Let's say you receive your bank statement and see a deposit for $100 that you didn't make. If you choose to spend it, you know it's theft (no matter how you try to justify it).
Turns out that the bank made an error in your account months ago and they were simply correcting it. Spending it, therefore, is not a crime.
Dateline is essentially depositing money in checking accounts and filming who spends it. These sexual predators weren't committing any actual crime -- no children were involved at any time -- they simply thought they were.
Orwellian rationalization, right out of the "1984" mindset.
You posted: Let’s say you receive your bank statement and see a deposit for $100 that you didn’t make. If you choose to spend it, you know it’s theft (no matter how you try to justify it).Turns out that the bank made an error in your account months ago and they were simply correcting it. Spending it, therefore, is not a crime.
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Your analogy fails in that it isn’t inherently wrong, or illegal, to spend $100. It IS inherently wrong to have sex with a 14 year old girl. There can be no mistake there. Entrapment is different than this sort of sting operation. Entrapment causes someone who would not otherwise be likely to commit a crime to do so. These men weren’t called up on the phone and solicited by teenage girls. The men were looking for this sort of thing and that is what they found. To my mind, anything, including this NBC show, that gives these perverts reason to think twice is ok by me.
BS. Those men don’t accidentally email a picture of themselves naked to a 13 year-old girl. This is already happening throughout the country. NBC just merged into the traffic.
The reason they are catching so many people is that so many people are doing it. This is just a minute part of it.
The only time I ever did chat, I was propositioned. And I was 38 when it happened. I deleted IRC after that happened.
Wow!!! Talk about comparing apples and oranges!
Underage sex participants are only "currency" if you like to spend that kind of thing.
And that's where you're wrong. Arranging to have sex with someone you think is underage is a crime, even if no child is involved at all.
The police run the same stings to identify and prosecute these creeps and they do get convictions even though no children were involved.
That said, there is something wrong IMHO, with NBC doing the same thing just for ratings.