Arizona

Good to see the national media and Democratic Party aren't letting a tragedy go to waste.

It's been a couple days since that lunatic starting shooting up a meet and greet and liberals have continued to somehow try and paint this marijuana currency advocate, mind control believer, skull shrine worshipper as some kind of tea party nut. I don't recall Reagan or Milton Friedman pushing to give up the gold standard for the green standard.

This is of course absurd, this guy is just crazy, not partisan. Even if he was though, heated political debate doesn't drive people to kill. We know this because if hate speech caused killings then liberals would have instigated a genocide with all of their evil rhetoric about conservatives and President Bush for the last 10 years.

All of this blame has turned into the nanny staters trotting out all the gun statistics that show that the US has more gun related deaths than other countries. They must have pulled that from the Big Book of Obvious Stats. More people, more guns, close to Mexico = more gun deaths. I would point out that other parts of the world do far more killing without guns than we do with them. I'm pretty sure Rwanda killed a million people by hacking them to death with machetes.

All of that misses the point though. The only issue is whether or not we should give up more rights to the government in exchange for a sliver more security. The answer is no. Will this result in more deaths? Probably. I'm betting there aren't many gun related deaths in North Korea. At least that don't involve the government. Freedom is a risky proposition in some ways. The same freedom that sane people use to achieve the highest levels of excellence can also be exploited by nuts to kill innocent people. Unfortunately, you can't just restrict the freedom of the nuts, they often don't expose themselves until the shots are fired. Liberals can only restrict everyone in hopes that it'll catch the kooks. Nor can liberals claim this is some isolated case where the government needs to regulate something for the common good. Liberals advocate government regulation of everything. It's gun control now but rest assured, once they get that under wraps they'll find another freedom people enjoy and take that away too. It's just what they do.

By giving the people a wide array of freedoms you do run the risk of these types of incident but they are rare. When you give too much power to governments it always ends in disaster. Knowing, despite the best efforts of liberals, that you can't legislate away death, I say society should just take their chances with the public at large. I'd rather take my chances against a random loon than an institutionalized totalitarian state any day.