There Oughta Be A Law.... By Jeff Smith OKAY, IT'S SUMMERTIME and against all odds, logic, and common sense you have succumbed to peer pressure and TV indoctrination and found yourself and the family in Atlanta for vacation. The savvy vacationers are in Bozeman, Montana. The air is so thick with humidity and the collective halitosis of United Nations globe-trotting Tourons that you have to hack your way through it like Ramar of the Jungle--with a machete. The good news is that it's around midnight, so instead of hovering around the century mark, the thermometer is pegged in the high 80s. You're in Centennial Olympics Park, part of Atlanta's monster "I'd-like-to-buy the-world-a-Coke" commercial, when all of a sudden there's this loud bang and you find this rusty nail stuck in your leg. Well at least you weren't wearing long pants: no harm done to the Banana Republic shorts. Around you are scattered some 100 other sweaty vacationers who are now adding bloodstains to the perspiration that has been taxing their deodorants and laundry detergents. The scene is chaotic, right out of the Mideast. Panicked people are fleeing as fast as their Nikes can carry them. Another Terrorist attack, like Beirut, Belfast...well, the pre-Olympic hype has pretty much conditioned us to expect this. We're 99 percent certain the explosion of TWA Flight 800 was terrorism also. On the heels of Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center before that, America is pissed. What are we gonna do about it? We'll pass a law, by God. Like we did after Oklahoma City. And this time we'll get Newt Gingrich and the Republicans to sign off, too. Well I've got a news flash for you: We've already got a law, a whole slew of them, in fact. It may surprise you to learn that it already is, for instance, unlawful to possess explosive devices unless you have the proper license issued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. It's against the law to vandalize public buildings. It's contrary to state and federal statute to blow up a common carrier (like a passenger airliner). It's agin' the law to shoot nails and screws into people's legs, long pants or no. It's a violation of statute to murder people, as in the case of the Olympic park bombing, in which an Atlanta woman was killed. Or the multiple hundreds in the TWA explosion or the Oklahoma City courthouse bombing. Everything the terrorists did, in each of these three celebrated cases of terrorism or suspected terrorism, already was against the law before the act was committed. So why the inevitable, knee-jerk rush to pencil another thick stack of whereases and whyfors? Because it's an election year, dummy. And if it weren't an election year it would be the year before an election year, and everybody running for election wants to cuddle right up to the body politic, so they can feel the pulse of an outraged and terrorized public and seem to resonate in sympathy with it. And so we witness the spectacle of Congress and the White House sitting down together before the cameras and microphones to assure us that this time they will write, pass and sign an anti-terrorism bill that will allow us to visit Atlanta in future summertimes at future Olympic extravaganzas free from fear and discomfort. Except for the pickpockets, the heat, the humidity, the mosquitoes, crowds, kudzu...never mind. Why am I not comforted? Because each time shit happens and more shit happens in reaction, the sheer weight and bulk of statutory law groans and grows, and your individual freedom and mine is incrementally diminished. To the accompaniment of no significant improvement in public safety. And even if public safety were measurably increased, it would come at the expense of the freedom which is our natural birthright. Given my druthers this is a no-brainer: I'd rather be free than safe. After the Oklahoma City Bombing, President Clinton pushed for an anti-terrorism bill which expanded the wiretapping powers of the FBI, limited the rights of accused and convicted persons, and treated foreigners in America like farm animals. Clinton got his bill to sign, but an unlikely coalition of conservative Republicans and civil libertarians stripped the bill of its worst intrusions on constitutional rights. But now, with an airline crash and a bombing at the biggest media event of the election year outside of the presidential election itself, the ACLU will have to go it alone: Newt and the GOP are jumping on the anti-terrorism bandwagon. Which is a damn shame because, as I already have pointed out, terrorism was unlawful before the Centennial Park bombing and those other things. Before Oklahoma City. Before the World Trade Center bombing. Matter of fact you can go back to the writing of the U.S. Constitution. Back to English common law. Back. Back. Baa-aa-a-ack. Try Moses hiking back down from the mount to the foothills with those cumbersome stone tables with the Ten Commandments chiseled on them: The basics of proper behavior have been codified since humankind had the technology to record a durable record. Ever since then all our legislators have been doing is writing the print finer and finer, spelling out for specific subsequent cases what already was covered by the wisdom of the general, underlying code of conduct. And in so doing, limiting our freedoms and our rights. By fractions, so we hardly notice it and don't squawk. The idea is to make us feel good, feel safer, and vote for the folks who passed the latest law to put us back into sound, secure slumber. But I don't feel good. I feel threatened when my rights are infringed and I don't believe the next terrorist lunatic is at all dissuaded by this anti-terrorism bill, or the next. So I'm squawking.

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