That’s right, just leave your keys in your car the next time you park. Leave the doors unlocked too. In fact, just leave the car running. Or, if you don’t want to waste gas, turn the car off, but set the keys on top of the roof, right there in the middle for all to see.
You see, all this time I thought there were common sense steps that could be taken to reduce the incidence of car theft. And well...there are.
But if somebody is really determined to steal your car, taking the keys and locking the doors isn’t going to prevent them from doing that. Even a car alarm can be defeated, as can an ignition interlock. Oh sure, it will take any would-be criminal extra time and effort to pop your door locks or smash a side window, pull out the ignition lock, perform a hot-wire, etc. and it might even discourage him from trying. But since we can’t prevent every single car theft, we shouldn’t bother even trying to prevent any.
Similarly, don’t bother locking your house. Those nice heavy steel-clad doors you paid so much for? Take ‘em out and put in some pretty multi-pane glass doors. Much more attractive, and they let a lot more light in too. And sure, some motion activated exterior lighting and a burglar alarm system will make it more difficult for somebody to break into your house, and slow them down, and perhaps discourage them from even trying. But if they’re determined to burgle you, they will. So again, even though there are some common sense steps that can be taken to reduce burglaries, since we can’t be absolutely positive that we can eliminate them entirely, we shouldn’t even bother trying to prevent any.
What has brought me to these realizations is that I keep hearing that if somebody wants to kill a bunch of people, and they don’t have a semiautomatic, they’ll just use a knife or a beer bottle or a brick. All this time I’d thought that these guns were specifically engineered to be particularly effective machines for killing people, but apparently I’m mistaken, which I guess also means that a 100 round clip doesn’t make a gun any more useful in killing a lot of people in a short amount of time than if the person firing it has to change clips after every ten shots or so.
Now, with this reasoning, just think of the money we could save by outfitting our military and our police with only knives instead of guns! Heck, maybe we don’t even have to go to that expense, because a few weeks ago when a football player shot his girlfriend to death, some very smart people on Fox News told me that since the athlete was about twice the size of his girlfriend, he could have just killed her with his bare hands. The very smart pundits didn’t mention that the football player then shot himself to death, which was a shame, because I really wanted to hear them explain how a person can be twice the size of himself and can thus kill himself with his bare hands. But apparently it can be done, so guns aren’t an issue.
In any case, there seems to be a large consensus that since certain guns aren’t any more effective in laying waste to a large number of children in a short period of time, and guns in general aren’t any more effective in killing people than knives, or beer bottles, or bricks, or even bare hands (provided the existence of the important size differential, of course) that there’s no point in even trying to reduce the carnage.
So let’s all stop with this nonsense of common sense steps to keep people from stealing our cars or burglarizing our houses. We’ll never achieve 100% effectiveness. So why bother?