Seven Pieces of Good News for Freedom in 2013

Highlights from an eventful year.

Ed Krayewski, Jesse Walker, Jim Epstein, J.D. Tuccille, Scott Shackford & Matthew Feeney
Reason Magazine
12/31/2013

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch’s The Declaration of Independents, published in 2011, provides a hopeful outlook for the future of freedom, a vision of how libertarian politics can fix America’s problems. How did 2013 pan out for the libertarian moment upon us? Here are seven pieces of good news for freedom this year from some of us here at Reason—Ed Krayewski

 

1. No Tolerance for Zero Tolerance

As 2013 began, America was still reeling from a mass murder at a Connecticut elementary school. Parents and officials across the country were nervous that something similar might happen in their backyards, and that nervousness translated into a series of strange school security scares, many of them involving absurd zero-tolerance decrees. The most infamous might be the second-grader in Maryland who was suspended for chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun.

It was easy to assume that the reign of zero tolerance was just going to get worse, as school districts felt the same bureaucratic imperatives that swept the nation after the Columbine massacre of 1999. It didn’t help that both liberals and conservatives were calling for measures that had fed the zero-tolerance beast in the past. But then something unexpected happened. Those silly security scares were mocked in the press. Politicians proposed bills to roll back zero tolerance’s excesses, and schools across the country adopted new policies that might not be a civil libertarian’s dream but at least give officials more flexibility in doling out punishments and make it less likely that a misbehaving student will be pushed into the criminal justice system. As victories go, these may be small, but a year ago I didn’t expect this to be an area where there would be victories to celebrate at all. —Jesse Walker…

3. 3D Printing Guns a Reality

While 3D printing isn’t, yet, quite as futuristic as a Star Trek replicator, it brings manufacturing to the desktop and promises to revolutionize and decentralize industry. 3D printing also makes banning physical objects—most famously firearms—an impossible task, since it turns anybody with a printer into a potential manufacturer of almost anything. Just months after the open-source group, Defense Distributed, demonstrated the practicality of a working gun 3D-printed in plastic, U.S.-based Solid Concepts, announced it would sell 3D-printed semiautomatic pistols. —J.D. Tuccille…

 

 

Read the entire article at Reason.com

 

 

Related:  Zero-tolerance stupidity at school: Column  Educators can’t distinguish between childish games and real threats.

 

 

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