When anything ‘bad’ happens collectivists stampede to call for ‘something to be done’, usually More Government.

What a strange attitude that is. It somehow assumes that everything in principle can be regulated, and that a crude cost/benefit analysis run by collectivists is invariably the way to decide what outcome is ‘best’.

But it is essentially phoney if not immoral. It looks only at part of any problem and relies in a bonkers Gordon Brown way on measuring things, when not everything that counts is easily measurable. Thus crudely measurable things start to count, and subtle unmeasurable things don’t count.

Take, say, freedom. The freedom we have to do good or evil means that necessarily some evil is likely to happen. That evil then happens does not mean that freedom has ‘failed’. It’s rather an inherent part of freedom being expressed.

All this is eloquently explained by the father of Christina-Taylor Green, the nine year-old girl gunned down by Jared Loughner. Far from using this disaster to express weakness in surrendering more private autonomy to the state, he makes a moving case for accepting the risks of living in a free society:

John Green ends by saying:

If we live in a free society like the United States where we are more free than anywhere else, we are subject to things like this happening and I think that’s the price we have to pay.

Frankly, I think we would have to pay that price even if we lived in a substantially less free society. Sure, with stricter gun control, Jared Loughner might not have been able to get a gun but also, with stricter gun control, criminals would have an increased advantage against law-abiding citizens.

But that makes John Green’s comments all the more impressive. He’s saying that even if freedom leads to more random acts of violence against innocent people, reducing freedom is even worse.

Exactly.

How often do we over here hear even a whisper of that argument on the R4 Today programme?