Activist Post
With the recent school shooting in Connecticut coming shortly after the horrific Batman theater massacre and another recent incident at an Oregon Mall, a shocked and outraged public is demanding something be done to prevent random shootings.
If gun rights supporters in Congress are successful in fending off attempts to limit gun rights, what next? Even if stricter gun control laws are put in place, will that satisfy the American public or the tyrants in government?
Since the Oregon mall shooter and a recent theater shooter in San Antonio (TX) were stopped by people with concealed carry permits, promoting responsible citizens to learn to handle weapons may actually be the best defense against rogue shooters.
Some are proposing having soldiers or policemen at all public schools. As if public schools didn’t already resemble prisons enough, this would seem to push it over the top. So the more gun solution is unlikely.
My guess is that the conversation of “solutions”, whether through political compromise or conquest, will move toward outfitting schools, malls, and movie theaters with TSA-style naked body scanners.
The naked body scanners were put into airports with very little protest from the public. All the people needed as motivation in a post-9/11 world was failed attempts of blowing up planes by the shoe and underwear bombers – both of which were highly suspicious cases indicating they were inside jobs.
Since these recent shootings actually resulted in horrific deaths of innocent people including children, the public is scared enough to accept just about anything. So if naked body scanners were proposed for these venues, I bet most Americans would brush off any concerns about privacy rights and support it enthusiastically.
Sound crazy? Well, the TSA has already spread beyond airports. It’s been steadily making appearances at sporting events, political campaign stops, and bus and train stations with their TSA VIPR teams, or mobile security units.
The TSA has even set a precedent at schools by having been hired to handle security at high school proms. What’s more, many inner city public schools already have metal detectors. Therefore, the upgrade would seem quite normal to those students, and probably welcomed by scared but uninformed parents.
It leads one to believe that the TSA’s tactics at airports and elsewhere combined with warrantless checkpoints are to condition the public to accept having these invasive procedures everywhere in their communities.
Another motivation for this expansion is companies like those headed by former DHS chief Michael Chertoff make millions selling his company’s body scanners to the government. Now that all major airports are outfitted with these radiation machines, where are the next logical places to install them?
Bus and train stations are the obvious first choice since they are modes of transportation. But schools won’t be far behind after the latest mass shooting, and as they’re government-run institutions. And, finally, they’ll move on to privately-owned shopping centers maybe even at the behest of the proprietors.
It goes without saying that the privacy of Americans will be nonexistent when they leave their homes with the TSA and CCTV cameras lurking around every corner. It also means the federal Department of Homeland Security will have eyes everywhere through their minimum-wage Transportation Security Agency employees.
I’d be willing to bet that naked body scanners will be in schools and malls around the country within the next decade. I’m surprised it hasn’t been proposed yet.
Read more articles from Eric Blair Here.