Thursday, October 20, 2011

Ohio escape renews calls for exotic pet ban

This was the first headline I saw today regarding the story of the man that released all his exotic animals before killing himself.
Without debating the appropriateness of keeping exotic animals or not, what leaped out at me was the attitude that every unfortunate event that makes the news means we need more laws.
This is how freedoms get eroded. Some pinhead does something stupid, then activists and legislators begin yelling "Something has to be done". The next thing you know they write and pass new one-size-fits-all laws that are written so broadly as to prevent perfectly responsible people from doing perfectly responsible things. (This describes 99% of all gun laws.)
In the name of liberty leaders in this nation once tried to avoid violating the principle of 'prior restraint'. That principle demands that we punish bad apples rather than create laws that presume everyone is a bad apple.
Sadly we don't use that standard much anymore.

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