Today’s idea: Summary seizures and killings of pit bulls around the country are unjustified “canine profiling” and flout the legal due-process rights of owners, an article argues.

Law | In Boston Review, Colin Dayan laments the pit bull’s fall in the popular imagination from beloved companion — think Petey of the “Our Gang” comedies (right) — to fearsome, four-legged lethal weapon, “inherently dangerous, too aggressive to live.”

As a result, many towns and cities now allow the police and humane organizations to impound or kill these dogs without criminal convictions of the owners, despite the Constitution’s ban on taking “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” the author says. She doesn’t mention statistics on the prevalence of vicious pit-bull attacks, arguing instead that it is owners — and not dogs — who are the problem:

… Other breeds of dogs also bite, but we hardly ever read about them. “Dogs that bite people,” as [the writer and pit-bull defender] Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out, “are vicious because they have owners who want a vicious dog.” That is, what predisposes a dog to bite is not its nature, but its environment. The most loyal dogs are the most abused. Ever ready to please, these dogs become victimized by those they love most.

The author sees a slippery legal slope in the breed-specific legislation and a historical analogy: “Just as someone who summarily killed an unruly, stray, or unmuzzled dog was seen as peaceable and law-abiding, so lynch mobs tortured and murdered, knowing that they were respected as guardians of the community.” [Boston Review]

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An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified the author of the article about pit bulls as a man on subsequent references. Colin Dayan is a woman.