Government protection

There are some who feel that the government can - and should - keep them safe and secure.  That by passing a few "well-intentioned" laws, the government can provide a high level of security for the general public.  A level of security only achievable through laws mandating government restrictions on the rights of The People.  Or as was noted by an old guy with a wig: surrendering liberty for safety.

Let's examine this for a moment.

If the government can’t keep you safe when you’re in a prison cell, then the government can’t keep anyone safe anywhere.

That’s the lesson from this past weekend's report about the death of a notable prisoner in a NY prison.

But this isn't about this prisoner, or that prisoner, or any other prisoner.  Nor is it about someone in a car, or a homemaker, or kids in school.

This is about demands that the government should "keep us safe".

There will be a demand for an investigation to find out why the prison cameras didn’t work or were pointed in the wrong direction.  And there will be a demand for answers and accountability from prison administrators, accusations and cross-accusations of fault, and a call for newer and stricter prison regulations.

Of course, there will be the inevitable “We need to know what went wrong so we can take action to prevent it from ever happening again.”  Yeah.  Right. We've heard that tune before.  As the saying goes, “Pull the other one.”

And yet, this person, someone whose testimony may have implicated other powerful individuals in criminal acts, and someone who was well known to authorities and the public at large, is dead.  In what should be one of the safest places in the country: a prison.  Yes, there are deaths in prisons every day, but this wasn’t a street criminal, drug dealer, or an ordinary thug.  And it didn’t happen in “the yard” or where multiple convicts can group together.

It happened in his cell.

Let's examine this for a moment, but in the context of the latest demands for disarming the general public (and that's what those thinly-veiled demands are meant to do).  If the government can’t keep someone safe inside a gun-free zone where body searches are performed to check for any weapons, which is inside a building with locked doors to prevent both entry and exit, and which is inside a gated facility patrolled by armed guards both outside and inside, then the government can’t keep anyone safe anywhere.

If the government turned its back on someone it was supposed to protect and keep alive, and that person somehow ended up dead - and without explanation - it means that the government isn’t competent to keep anyone safe.  Isn't the old complaint by conspiracy theorists, "who watches the watchers?"

And that’s the entire point: when we trust the government to do something we should do for ourselves, and when allow the the government to restrict our the ability to act on our own behalf, and when we trust the government to do what it is supposed to do, the worst can – and sometimes does – happen.

And that is a problem that no "well-intentioned laws" can solve.