How safe is safe enough? What are you willing to trade for safety?

Last week was Outdoor Week here at Wyoming Catholic College. Our students were canyoneering in Utah, rafting the Green River, canoeing in Wyoming, and mountain biking in Colorado.

I joined students taking hunter safety at Wyoming Game and Fish. That included classroom instruction, an afternoon shooting, and a day of hunting upland game birds.

Dangerous? Of course. The wilderness is not Disneyland.

If there’s a sudden downpour, canyons can flood. Rivers include rapids. Mountain biking, to put it simply, is riding bicycles on trails in the mountains. And tromping through fields with loaded shotguns requires great care. The “safety” on a gun, our training made clear, is a mechanical device that can fail.

What Are You Willing to Trade for Safety?

With Outdoor Week as the background, I ran across this article: “Penn State says wilderness is too risky for outdoors clubs.”

According to the AP report,

The Penn State Outing Club, originally founded in 1920, announced last week that the university will no longer allow the club to organize outdoor, student-led trips starting next semester. The hiking, camping and other outdoors-focused activities the student-led club has long engaged in are too risky, the university’s offices of Student Affairs and Risk Management determined.

The Nittany Grotto Caving Club and the Nittany Divers SCUBA Club are also out of business.

But all is not lost. Beginning next semester trips will be available using professional guide services — at a greatly increased cost — presumably lowering the risk. (Or at least providing a target other than Penn State in the case of a mishap and lawsuit.)

At Wyoming Catholic College, trips are nearly all student led. And groups of students can check out equipment for weekend trips as they choose. Is it safe? Not entirely, no.

Which leads to the questions I posed. How safe is safe enough? And more importantly: What are you willing to trade for safety?

Penn State apparently believes its students cannot safely lead trips despite the fact that they’ve been doing just that for nearly 100 years. It’s not safe enough without professionals who don’t come free. So Penn State is willing to trade students’ money and freedom for more safety.

On Gun Laws and Prohibition

Safety has become an obsession in America. And we’re willing to trade huge chunks of cash and freedom for just a little bit more.

Cable news with it’s need to keep our eyeballs fixed on it’s advertisements 24 hours a day seven days a week has done a great deal to convince us that we live in an unacceptably dangerous world. Psychotic fatherless teenaged boys with guns are, presumably lurking just outside every school in America. They’re not, but far too many young people are more than ready to trade away money — more and more police — and freedom — repeal the second amendment — for the perception of greater safety.

I say perception because in Canada, where gun laws are very tight, “gun related homicides and gun violence have increased.” Canada has also discovered — as has high gun control New York City — that mass killers don’t need guns. Trucks and vans will do very nicely. In China, where only the government has guns, attackers on multiple occasions killed children at their schools with knives.

Benjamin Franklin famously said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Take another example. Years ago George Will asked, “Do you believe in traffic safety?” Well, of course. Okay, if you want real traffic safety, he argued, let’s ban all left handed turns and make the national speed limit fifteen miles per hour.

Or perhaps we could ban all alcoholic beverages. Oh, wait. We tried that. It turned out not to be safe at all.

How Safe is Safe Enough?

My point is not an all out defense of the second amendment or a desire for more traffic regulation. My point is to raise two questions in a world that seems obsessed with personal safety.

How safe is safe enough? Think about no left hand turns. And how much money and freedom are you willing to trade for a bit more safety — or at least the perception of more safety?

Benjamin Franklin famously said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” And Abraham Lincoln noted, “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”

More than not deserving it, they will find that their liberty is simply gone — along with all their safety.