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Politics : Bush-The Mastermind behind 9/11? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wayners who wrote (3835)	11/4/2003 7:42:47 PM
From: Don Earl	Respond to of 20039

<<<There is an air marshals program and every flight in and out of DC supposedly has an air marshal aboard today.>>> I suppose that would provide a margin of safety to a few thousand politicians, but doesn't quite cover the 50 States and a few hundred million citizens. It also assumes the Marshals are not corruptible. With enough money, it isn't hard to imagine a situation where a Marshal might leave a few hidden weapons where hijackers may find them on a subsequent flight. I doubt there is such a thing as a perfect solution. In the real world, there will always be a man with a gun. If not guns, knives, or clubs, or big rocks, or even as one poster pointed out, a hammer. Man is the most naturally poorly equipped critter on the planet when it comes to survival, except for his ability to manipulate tools. A naked human would die within a matter of hours in the majority of environments he calls home. In the final analysis, either you're the man with the gun, or the man with the gun is your master. There are no other choices. The authors of our Constitution understood that concept quite well, and correctly concluded that in order for a people to be free, the right to bear arms had to be protected. It isn't hard to imagine a society made up of nothing but honorable folks and the total absence of persons willing to achieve evil through the use of force, but imagination is the only place such a society has ever existed since the first man crawled out of a cave to poke a critter with a sharp stick. Or as Machiavelli put it, "It's unreasonable to expect he who is armed to obey he who is unarmed.". What the 9/11 hijackers did was capitalize on a situation where citizens allowed themselves to be disarmed by the government. A tiny advantage in arms was all it took to master a group of humans that are helpless without their tools. I think it would be silly to pretend armed citizens would prevail under all circumstances, or that it would be impossible for evil persons to ever gain the upper hand. The wrongness as I see it is saying a person who would otherwise be able to defend himself should be completely denied the possibility of doing so under certain circumstances. Why should a person who would choose to go armed while riding the bus through a ghetto at midnight be made helpless while riding an airplane occupied by members of organized crime families, drug dealers, or international terrorists?