Recently, a nearby community college proposed arming its
guards. Let’s suppose it wasn’t just to
protect against ISIS, but against the locally
grown dangerous and the locally grown insane. One could claim that there is cause, since a
few years ago a young individual brought an assault rifle into a neighboring
elementary school and killed 20 small children and 6 adults.
While arming the guards may perhaps make the students at the
particular college safer, while they are at the college, it does not address
the broader problem: How to keep society
safe, given the wide availability of weapons capable, from use by someone so
motivated, of killing a fair number of people very quickly. But if we make that
particular college safe, what of other colleges? If we make the colleges safe, what of other
schools? If we make the schools safe
what of the plazas, and the stores, and the factories and the hospitals, and
the homes? What of the water supplies
and power grids?
It is clear that what ever we protect, what ever we do not
protect will become the target. And so
we must protect it all. The material
cost would be stupendous, not just in capitalization, but in maintenance. We cannot pay sufficient guards, so citizens
must go armed. And then how to tell, who
among the myriad of armed citizens, is not a terrorist, armed and on his way to
destruction. Further, even if armed, how
can the citizens be protected against suicide bombers. Explosive fireworks, albeit of limited
gunpowder content, are available in 26 states.
Will potential terrorists find these limitations to be
insurmountable?
The fact is, we cannot prevent any terrorist, of either
foreign or domestic origin, once sufficiently determined, from inflicting
damage on our society or our infrastructure.
What can be done is minimizing the strength and power of the
motivations behind the terrorist and his acts.
Two things must be done.
The first is to stop inflicting violence. The second is to excite admiration, rather
than to incite envy.
