The latest CDC recommendations for all U.S. citizens to wear face masks when in public has created backlash from an unexpected quarter: career criminals.
Long accustomed to wearing masks to conduct their unlawful business, the presence of masks has upended criminal stereotypes and forced armed robbers and muggers alike to rethink their image.
“I mean, used to be a guy wears a mask, you pretty much know what he’s got in mind,” said P.J. “Punky” Brewster, head of Burglars & Bank Robbers Local #211 in a recent surreptitiously recorded interview. “Nowadays, you walk into a bank and freakin’ everybody’s got a mask on, including the guards and the tellers!”
The rash of business closures has hit criminal enterprises hard across the board. “It’s an invisible kind of unemployment,” said economist T. Telford Lange of DeVry University. “The average citizen just doesn’t realize how much of the cash running through the economy on an average day is the product of illegal acts.”
William R. Sutton, a former convicted bank robber and now a security consultant with Steven Mnuchin’s Treasury Department put it this way: “The mask? Come on, it’s an essential part of who we are as armed robbers. All these law-abiding citizens wearing masks – it’s nothing less than pure cultural appropriation on a massive scale.” Sutton was quick to point out that even criminals understand the need for social distancing during the pandemic. “We’re willing to rob or mug you from a safe distance or in a no contact manner if that’s what it takes,” he explained. “Hey, we’re all in this together, right?”
But Buster Poindexter, President and CEO of Masks-R-Us defended the Masker-Aid-for-All movement: “It’s a Second Amendment right – the right to protect yourself. The only defense against a bad guy with a mask is a good guy with a mask. They can have mine when they pry it off my cold, dead face.”
But criminals are, if nothing else, adaptable. “I don’t have to carry a weapon no more,” says Nate “No-Nads” Nadler, an accomplished stick-up artist. “Now I just walk up to the teller and ask for all the money in her drawer. Then I pull down my mask and I say, ‘Don’t try anything funny. I have a cough.’ Works every time. ”
The ACLU was reportedly considering filing a class-action suit on behalf of the suddenly indistinguishable miscreants.
