This is an incredibly tragic story, and like all such stories, it has prompted a call for action. The form this action will take will be of the legislative variety: a new law, tougher penalties, more enforcement, and so forth.
And if history is any judge, this very law will be derided as another example of the “nanny state” and “big government” as soon as the memory of Ofc. Michael Petrina fades.
It just seems as if people have forgotten why we have laws, regulations, oversight, etc. in the first place. People have lost touch with where these things come from. It’s not because of Big Government wanting to Control Your Life. Laws aren’t born out of a committee of Nancy Pelosi, the ACLU, a union thug, and an aborted fetus. We have laws because some innocent person or persons got really seriously hurt, maybe even killed, and We The People decided to try to make sure as few people as possible had to suffer that same fate again. We decided to be a society that would would Learn From Its Mistakes.
That’s how it works, folks. Tragedy happens, people mourn, they say “please, never again,” and we pass a law requiring air bags or seat belts or building codes or No Building Here or No Doing That There. And sure as shooting, in a few years some idiot is going to come along and wonder why the hell we do that (or don’t do that), and how stupid is that, and it’s costing us jobs, and it’s the Nanny State, and stupid liberals, and on, and on, and on.
No, it’s not that. It’s because someone died and we don’t want anyone else to die in the same way.
Or maybe someone didn’t die. Maybe something really precious or special was lost, forever. And people decided, let’s not do that again. For example, when I see a bunch of idiots like the Cliven Bundy Clown Car riding ATVs through protected Native American burial grounds in Utah because of Freedom, it’s hard not to remember these assholes, also in Utah (hello, Utah? WTF?), who destroyed a 170 million-year-old rock formation, because Safety (and also Freedom).
This stuff doesn’t come out of nowhere. It comes out of tragedy. Maybe next time some idiot tries to claim that everything from EPA regulations to the local fire code is stupid, maybe we could dig into the memory hole to remind them of the tragedy that spawned said burdensome chains on their freedom in the first place.
