Commentary: Waiting For Angels To Govern Us

By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com 

INDIANAPOLIS – A disturbed young man in Toronto turned a rental van into a deadly weapon the other day.

He drove the van onto the sidewalk and into a crowd of mostly female pedestrians – he apparently is a misogynist – on one of the busiest streets in Canada’s largest city. He killed 10 people and injured 13 others.

Similar killings have occurred in Muenster, Germany, New York, Barcelona, Spain and Charlottesville, Virginia, in just the past few months.

This has made me think: What if we applied the logic of the National Rifle Association to this disturbing trend?

What if we said that the fact that these murders have occurred proves that traffic laws cannot work and dispensed with them?

We could get rid of laws against speeding. We could tell drivers they could take their vehicles anywhere they wished – onto sidewalks, into malls – at any speed they wished. They could drive 95 miles per hour in a school zone if they wanted.

We also could eliminate licensing requirements and proof of insurance.

This would mean that we wouldn’t have any assurance that the person climbing behind the wheel would know how to drive or would be able to compensate others for any damage done.

That concern, though, could be dealt with the way the gun lobby handles similar complaints – by urging everyone to take “voluntary” driver training, while also arguing that any requirement to prove competence or responsibility would “penalize” law-abiding drivers.

We also could remove restrictions on people who have demonstrated they might be threats to others’ safety – people with mental illness, people who have driven drunk, etc. – because checking such things also would “punish” law-abiding car lovers. To make sure this punishment didn’t occur, we would dispense with all requirements that cars be registered and bear license plates, so the government wouldn’t know who owned or was driving a car and thus couldn’t come “take it away.”

This is the most important part.

We could accept the NRA’s argument that the best way to ensure public safety is not through a rational system of laws and restrictions implemented and enforced by a trained and well-disciplined law enforcement structure, but instead we could depend on untrained individuals who just happen to be on the spot where disaster happens.

In other words, to paraphrase an NRA talking point, the answer to a bad guy in a car would be a good guy in a car.

Because the safest place for pedestrians to be is in the middle of a demolition derby.

If we did all these things, we would save lives, right?

We would make this country – this world – a safer place, correct?

Everything would be better, wouldn’t it?

If what I have suggested here sounds absurd, that’s because it is.

But it also is what passes for argument on one side of our ongoing debate about guns and gun-related tragedies.

It is a position disconnected from reality, but it dominates our policy discussions.

That is unfortunate, even tragic, both because of the lives lost and the suffering involved – and because it shows how profound is our abdication of responsibility as citizens in a self-governing society.

When we accept the argument that no law can work, we say we cannot govern ourselves.

This notion would be anathema to this nation’s founders, who fought for rational self-government, not against the idea of government itself. Their beliefs were shaped by a deep understanding of human nature.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself,” wrote James Madison in “The Federalist.”

The words remain true today.

It’s because men are not angels that we have laws regarding where, how and at what speed we may drive – and police officers to enforce those laws.

The pity is that we can’t seem to apply the same logic and the same will to deal with other problems.

Other tragedies.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

THIS ARTICLE WAS POSTED BY THE CITY COUNTY OBSERVER WITHOUT OPINON, BIAS OR EDITING