Thursday, September 19, 2013

I think we should have police

Despite there being a tiny minority of police who do horrific and awful things that lead to the innocent going to jail and worse, I think we should have police. The vast amount of good that they do far outweighs the evil that accompanies the system. We should be vigilant to reduce the evil that happens because of this system as much as we can but, overall, it is a good thing that we have police.

The exact same thing is true about legal gun owners.

Despite there being a tiny minority of legal gun owners who do horrific and awful things, they too do so much good that this system of civilian firearm ownership should be preserved. It needs to be strengthened so that the good is maximized and the evil is minimized.

Any prospective changes in law should have that perspective of increasing the good and reducing the bad. It's a real shame that this is too often absent from the national debate about guns. This is why we haven't yet adopted standards in all 50 states for reciprocal recognition of concealed carry permits. It is why lawful gun owners keep getting nailed on technicalities and threatened with draconian punishments for minor mistakes in transiting certain jurisdictions. It is why we don't keep proper statistics to even measure all the good that civilian firearms ownership does. A significant segment of officialdom and academia is simply not interested in accurately assessing the benefits along with the costs of the system.

It's time to call them on it.

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