Observations about Ft. Hood

It's still too soon to know all of the details of the attack that occurred at Ft. Hood, Texas yesterday, but here are some of my preliminary observations:

1. Like many before it, this attack took place in a gun-free zone; gun-free zones therefore do not prevent attacks, and arguably make these attacks more successful.

2. When seconds count, the police are only minutes away. In this case the police responded quickly, but the attacker still had time to shoot 41 people. That's a lot.

3. If anybody can be trusted to carry firearms at all times it is members of our military. Like police officers, hunters and millions of law-abiding citizens, they have been trained in the safe use and handling of guns.

4. Like police officers, members of the military are targeted for attack.

5. It's impossible to predict ahead of time who will attempt to murder someone, so attempting to restrict firearms to sane, stable people, or even to just police and the military, will not prevent this kind of attack.

Who owns me?

If I owned myself, then I'd be able to:

• sell my body parts
• rent my body parts

Laws that prohibit those things have severe consequences. Thousands of people who are waiting for an organ transplant die every year. Prostitutes are mistreated and enslaved by their pimps.

Lawmakers believe that those things are less bad than people feeling economic pressure to sell or rent themselves when they don't want to. That's appalling. People feel economic pressure every day; that's why we have jobs. People make foolish decisions every day too; we don't need the nanny state to protect us from every bad decision that we might make.