I have been profiled, and targetted, as a Catholic when I was a kid. It's not fun.

I can only imagine what it must be like to have a negative profile in the eyes of law enforcement. I only had insults and the occasional rock from unenfranchised dopes to deal with. Reading the memoirs and histories of people who have experienced racial discrimination provides a fine tutorial for understanding the real effects of broad-based profiling on the subject, on the profiler, and on the community riven by its practice.

As the mommy in a gun-toting household, I would take strong exception to the idea that any of my children would use violence at school merely because some of my children shoot. (Thing 1 is at Leagues today for rifle. Good luck, honey!) Yet, based on your illustration, I can see it happening. In fact, it does, among my liberal friends. I have to be the person who demonstrates, by word and deed, that "gun nuts" are "nuts about guns", like "car nuts" are "nuts about cars", and not just plain nuts.

I oppose profiling based on over-broad criteria for three reasons:

-It's unjust on its face to the vast number of people profiled, thus it undermines their faith in civil justice. The few people caught in a broad profiling have other things, narrower things, in common that would make a valid profile, without isolating and angering a large number of good citizens in a nation sewn together like patchwork.

-It blinds us to those narrower factors that, in fact, form the basis for a valid, useful profile of potential political extremists and criminals. If criminals are more likely to be brown-eyed, the blue-eyed criminal is overlooked. The narrow factors cut across the larger "common sense" factors, and include people not fingered because they are outside of the big profile group. Remember when everyone said that all Muslim terrorists were male?

-It sets a pattern of divisiveness that will eventually be used to profile ever-narrower out-groups by in-groups.

We are a tribal species. We tend to divide when we think with our lower brains. I'm in the pro-frontal-lobes party. I want to include. Criminals and extremists tend to divide themselves away from inclusive societies. We don't need to give them any help.