Protect our rights with a police state?

Conservative leadership has become so limp-wristed that these are the responses we can expect to get. An honest statement would look something like this: Unless you want a police state that takes every last gun, you’re going to have to expect every now and then for some crazy person to go on a rampage. And even if the crazy person can’t get a gun, they could easily construct a bomb. We live in fallen world, and such is life.

Or maybe, I don’t know, talk about the removal of God for the public schools? Perhaps if the shooter hadn’t been taught there was no God and no objective moral standard. Such talk would be honest, but would be too harsh for it’s feminized listeners.

@ 1
If every teacher is packing heat how can that information not be known?

@2
So this is the situation–either we have a nation in which everyone has the right to “choose to own any weapon they darn well please” or we have a police state that takes every last gun. Period. End of Discussion. An armed citizenry meting out death based on each person’s own interests is SO much better than a police state.

How’s this for logic:
You’re going to have to expect every now and then for some priests to go on a rampage. And even if there are no small boys to molest, they can always rape a parishoner. We live in a fallen world and such is life.

On the other hand, I wonder how many people die from auto accidents each year compared to gun violence. All you have to do to drive a vehicle capable of killing is have the money to buy one (and hopefully insurance) and pass a government administered test. Why are people dying from auto “accidents” less disconcerting than people dying from guns? Are we working with a different definition of “accident” in relation to automobiles as opposed to guns?

I think Mark Mitchell’s complaint has less to do with the most effective means of preventing school shootings and much more to do with our increasingly contradictory understanding of rights.

In the American/classically liberal context, rights such as those provided in the Second Amendment were understood as “negative” rights: they represent an absence of state or other coercive influence. I can speak freely–because the government does not hinder my space to do so. I can bear arms and defend my own family–because the government allows me to do so, and doesn’t take up arms against me. I can worship however I please–because the government does not extend its reach into the realm of conscience.

And so on. Obviously, the implicit premise here is that, in order for negative rights to exist, the government must be small enough not to pose a threat to those rights. Of course, the government exists solely to protect those rights, but the government must nonetheless be sufficiently minimal not to encroach upon them, as it will inevitably do given the opportunity. As the old proverb goes, a government big enough to give you certain rights is big enough to take them away.

The irony to which Mitchell directs our attention is that we now seem to believe that the government must be ever bigger and ever stronger to protect our formerly negative rights. If the Second Amendment is at stake, the answer, according to the NRA, is clearly to arm countless government agents and ensure that their coercive presence is felt even more closely in our daily lives. If terrorists threaten our fundamental rights, clearly the answer is for the state to increase its scope and limit our rights to privacy, speech, and fair trial.

So the logic goes, yes? The question of whether armed guards in every schoolroom would prevent a certain proportion of mass murders is beside the point in this case.

We have money to fund another national police force
but we can’t afford treatment for mental illness?

[And heaven forbid we should teach positive
morals and values, instead of “Do it if it feels good!”]

i’m stuck in the filter – help!