As IF Times

link Arming TSA officers hits resistance on the Hill – Kevin Robillard – POLITICO.com.

In case anyone has missed it, the never ending clamor to reign in the ability of law abiding citizens to possess and carry firearms continues unabated and in fact rises in volume anytime someone gets shot.  Strange then that in the wake of the shooting of a TSA officer in Los Angeles recently, there is a push by the union representing the TSA for arming their rank and file.

Through the years of the existence of the TSA, this is the first such incidence of such violence occuring against an employee among the thousands of them staffing the nation’s airports.  While it is of course sad that the unfortunate employee was killed at work, the job is not really a dangerous one.  Despite the official uniforms, badges and surly demeanor, the TSA staff are essentially a layer of ticket checkers for passengers in advance of them boarding a bus.  While their jobs capture the scorn and contempt of many travellers, they are only performing a job that someone higher up in the command chain thinks is useful.

If we’re going to consider arming people because of violent attacks, there are many other constituencies in society that should also be eligible.  Statistically, operators of 7-Elevens, liquor store employees and pizza delivery people are far more likely to encounter gun violence while simply peforming their jobs than a TSA employee.  In fact, a quick check of recent news incidents tells you that if you were sitting in a movie theater, a student at school or just shopping at a mall, you were just as likely to encounter gun violence as a TSA employee.

In the wake of all of those other newsworthy incidents, the immediate knee jerk response was to re-ignite the gun control rhetoric.  As far as I can tell, the only difference seems to be that all of the other victims of crime weren’t wearing uniforms.  It’s not clear why they wouldn’t be better off being armed as well.  The point here is not to ascertain who should or should not be armed.  It is to point out that mental cases will strike without predictability in a free society.  If one segment of the law abiding population is entitled to be armed, then everyone should be.

If they decide to arm TSA staff, the experience of travelling will be even more fun than it is today.  Being told to remove shoes, belts and articles of clothing by an armed person so that they can grope you… isn’t that the quintessential bad date?

link Long Island Middle School Bans Footballs, Other Recreational Items « CBS New York.

The knee jerk response is to tsk tsk the parents of these precious darlings for treating their spawn like Faberge eggs, but that would be a mistake.  While most parents have some sense of over protectiveness with regard to their children, few expect that they would be completely insulated from playground activities.  Anyone who has not suffered an abrasion, bruise or scraped knee as a kid must have never attended school; maybe they were living in an aquarium.  But it’s not Bloomberg-ism that is driving this policy.  It’s lawyers.  No doubt, the administrators at this school were petrified at the possibility that under their care, some harm would come to junior which would open them up for an expensive lawsuit.  It’s amazing that they don’t mandate the wearing of helmets during class.

It used to be that you could never exceed the reach of the long arm of the law, but over generations, this has morphed into not escaping the long tentacles of lawyers.  As we’ve discussed previously, when a nation puts out as many law grads as the U.S. does, they have to make themselves useful somehow.  Statistically, few of these lawyers will be Oliver Wendell Holmes material.  Most of what they do in real life will circulate around arguing petty rules and  grievances rather than arguing big picture principles.  Unluckily for the public, many of them wind up as politicians.

Life truly does imitate art as even the depiction of lawyers has evolved over the years.   In the old days, Perry Mason was the admired role model; today, it’s more Jackie Chiles from the Seinfeld show.  In fact,  the very expression “frivolous lawsuits” is as redundant as “bleeding heart liberal”.  While there exists many arbiters of what’s legal, there does not exist any arbiters of what’s stupid.

And that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.  As a society, we have been programmed to be passive about most things and instructed to ‘let the process work’ as far as legal fixes, no matter how convoluted or illogical that process may be.  Ironically, what has evolved is a society openly contemptuous of many of its laws and especially of their lawmakers, rather than a more civilized one.  As criminals know, laws are for law abiders.

It’s highly unlikely that those first crafting laws for our society envisioned  exhaustive prescriptive rules rather than on general humanistic principles.  That occurs only in Muslim enclaves and in North Korea under Mullah X or Kim Jong Un.  To be lumped in with societies run by those folks should be sobering for anyone.