A typical Saturday night in Albuquerque ,
a gang drive by shooting highlights the evening.
I’m pretty sure our police gang unit knows who was involved,
but since our laws lean so heavily in favor of the bad guys, the police may
never be able to send them to the slammer unless one of them confesses, and
only then after being read his rights, lefts and everything else that get in
the way of speedy law enforcement. Let me just dream a bit. What if, since the police
are 90% sure who pulled the trigger, they grabbed this goober from his mother’s
basement took him to the town square and chopped off his gun hand with a dull
axe. Do you believe random shootings
would go down? Try the same technique in
the South Side of Chicago.
Of course we wouldn’t do that because our societal sense of
decency and fairness outweighs our desire to reduce gun violence. Bringing what we really want up to a conscious
level is important because we always get what we want. We shout from the highest
roof tops that what we want is to reduce gun violence, but what we really want
is to enact laws that make it more difficult for the good guys to get guns,
laws that make our lawmakers more reelectable, more feel good laws for the low information
voters, and that’s just what we got while all the time saying we’re trying to
reduce gun violence. You really want to
reduce gun violence get the axe ready.
How does this thinking fit in with one of the current administration’s
“misunderstandings.”
"You can't have 100% security and
also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make
some choices as a society." -President Obama on NSA surveillance controversy.
I agree with
President Obama. (Like they say, “Even a blind pig roots up an acorn every once
in awhile.”) The war we are fighting
now (or the philosophical difference we are having with radical Muslims, as the
administration prefers to consider it) is different than any other conflict we
have a ever had, and so out of the vision of our founding fathers we may have
to, in this instance, stretch the limits of the Constitution. We are no longer fighting a country, a
geography or even a race of people. We are fighting a religious ideology. We are all familiar with the weapons of past wars,
and they were the best in the world at bringing an enemy country to its knees, rearranging
geography and wiping out people. We had the most effective weapons when they
were effective, but today’s major weapon for fighting today’s war is--Intelligence. With the
right intelligence we can wipe out the enemy with a musket.
We have the ability
to profile the individual enemy, (if we can get by the ACLU), but even profiling
is getting more and more difficult with the home grown variety terrorist. Bombs
with the power of mega WW 2 bombs are crossing our borders in suitcases and crossing
gullible minds on the Internet. I believe, as does my buddy Barack, that we are
going to have to give up some of our freedom for safety. The debate, and it
will be a heated one, will be on where is the line. I believe at the end of the debate the line
will have to be moved. What will make
moving the line so difficult will be the recent actions of the administration has
created a real trust issue as to the ultimate use of the acquired information.
Can we trust our government to use the information to help us or hurt us? It’s a shame we have to consider that
question, but we do.
We say we want
an end to gun violence. We can get it with the hand chopping thing. We say we
want safety. We can get it with a peeping Tom government. Remember, we always get what we want.
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