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It’s All About The Children

By Theresa Fritz Camoriano

Louisville, Kentucky

Eighteen-month-old Kaylynn Alicia Shelby Gaddie was murdered several days ago, and her body was dumped in Jefferson Memorial Forest.  The murderer was a man who was supposed to have been in prison since September.  Unfortunately, the police hadn’t served the warrant to put him in prison, so he was on the loose and took advantage of his freedom to murder Kaylynn.  According to the Courier-Journal, “Maj. Troy Riggs, chief of staff for Metro Police, said picking someone up on a warrant isn't as easy as ‘knocking on the door.’… Kaylynn died of head injuries but an exact time of death could not be determined.”  Since when is protecting us from the bad guys supposed to be as easy as knocking on the door?  Is that the standard the government uses?   – If it is as easy as knocking on the door, we’ll do it; if not, we won’t.

Who will be held accountable for allowing Kaylynn’s murderer to remain free when he was supposed to be in prison?  Nobody!  Thanks to sovereign immunity, no government official will be held responsible.  Nobody will be held accountable; nobody will go to jail; nobody will even pay a fine for allowing this convicted felon to remain free to murder Kaylynn.  In case you think this is a fluke, you might consider that, according to the C-J article, there are currently more than 70,000 outstanding district court warrants and about 950 outstanding circuit court warrants in Metro Louisville alone.  How many of them involve people who will be committing violent crimes against innocent victims when they have already been convicted of another crime and should be in prison?

The government has an important role to play in society, and that role is to protect us from the bad guys who would intentionally harm us.  Government officials are supposed to catch the bad guys, convict them, make sure they are put into prison, and keep them there until they have served their time.  If the government cannot even be counted on to do its one critical job properly, perhaps because it is not as easy as “knocking on a door”, what business does it have taking on a variety of other jobs that can be performed better by the private sector (and that also are not as easy as knocking on a door)? 

Unfortunately, government doesn’t appear to be very interested in protecting us from the bad guys.  Instead of doing that one, important job well, it prefers to expand its power into other areas, always taking on more jobs and grabbing a bigger chunk of our wallets as it goes along.  It would rather be in charge of indoctrinating children, subsidizing business ventures, providing old age pensions, regulating and providing health care, regulating strip clubs, outlawing smoking, and doing thousands of other tasks, claiming that it “cares” about us, as it siphons away our money and our freedom. 

Many of the new laws and regulations create new criminals, further loading up the court dockets and making it more difficult to put the real bad guys away; all the new jobs take resources away from the important job of protecting us from the bad guys.  I am reminded of the time I actually did have to call the police to my business for help, and, instead of helping me, the police measured the width of the handicap parking space in our parking lot, trying to find something for which they could punish me!  Now, Louisville’s mayor even wants to take over Louisville Gas and Electric, the local power company.  But, of course, it really is all about power, isn’t it? 

What’s next – government taxing us to take control of our lawn care, weddings and funerals?  Unfortunately, unless government backs off from its excessive interference in our lives and pocketbooks and re-focuses its effort into its legitimate job of protecting us from the bad guys, there will be plenty more premature funerals to be planned in addition to Kaylynn’s. 

The next time government says it needs to take control of still another area of our lives and to tax us still more “for the good of the children”, you might want to think of little Kaylynn Alicia Shelby Gaddie; remember who was supposed to be protecting her from the bad guys. 

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