hell out&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At first glance, this story looks pretty funny, just the sort of weird news item I chuckle over a dozen times a day: a would-be Good Samaritan, hearing sounds that he thought came from a woman being raped, armed himself with an antique sword and burst through the door of a neighbor&#8217;s apartment ready to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}