Freedom matters more than safety, even if you’re too blind to see that

By David McElroy · March 26, 2018

When I first saw the tweet, I was pretty sure it was a joke. Police in England have been making a big deal of “getting weapons off the street” for years now, so they tweet photos of weapons they’ve confiscated.

But surely this photo was a joke. Right?

“These items were found during a #weaponSweep near #MackworthHouse #AugustasSt during #OpSceptre,” said the tweet from police in the Regent’s Park area of London. “Safely disposed and taken off the streets.”

But it was a real tweet from real police in London. It appeared that someone had frisked a local handyman or janitor and stolen his tools.

I see two pairs of pliers, two small screwdrivers and a pair of scissors that would be at home in any office desk. The remaining item might be a file of some sort, but I can’t tell for sure. I just know it’s bizarre to consider these common tools to be weapons — and it shows the end result of a world which tries to use force to eliminate risk.

The ability to think rationally has become a liability in public discourse. The winners in politics today are those who can put their brains in neutral and tell emotional anecdotes. That’s how policies such as this develop. It’s the product of shallow and short-term thinking.

If you tell stories of the tiny minority who have been harmed by something, you can get unthinking and emotional people to go along with banning almost anything.

If you want to get rid of guns, tell emotional stories of people who have been killed by folks with guns — but pretend that guns aren’t also used in defensive ways to stop attacks. Pretend that guns have no uses other than by a crazed criminal out to murder children.

Then you can start banning all sorts of weapons, as has been happening in England. Before you know it, police are stealing screwdrivers and pliers — and pretending they’re protecting you from criminals.

Is it possible that someone could use a screwdriver to stab someone? Sure. But do screwdrivers serve so many useful purposes that it’s reasonable and rational to let people keep their tools. Of course.

I don’t own a gun and I’ve never owned one. I recognize the dangers they can pose and I’ve chosen not to have one around. But I also recognize that millions of Americans use guns for legitimate purposes — such as self-defense or hunting — and I know that I have no right to force them to make the same decision I’ve made about owning a gun.

It all comes down to who has the moral right to make a decision. I have the right to make decisions for my life. I also have the right to respond to specific threats against me, so I would be within my rights to use force to stop someone who used a gun to threaten me. But I have no more right to disarm every person in the name of safety than I would to take away everybody’s screwdrivers because they could theoretically hurt me.

Some of the Parkland high school students who are trying to take guns away from peaceful people are confused about this issue. In the wake of a murderous rampage by one former student at their school, authorities have instituted a new policy that all backpacks must be clear — so the contents can be seen by all. Some of the students are indignant about this. For instance, senior Tyra Hemans told CNN the requirement isn’t right.

“I’m not happy with it,” she said. “Why are you punishing me for one person’s actions?”

I presume she said this with a straight face — and with no understanding of the hypocrisy of what she was saying.

At the big protest march in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, there was a sign which was popular and was being tweeted by many people. The protester had written, “Is ‘freedom’ more important than safety?”

She apparently thought this was a slam-dunk for taking freedom away — and this is an indication of how unpopular freedom is becoming. Unthinking people like to take freedom away from others, but they have no understanding that their intrusion on other people’s lives and rights will eventually result in a loss of freedom for themselves.

So, yes, freedom is more important than safety — even if you’re too blind to understand that.

I’m a big advocate of safety in my own life. I make decisions to protect myself and those I care about. I strongly suggest that you make decisions for your own safety, too.

But neither you nor I have the right to make these decisions for other people. A world which dictates all safety decisions — and demands obedience through the guns of government employees — is a far more dangerous world than one in which my peaceful neighbors have the right to own weapons.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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