Bounty On Your Local Taggers

Mr. Stahnke suggested that local government place a bounty on all taggers.  He was fed up with the graffiti problem that plagued the area and he wanted some immediate action taken.  Thinking back to his little proposal, I thought that his little bounty program would’ve had some real merit.  He figured that the state government could place some kind of dollar amount on taggers’ heads and pay that dollar amount to anyone who shot and killed those taggers.  Tagger hunters would be required to bring the corpses down to their local police station or some other designated dropoff spot for processing and payment.  You know how’s there’s duck season?  Well, welcome the new tagger season.  Mr. Stahnke speculated that such a program would generate a genuine interest in eliminating the graffiti problem, while probably boosting gun sales, both over and under the counter.  You see, Mr. Stahnke’s plan was actually two-fold.  His goal was to eliminate two problems, not just the graffiti one.  Mr. Stahnke believed that as people began to bring in the bodies of dead taggers and graffiti artists to their local police stations, law enforcement officials would also check the weapons used in the shootings and verify that the weapons were registered.  Anyone who shoots and kills a tagger with an unregistered weapon would then be placed under arrest.  With that, you’d essentially kill two birds with one stone.  Not only are you steadily slaughtering taggers one by one, but you’re also reducing the number of illegal and unregistered firearms on the streets.  Of course, there are some loopholes and other facets of this program that haven’t been ironed out but that was basically the Cliff’s Notes version of his proposed anti-graffiti program.  I don’t know if he had put any additional thought into it, but he was convinced that such a program would not only be successful in California but that this program would eventually catch on in other states. 

Mr. Stahnke was a thinker.  He was a comedian or sorts too.  I think that even though he told us about his hunt-a-tagger program as a joke, I think that deep down he was actually very serious.  I don’t know if he was a victim of graffiti himself but he really seemed to have it in for taggers.  I can’t say I blame him either.  When it comes to tagging and graffiti, I’m definitely not a fan.