The Price of Freedom in America
Guarding Every School
Police in Every School
Put armed police in every school, to prevent massacres.
Imagine the scale of the program needed to recruit, train and deploy a squad of trained police to each of America’s 98, 817 public schools. That’s four or five police per school, more for larger schools. That’s more than a million new police, fielded in a very short time.
It takes a special sort of person to become a professional police officer. I’m not so sure America has another one million qualified applicants. Military veterans have already taken on the task of serving as TSA workers at airports, as well as federal civilian police protecting military bases. Homeland Security has also taken up its share of qualified military veterans. The bottom of the barrel is about to get scraped. The quality of law enforcement officers might be severely diluted by such a rapid expansion of the force.
Regardless, this is a monumental task that could only be handled by the federal government. Even though the individual police squads might be part of a local police force, there would be a federal standard for the training and certification, and federal block grants to pay for getting the program started, at least. To pay for it over time, it would be hard to prevent public support for a tax on guns and ammo. A federal tax, perhaps, followed by a federal gun registration program, and a tax on the ownership as well as the sale of firearms. Kind of like the way we get taxed on cars. It all seems so innocuous at first.
And that’s how it happens. Some A-hole, some several A-holes, take it upon themselves to abuse the freedoms they enjoy. There is public outcry, “People ought not do that!”
Of course. We have a system. Someone breaks the law, and then generally gets caught eventually, if they continue to commit crimes. The police do a pretty good job. Then there is the court system, and the prison system. Criminals tend to end up in prison. America does have the largest prison system in the world, so that means there are far more more criminals getting caught than getting away.
But to ban guns, to put cops in every school, that’s a bit extreme. To prevent crime, that’s ambitious. It is necessary, in a free society, to wait until someone actually breaks the law before they can be arrested, as flawed and cruel as it seems. When a whacko murders children and then commits suicide, it’s too easy to err on the side of prevention. Perhaps perform DNA or brain wave tests on everybody, identify the criminals ahead of time and march them off to internment camps? What?
Freedom is not free. It involves sacrifice, and that sacrifice extends well beyond soldiers sent off to war. From every person killed by a maniac, to every convicted murderer who is executed, those lives are lost as part of the price for freedom. The alternative is a society where getting groped by strangers extends well beyond airline security gates, where privacy is tossed in the trash and forgotten, where civil liberties are just too dangerous for everyday people.
How free is free?
It's a choice we make as a society.
Some Places Where Guns are Banned
- 10 countries where people fear for their safety - Slide Show - MarketWatch
In many countries, less than half the population feel safe walking in their communities at night. Internal conflict and repressive regimes are marked problems in many of countries where citizens feel unsafe. Some of the nations are among the world’s
