No community is immune from violence
The tragedies in the Thousand Oaks area earlier this week serve to remind us that no place is immune from violence.

Although it’s hard to imagine a community safer than Thousand Oaks, there’s no way to predict the breaking point of every potential psychopath.

It’s not an easy thing to say, but part of the price of freedom is that some people will abuse it and commit crimes. “Innocent until proven guilty” are strong words that have meaning in our country.

In other parts of the world, people are imprisoned for even the possibility that they might go berserk.

In those societies, however, there still are no guarantees that every sociopath is incarcerated before losing all control.

Sadly, the perpetrator had a history of violent behavior. Although mental health professionals may someday be able to announce with certainty that someone is a ticking time bomb, that level of predictability is far in the future. Even if a psychiatrist had testified that a specific person would eventually commit murder, it would have been unconstitutional to have imprisoned him based on that testimony alone because another “expert witness” undoubtedly would have testified to the contrary.

There’s no question that America would be a safer country if every person who was capable of committing murder were to be locked up.

But it cannot happen if we are to remain free.