What do Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Kermit Gosnell, and the accused IRS employees have in common? In all four cases, Federal law prohibited them from committing their crimes. I was illegal to walk into an elementary school or movie theater and gun down countless people. It was also illegal to murder a baby born alive after a botched abortion attempt. Additionally, Federal law has restricted the Internal Revenue Service from targeting political groups since the Nixon administration.

All three of these criminals broke the law. More importantly, however, is the fact that the law failed to prevent the crimes.

To understand the law’s purpose, one must examine the United States’ founding. In his Second Treatise on Civil Government, political philosopher John Locke writes that in order to escape the state of nature, essentially anarchy, governments are formed to provide constituents with protection. To achieve this end, men willingly give up certain rights in return for security. This fundamental process is known as social contract theory. Man is born naturally free. In the state of nature, man’s freedom is absolute. While this freedom has great potential, it also carries significant dangers. When everyone is free to do as they please, people will inevitably begin to violate one another in pursuit of property. Therefore man surrenders absolute freedom in return for the promise of safety and security.

Even so, man remains fundamentally free. Even after signing the social contract with the government there is nothing to stop anyone from breaking that contract. Sure, the state of nature as people seek to better themselves at the expense of others. Yet even civil society today is full of criminals and rights violators.

Whether it is god’s law, or mankind’s law, there are no actual barriers to preventing crimes or atrocities. No law can prevent action; that just isn’t how the United States was designed. Truly restricting individuals’ actions would require the government to trample on practically the entire Bill of Rights. While the founders understood the need to sacrifice rights for security, it has not reached the point where the majority of Americans are willing to shred the constitution for the illusion of security. Benjamin Franklin writes that “they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” This remains true today.

No amount of laws can restrict action in a free society. That is not their purpose. Instead, laws seek to convince would-be criminals that the consequences of their actions far outweigh any of the perceived benefits. Our entire society is built around these sorts of cost-benefit analyses. Government will only survive as long as the governed value the arrangement. For most citizens, the consequences of jail-time far outweigh the benefits of murder, theft, or any other serious crimes. Society survives because the majority of the citizens are able to make these rational choices.

In the wake of the Aurora, Colorado and Newtown, Conn. shootings, much has been said about increasing gun control. Such measures would be valuable if, in the words of the President, “they could save just one life.” That logic, however, is preposterous. You don’t shred the constitution because of the possibility of someone committing a crime. While these massacres are regrettable, they are statistically insignificant. Sure, debates over statistical significance do little to console victims of these atrocities, but the fact remains that while the law failed in these instances, the law succeeds in deterring crime 99.999% of the time.

Unfortunately, as we saw in Newtown, Aurora, and countless other towns, these laws sometimes fail to deter psychopaths. The fact remains that for someone intending to cause massive harm, no law will ever succeed in preventing them. No amount of regulations can teach an Abortion provider to respect the rights and dignity of newborns and no amount of laws can prevent an IRS employee from politicizing their power. All the government can do is pass laws to deter crime, and prosecute those who commit crime.

Yet many today are calling for more laws. If only the country had more laws, then less people would die unnecessarily. Yet the United States’ Code of Laws is currently over 200,000 pages (that’s not even considering state laws and local statutes). It is safe to say that even if you were to successfully read through all of our nation’s laws, the law would probably have changed by the time you finished. The solution cannot be volume. No amount of pages will ever make up for common sense.

It was already illegal for James Holmes to walk into a Aurora CO cinema and open fire on theatergoers. This tragedy reflects how Holmes failed to make a cost-benefit analysis, or he believed that the benefits of committing murder outweighed the consequences. This is clearly a mental health issue. The solution is NOT to limit civilian access to firearms. Kermit Gosnell’s atrocities don’t warrant the outlawing of medical personel and accountants will remain important even after the dust settles in the IRS scandal. Yet somehow, when it comes to firearms, people think that the solution is control. Gun control isn’t about guns, it is about control. Gun control advocates want to control your actions, not because you have exhibited signs of instability or malice towards others, but because you possess the ability to commit a crime.

These critics argue that individual rights are not limitless. In the 1917 case Schenck vs. United States, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that individual rights have boundaries. “The most stringent protection of free speech,” he writes" would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater.“ The premise is that because yelling fire in a crowded theater could cause a panic and even loss of life, that action would be prohibited. Yet just because someone has the capacity to yell fire and cause massive harm doesn’t mean that all theatergoers should be forced to wear a muzzle.

We are not a society of laws. We are a society of individuals content on making this experiment with democracy work. Our participation is voluntary and the communal security depends on this. Laws are necessary to deter violent criminals and prosecute those who step out of line. But any attempt to restrict actions would redefine what this country stands for. Sure, the idea of being forced to wear a muzzle to the theater sounds absurd, but how far are you willing to let the government go? How many rights are disposable in the pursuit of imagined security? When will you draw the line? When the government no longer trusts the people to make rational choices and act in their best interests, that will be the end.