Near-Absolute Safety Means Near-Absolute Oppression

How much freedom are you willing to give up to feel safe? In light of the shootings we hear and read about in the news in this country, we all ask ourselves this question. What price are we willing to pay to feel safe?

Some people suggest installation of metal detectors at the doors of buildings and stationing armed police inside schools to protect students from rare random acts of deadly violence.

In and of itself, this doesn’t sound like much of a loss to protect ourselves and our children. After all, it will only cost money to buy the equipment and hire a few extra guards. It would raise taxes only a few cents per thousand dollars of property value. That isn’t much when you consider the safety of all, is it?

Some schools in the Pacific Northwest have removed lockers from the junior and senior high schools to eliminate easy hiding places for weapons and drugs. Others have conducted locker searches based on tips that certain students had some form of contraband.

These tactics may work well enough to protect our children from acts of extreme violence at school, but what about after school and in public places? We had a deadly shooting in one of Spokane’s landmark hotels last year. What are we going to do there?

We could install metal detectors, but there is a lot of metal in the business world and some may not adapt well to the equipment. Maybe police could search people who look suspicious - just pat them down for weapons. If they found a gun on a patron, they could confiscate it. After all, why would anyone need to have a gun in broad daylight in downtown Spokane?

Then there is the problem of feeling safe in our cars. Maybe police should search any suspicious people they see. After all, this is 1997, not 1865. It wouldn’t cost all that much to have a few extra police officers to make us feel safe. Until we had a large enough tax base to pay for the extra police, we could have the National Guard come in. Instead of spending two weeks on active duty training for war, they could patrol the city’s streets, stopping suspicious-looking people. They could stop cars, too, in case someone was armed for a drive-by shooting. If anyone had a gun, they could pick it up to keep us safe.

What about the groups of young people hanging out on the streets downtown and in the malls? Don’t they make you nervous and a little uneasy? They might be up to something. We could have the police break up their gatherings. Maybe limit groups on the street to no more than two or three unrelated people.

I recently read that Baltimore was installing video cameras to watch for crime. They expect to have the entire downtown area under video surveillance by the end of 1997. Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke was quoted as saying, “I know some people get nervous with Big Brother watching, but people want us to do everything to make our neighborhoods safer.”

They expect to cover 16 blocks at a cost of only $58,000. That’s cheap, considering how safe you can feel while someone is watching over you, right? You would feel safer, wouldn’t you? We all want to feel safe.

Another thing; we can’t have people going around on our streets passing out fliers with radical ideas and we can’t have extremists peddling their brand of religion. We have to make sure people only talk about respect and think the way we think. We would have to stamp out all dissident views.

Now we will feel safer. We have metal detectors in all our schools and many public buildings. We have removed lockers and other hiding places at schools. We have police patrolling our streets and shops, watching for suspicious-looking people and searching them for weapons. To help the cops on a beat, we have brought in the National Guard. We have stopped young people from loitering downtown and in the malls. This should make us all feel safer.

What have we really done?

We have imposed martial law. We have eradicated the Fourth Amendment, which protects us from unreasonable search and seizure. We have, in effect, blotted out the Second Amendment with its right to bear arms. We have infringed on the First Amendment freedoms of speech, press, religion and assembly. These freedoms have no dollar value.

I honestly don’t think anyone in Spokane would suggest we go to these extremes to feel safe, but we must guard against our fears and remember each and every one of these freedoms was put in place because our founding fathers knew just how easy it is for tyranny to set in and take over. In times of high passions when an act of violence has snuffed out an innocent life and we want to feel safe, we must remember the cost of freedom and the price of feeling safe.

It shakes me to the bone when I read about a child killing another child. It causes me grief when someone’s mother or father is killed in a random act of violence. But we all will have to give up some of our freedom to feel safe.

What price are you willing to pay?

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