In the wake of the Laurie Dann tragedy, many have asked, ”What can be done?” and many answers to that question have been proposed. The question that has not been asked, and should be, is: ”Should anything be done?” The answer to this is an emphatic ”No!”
That the Laurie Dann incident was a terrible tragedy is obvious. What is not so obvious is that Laurie Dann was a bolt of lightning, a ”worst-case”
occurrence in spite of all reasonable precautions. There are now various efforts abroad to ensure that such a thing can never happen again-by taking unreasonable precautions.
It was once widely held in this country that freedom was a thing worth dying for and lip service is still given to the idea. Yet whenever a bolt of lightning strikes, whenever a bizarre tragedy occurs, we turn as a people to government and ask it to take away more of our freedom in exchange for less responsibility for our own lives and some largely illusory increased measure of safety.
