TheTornadoTimes

Anyone who’s seen “Hakop Kaplanyan – Innocence 2013,” the YouTube video vouching for the innocence of Hakop Kaplanyan, the UCLA freshman and former Clark student accused of rape, knows the argument his friends made in his defense.
Except, wait, there is no argument. It’s the standard response: “I know him. He’d never do this.” Unfortunately, many have bought into this, constantly retweeting the hashtag #SupportHakopKaplanyan and video over the past few weeks.
As of press time, no charges have been filed against Kaplanyan.
However, the police cannot simply arrest a student without some evidence against him, and the people mindlessly retweeting the tag should take that into account.
The only people who truly know what exactly happened are Kaplanyan and the girl he was with.
Whether they had been dating for weeks or months or whether they simply went out one night, Kaplanyan was not entitled to sex in any way. His lawyer is arguing that the sex was consensual. If Kaplanyan thinks he’s innocent because they were dating, he does not know the law.
Often, a sense of entitlement allows people to feel that sex is supposed to come along with dating, and if a man takes a woman out on a date and spends money on her, he is entitled to a reward afterwards. In this case, if a man were to force himself onto a woman, he’d be guilty of date rape.
In the video, Kaplanyan’s friends claim he’s innocent. They also somehow find it important to speak of Kaplanyan’s water polo achievements. Apparently, because someone has had several victories in a sport, people should consider them less likely to have raped someone.
Not only are their claims irrelevant and unsupported, but Kaplanyan’s friends are severely disrespecting the girl who was allegedly raped. Look at some of the tweets that followed yesterday’s hearing: “#SupportHakopKaplanyan trended and it worked congrats dude!” and “Oh thank god, he is innocent! The girl needs to get shanked.”
Kaplanyan may be not guilty but his friends are guilty of smearing the reputation of the accuser.

Last week, barely four months after the horrors of Sandy Hook Elementary, took place another atrocity.
Except this time, it wasn’t perpetrated by a deranged 20-year-old, but 45 senators who killed a bill (six votes shy of the needed 60) that would have expanded background checks on gun buyers.
Pressed against the backs of these trembling senators was the barrel of the National Rifle Association’s scary machine gun named “candidate rating.” Never mind that the bill was proposed by initially pro-gun senators Joe Manchin and Patrick Toomey, who willingly sacrificed the “A” ratings they earned from the NRA to place gun violence prevention as a priority.
The other senators decided that personal political well-being preceded the public safety of our nation and yielded their spine to the NRA—the lobbyist group whose vice president’s wise solution, in response to the 20 firstgraders lifeless in their classrooms, was handing out guns to teachers.
The Manchin-Toomey bill rejected last week would have required background checks for buyers at gun shows, on the Internet and other commercially advertised sales. It was a relatively moderate tackle at the shocking 40 percent of purchases made without checks, but moderate or not, the senators would have shot down the bill all the same.
The statistics indicating that 30,000 people nationwide die by guns every year, the studies showing that states with the most gun control laws have a 42 percent lower death rate than the states with the least number of gun control laws—none of these facts mattered to the senators.
It seems that not even the shock of Sandy Hook Elementary was enough to trigger the senators to take the long-overdue forward strides in the prevention of gun violence.
Despite that the Newtown tragedy is an extreme case of gun violence, and though perhaps stricter background checks may not have stopped one Adam Lanza from stealing his gun collector mother’s semi-automatic rifle, the Newtown massacre should have been the ultimate push to break away from the NRA and make the change.
Instead, by rejecting the bill, the 45 senators brushed off the massacre as a mere freak accident.
The children of Sandy Hook Elementary died twice.