RichardHarlos.com

That’s what my dad used to tell me. He’d say, “Rick , locks are for honest people. If a thief wants in, no lock is gonna stop ‘im.”

Over the years this pithy sentiment has proven itself true over and over again and a recent example may be seen in the scenario where a 20-year old man smashed his SUV (sport-utility vehicle) into a police car that was parked to block a construction-worker entrance at the U.S. Capitol building. After getting by the police car, the man drove up to the Capitol building and ran inside. Police chased him down and eventually cornered him in the basement and took him into custody.

Upon apprehending the man, they discovered that he had a loaded gun tucked into his belt. (Full story at Judge Orders Gunman to Be Held And to Undergo Drug Treatment, WashingtonPost.com, 20 September 2006.)

To this man, the rules simply didn’t seem relevent to him and, therefore, weren’t important enough to obey. In fact, there are an awful lot of people in the U.S. today who are displeased with the decisions our government is making but very few choose to take the kind of lawless action that this man took.

I think the reason more people don’t behave as this man did is because most of us fall into the category of people that my dad called “honest”. Not that I believe any of us is perfect—far from it. But I do think most of us exercise fairly civil discretion in the way we conduct ourselves.

So if, as my dad says, “Locks are for honest people”, then the safety that we believe we have is an illusion because as long as there is a criminal element in society that can, on a whim, disregard and disobey the law (the “locks” of society, if you will), then the only safety we really have is from people who are otherwise inclined not to hurt us in the first place.

And that suggests, to me, that more and more laws that infringe upon, or even eliminate, our rights are not as effective as our authorities would have us believe.

The sign at the Capitol building that identified that entrance as being for construction-workers only didn’t phase this 20-year old man. Neither did the police car that was blocking the way to that entrance. Neither did the laws about carrying illegally concealed weapons, nor the laws about not running over pedestrians with one’s vehicle.

In short, the laws only provide us protection from the people least likely to hurt us. In other words, they are somewhat ineffective in that laws address behavior after the fact, which tends to leave victims in the wake of criminal behavior.

To me, some of the most egregious rights violations come at us not from infrequent, extraordinary criminal activity, but from the steady erosion of our Constitutional rights by such legislation as the PATRIOT Act and the NSA wiretapping invasions of privacy.

If you’re a criminally-minded sort of person (in other words, not included in the group of people my dad referred to as “honest people”) these kinds of government assaults on privacy matter very little; but they matter a lot to those of us who are decent, law-abiding citizens that do respect the rights of others.

If you’re tired of having locks put upon your freedoms through anti-terror initiatives, I encourage you to let your elected representatives know how you feel. If you’re not sure who those people are, or how to go about contacting them, check out my simple recipe for it here.