Opus 2011-22, Ban the Prius

There are many tragic events going on in the world from flooding in Australia to the murder of Christians in Egypt.  In the midst of this, much of our attention is focused on the shooting in Arizona.  A staggering number of people were killed by a maniac with a gun.

And as expected, the problem was the gun.  I don’t want to take away from the tragedy.  People were murdered for no reason.  This is not a reason to rewrite the Constitution and allocate billions of dollars of tax money for body guards to protect politicians. 

What if he had done the deed by driving a Prius through the crowd?  Think about it.  A maniac driving a car into a crowd of people.  Turning around and driving over them again.  Killing and maiming men, women and children.  Using the logic of our times we would have people urging the banning of the Prius.  Perhaps we would sue the manufacturer, after all they knew that their car could kill people.  Perhaps we could ban the driving of cars within 1,000 feet of any member of congress.

Oh, wait.  Something like that did happen.  You remember the story.  A young Muslim drove his SUV onto campus, made his way to a place where students would hang out, and tried to run them down.  He did it for the glory of Allah.  Fortunately he was not a very good driver.  I am surprised that colleges have not banned cars from campus.  Maybe that is the real reason behind all of the hostility to SUV’s. 

Some people mock the statement the “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”  I could put a gun in a box at a school for 1000 years and as long as no one opened the box no one would be hurt.  On the other hand I have seen students picking up books and throwing them.  Maybe we could ban books from the classroom.  I can no more blame the gun than I blame the car.  People do nasty things and have incredible creativity in finding ways to express their nastiness. 

I guess that is considered twisted logic today.