Re: Is security worth giving up some freedom?
Derwood, is it worth possibly killing an innocent person? We have had a recent string of people proven innocent that are on death row. Barry Shek's innocence project has been working for a reason. Our current legal system is not infallable. Yes housing prisoners is expensive. No I am not against the death penalty. I am not for it either. Prison is not a picnic, but it is neither is it hell. Depending on how you act in prison, there are certain benfits you get. Like getting one of the laundry jobs. If your actions are bad, then you get segmented from the general populace. There are people in prison that are petty criminals and will be rehabilitated by spending time in prison, then there are people that have no prospect of rehabilitation and they should stay there. I live 10 miles away from the place where Jeffry Dahmer was killed. In fact the person I consider the other person that was killed at the same time was a much worse and more evil person. Jeffry Dahmer was sick. there was something not right in his head. He was in prison where he belonged and should never have gotten out. The other person decided he was going to kill his wife for the insurance money. He stabbed her mutiple times while in a car in a parking lot in Milwaukee 2 miles from where I used to live. He called the police and told them some other person attacked her and he fought him off. He showed a baseball hat of the supposed attacker. What came to light in the investigation is he bought the hat off an unsuspecting person in the mall across the street and then accused that person. His wife did not die right away. She was in intensive care for a few weeks. My cousin was one of her nurses. She never had any prospects of ever recovering and was determined to be brain dead. He knew what he was doing. He knew it was wrong and evil. He deserved whatever he got. Don't get me wrong, what Dahmer did is unimaginable and repulsive, but there is a difference.<br /><br />As far as giving up freedom. I will not give up freedom for security. I also will not give up freedom because someone threatens me with violence. I will not give up my ideals. People have the right to own a gun, not for just hunting, but because our constitution guarantees that right. At the time it was written, people could rise up and take out their goverment with the help of their gun. While this would not happen today, it is still a right we have. Hunting has nothing to do with the justification.<br /><br />Now I can say that all the other databases that were used had the same type of private information in them as gun registration and that if we used those, then there was not good reason to excluded the gun registration database. I heard the questioning of Ashcroft and he had no good reason either. He sounded just like a kid when caught in a lie. The real issue should be whether any of that information should have been used.<br /><br />There is a big outcry on this, but not on the homeland security act? What about the copyright protection acts that are being pushed through. talk abotu taking away your freedoms. If all are passed, then any company will have a right to come in and disrupt your services if they suspect you have a illegally copied file on your computer. They will have the rights of bounty hunters. This will be a direct violation of your property in your own home. Who here thinks that Microsoft should have the right to all the information you have? Do you realize how much they actually have on you? If you have a hotmail account, then they knwo what you have prucahsed and from where. They also share this information with any company that has a .net passport contract with them. When these things get passed, I hope that they are challenged in the supreme court because they take away more rights than anything ever proposed. It is a scary time.
