A Bethesda, Maryland teen has been making a lot of news in the past week or so and his story is worth watching closely.  Colin McKenzie-Gude, is an 18-year old graduate of St. John's College High School in Washington, D.C., an up-scale prep-school.  He was a member of the JROTC program and the school air rifle team.  McKenzie-Gude was arrested at the end of July for having a “stockpile of weapons and bomb-making materials.”  He was later charged with setting off home-made bombs in a remote field in Gaithersburg, Maryland and also charged with an attempted strong-arm carjacking at a local shopping mall.  Along with the guns – several “assault rifles,” a shotgun, and a handgun – police found a fake CIA identification card and a “Geneva Convention badge” similar to ID’s issued to US contractors in Iraq.  They also found a list of several faculty members of St. John’s with home addresses and a map purported to be a motorcade map to Camp David.  The kid’s father was also arrested for “buying him the guns.”

All of this has the media, the public, and even conservative and gun rights blogs, convicting this kid of plotting to blow up his school, murder a bunch of teachers, and attempting to kill the President – all based on nothing more than the fact that there were guns and stuff in his home.

We all need to be really careful about buying into media hype based on skimpy evidence and scary pictures.  The gun owning public should be particularly skeptical about media reports of “stockpiles” and “caches” of weapons and “bomb-making materials.  Most of us could easily be accused of having weapons and ammunition “stockpiles” and I can find bomb-making chemicals in virtually any home in America.

Maybe this kid is a wack-o who needs to be locked up, but so far there has been little released in this case that suggests anything truly nefarious to me.  The car-jacking charge is the only real crime I see and I haven’t seen the evidence on which that was based.  As to the firearms, explosives, and other things; there is nothing that this kid had or did that I did not have, try to have, or attempt to do when I was a teenager.

There were always numerous guns in my bedroom along with a variety of ammunition.  We didn’t have the internet when I was a kid so I got my hands on a copy of “The Anarchist’s Cook-Book” and experimented with all sorts of home-made loud-n-boomers.  At 16 I had a doctored military ID that wouldn’t have fooled Mr. Magoo and an out-of-state driver’s license that was passable at the local beer stores (though I was too afraid to actually use it – my Mom would have killed me.)

I always worry when I see the press and public rushing to judgment based on evidence which in and of itself is not, or should not be, a crime.  Guns – even a lot of guns – are not an indication of criminal intent.  Nor are “bomb-making materials” since common household items can be considered such.

As I say, maybe this kid really is dangerous and was planning something really bad, but maybe he was just a kid playing spy and experimenting with things that go boom.  I did a lot of that when I was a kid and so did my boys.  It looks like this kid was probably taking things too far, but nothing released to this point remotely suggests that he should be considered a dangerous criminal.  It also looks like his father wasn’t supervising his activities closely enough, but again, bringing criminal charges because he let his son have access to his firearms?  That’s a bad precedent to be setting.

Only time and more information will sort this whole thing out, but unfortunately, if there really wasn’t something more sinister than possession of weapons and a vivid imagination, we’ll probably never know about it because the kid and his dad will be forced to cop a plea to some lesser charge and the assumption of guilt on all of the charges will stick with them for the rest of their lives.