You know what’s also strange is this man genuinely thought people who go around blowing people up would be stopped by a sign? You realize you’re talking to terrorists, not vampires. They don’t need to be invited in, alright? Or maybe he’s onto something, because if you think about it, we’ve never tried that. We’ve never actually tried to repel terrorists with signs. Yeah, maybe that’s all the airports need is a sign that says “No Terrorists,” yes? Yeah, and then guys are going to be walking going, “Oh, I was going to blow up the airport, but the rules are rules and they said I can’t come in. They said I can’t. They said I can’t come in.”I think I have made that point many times here about so called "gun free zones," AKA victim disarmament zones. If a criminal means to commit a crime in a gun free zone, he is not going to be put off by a sign, just as a terrorist is not going to be put off by a sign or for that matter, a law.
But, this is the part where I begin to have some trouble. Listen to the audience laughing away at the presenters remarks, true though they be. Now, if the liberal audience "gets it" when a liberal presenter delivers the "news" on the show, why doesn't that translate to the audience "getting it" in other contexts? Why can they not stretch their brains just a little to find similar logic in similar circumstances? The next leap is then to ask, why make a law that will affect only those not inclined to disobey the law in the first place? Perhaps there is an unspoken agenda at work?
I am not, of course, trained as a lawyer, so the following represents my opinion as a layman trying to follow the law. I realize that many of these laws are designed to punish people of whom the authorities suspect of doing actual harm to people, through fraud, assault, theft, and other actual harms, but they can not prove it. Having laws prohibiting things that might otherwise not be dangerous in and of themselves may allow prosecutors to convict these people of "something." The trouble is that these types of laws are too often turned on otherwise law abiding people. Often the reasons for this are less than noble. Too often, too, the very people who should be the subject of such laws are never charged with committing the crime. For example of 80,000 people who were denied a gun because of a background check, only 44 were prosecuted in 2012 according to Kelly Ayotte in Politifact. Politifact goes on to muddy the numbers some, but in the end finds that Ayotte's statement is "mostly true."
Under such circumstances, if the goal is simply to provide ordered liberty for everyone, the only legitimate reason for making laws under our Constitution, why add more laws that will be ignored not only by the criminal but by the prosecutors as well? The law should not be designed to play "gotcha" with the citizen. It should instead free him to be his best.
Some excellent points. I think the audience can laugh at the terrorist sign jokes because it is so far removed from their daily lives; "It doesn't affect me,"or at least that's what they think. With the gun free zones, it hits closer to home, and through somewhat blurred vision, see it as protecting their own property and loved ones.
ReplyDeleteGreg, thanks for your comment. I suspect you are right. I also think that the audiences for this stuff don't link the situations. Having not be trained in logic (most will not have more mathematics than basic arithmetic) they have no basis for looking at the overall situation, to see patterns and where our laws do not make sense.
ReplyDeleteWade