Buying a lie.

What rights would you give up for your family's safety? What would you give up for the illusion of safety?

Seems to me most rational people can find sacrifices they would make for the first category. The problem comes when they believe they're getting tangible results, but are in fact getting 100% illusion in the end. And in reality, a false sense of safety makes life more dangerous, not less.

We watched part of the evening news on one of the alphabet channels (abc, nbc, cbs) the other day and they ran a story about neighborhoods banning sex offenders from buying a home and living there. Sound reasonable? They recheck all family's records every 6 months.

These families are paying a premium and are voluntarily sacrificing privacy for what? It is so very exceedingly rare that a predator will strike outside of children who have some remote aquaintance with him. If he is that one-in-a-jillion kind of evil, isn't your neighborhood just as susceptable anyway? Do those parents relax a little? Are they tempted to just let their cloistered kids play in the culdesac unsupervised? Do they wait just a little longer before telling their innocents that not everyone who wants to be your friend really can be? That not all adults are in charge?

It surpised me how mad and frustrated this story made me. I just couldn't believe what they were buying into. It didn't help that every homebuyer they interviewed was a WASPy guy in a cardigan. The people selling this are nothing but predators themselves.