Page last modified February 27, 2018.

This is an optional reading for the students in my CSC 301 Computers and Society class.


Liberty or Safety?

by Dr. Marek A. Suchenek

February 20, 2018

Copyright and all rights reserved.

This article is posted here for in-class educational use only. No other use or uses is/are allowed.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
[Benjamin Franklin]




Students are being evacuated after the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, FL. Do they look like well protected? Notice a shadow of a sheriff deputy in the uper right corner of this photo; he wears a combat gear: a helmet, a bullet-proof vest, and is well armed for his personal protection. The kids do not have any of these. The fact that they are marching with their hands up indicates that the autorities did not think the threat of more shooting was over. A good example how the government is going to protect you when you delegate to it your right to self-defense.



The students are treated more like suspects than victims of the traumatic events who barely escaped death. This may be seen as government's fundamental inability to separate the good from the bad along the universalistic doctrine that the good ones and the bad ones are all equal. Is this how would you defend your own scared children?

In the aftermath of Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, FL, shooting, we are witnessing a well-organized radicalization of the anti-2nd Amendment movement. Reportedly, teens across the nation express their frustration with the right of the law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms for self-defense and other lawful purposes. Their main problem - it seems - is with other people's freedom: it makes them feel uncomfortable and unsafe to the point that they would rather seek governmental patronage rather than trying learn how to exercise the said freedom and look after themselves.

It appears that the idea of "safe spaces" promotes this kind of negative attitude against individual liberty and in favor of submission to the state. It appears that the new generation may not value freedom nearly as much as past Americans did; certainly, it doesn't welcome the responsibility that comes with freedom. Many young Americans just want to be safe from their fellow compatriots. Being brought up in a "gun-free" environment and conditioned by their politically-motivated teachers, they do not realize that guns in hands of prospective victims do save lives.

But then, if the American society is as dangerous for their safety as mant teenagers seem to suggest then why would they think that the government, drawn from the very same society, would faithfully champion their plea for defense and security? After all, the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting demonstrated how the authorities failed in assuring the safety of the pupils there even in the face of obvious threats. These autorities left the school deprived of any practical means of self-defense following the politically-correct (but factually false) mantra that we are all safer in "gun-free" zones.

Although places where regular citizens are not allowed to carry firearms (due to laws, like the mostly unenforced School Gun-free Zones Act of 1990, or regulations, like administrative restriction that prohibit students and employees to possess firearms and ammunition on university campuses) but criminals and other psychopaths can carry them constitute but a minuscule fraction of public square, the majority of mass shootings happens there. This debunks the myth that the so-called "gun-free" zones make us all safer. Actually, the converse is true - we are less safe there.

The guns have been with We the People since the very beginning of America. In particualr, in the 1950s and 60s, students were bringing their .22 cal. rifles to schools so that they could participate in after-class marksman competitions. Apparently, only lately the guns have been vilified as the culprits of the severe social pathology that is being reported in the news on a regular basis. Therefore, it must have been something else than guns that triggered the change for the worse in our nation.

Firearms were brought to existence not in order to make people more vulnerable but to provide them with means of self-defense against deadly threats. Not surprisingly, the bad guys and the predatory nations quickly adopted the new tools for their own purpose just like they are adopting advanced information technology for their criminal and evil ends. After all, police and military have guns not in order to hurt us but to protect us. Because the most effective way to stop a determined bad guy with a deadly weapon (it may be a gun, or a machete, or a truck, or a jetliner, or a box cutter, or even a strongman's hands) is a good guy with a gun. Quite often, nothing else will do. And if the gus could cause violence, as those who protest "gun violence" seem to imply, then we would not let police and sheriff deputies to carry them around.

What is mostly lost in today's discussion is the fact that the recent wave of school shootings is the "proof of the pudding" for the untested Liberal social policies that have been imposed on America for the last five decades or so. Misdirected tolerance, or even promotion, of opportunism, unethical behavior, law breaking, and other forms of asocial behavior, inevitably leads to empowering dangerous psychopaths to the point that they can wreck havoc to our generally civilized and gentle society. After demonstrable failures of so many Liberal ideas, now they have come up with another one: disarmament of the law-abiding citizenry. One can only imagine how the whole country, saturated with the unethical, the asocial, and the opportunistic, will fare as one large gun-free zone. It suffices to look into history of disarmed nations, like the Soviet Union, to see who is going to be taken advantage of in such an arrangement: the hard-working, ethical, and law abiding people are.

Bans, laws, and regulations are not going to solve the problem of our deteriorating culture. They are not going to turn the violent psychopaths and other harmful individuals among us into law-abiding, benign, and well-meaning fellows. Driving their population to extinction, as opposed to learning how to co-exist with them, is the solution that we need. As a society, we will keep moving in the wrong direction unless we depart from the ideas that sent us on a path to a morality-free nation that doesn't dare to judge those who are inflicting damage to our group survival strategy and has turned its back on virtually every value and virtue that has made America the freest, wealthiest, and most successful country that the world has ever seen.
It's time that we abandon failed ideas of "improving" this nation by governmental "wisdom" that have never worked, and return to the time-proven means and ways, based on ethics, rationality, and individual liberty, that were working quite well for so many generations of Americans.


In the spirit of Preamble to the Constitution, let's protect what is still left of our exceptionally great nation from mutiliation and appropriation by others. And if you doubt that America, all-in-all, has been perceived as the best country on this planet then how do you explain that tens of millions of people from around the world are so desperate to immigrate here and nowhere else?