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My last entry was about media coverage of shootings. I wanted to get bit more philosophical. I snagged the title of this entry from Jurassic Park. Ian Malcolm was a strong believer in Chaos Theory. Through the movie he explained how life finds a way. In the book they went into further detail. John Hammond tries to explain that there's no danger of the dinosaurs getting off the island and multiplying.

1. The dinosaurs were all created female. With no males there is no way to reproduce. In the book if I recall their ovaries were also irradiated to sterilize them.

2. The park computer system monitored the numbers of each species of dinosaur alerting them if there is a decrease in number.

3. The dinosaurs were engineered so they could not manufacture the amino acid lysine. If some of the dinosaurs managed to escape the island they would be cut off of their lysine supply and would fall into a coma and die.

This gave Hammond the belief he had complete control over the dinosaurs. Malcolm was skeptical as he believed life would find a way. Sure enough Malcolm was right. Some of the dinosaur DNA came from frogs and certain species of frogs were capable of changing sex. If I recall they also grew new reproductive organs. It's been a while since I read the book. The computer system had a set number of each species to look out for. Being so confident the dinosaurs can't reproduce the tracking program would look for X number of dinosaurs and stop counting. If you thought you had 10 raptors the software would look for 10. If it only found 8 you get an alert. If it finds 12 it stops counting at 10 so along side not knowing they were reproducing they didn't even know how fast their numbers grew. Finally you had the lysine. Some dinosaurs made it off the island and when they reached land they ate chicken and other foods rich in lysine so they were able to survive and reproduce. Malcolm was right. Hammond had the illusion of control but life found a way.


So where does all of this fit in with recent news? Well this is where I voice my opinions on gun control and especially the idea of an assault weapons ban. Basically the idea of restriction gives the illusion of control, but life will find a way. Evil will find a way. If someone puts their mind to it they will get the job done.

I want to reflect on the 2002 DC shootings. In a 3 week stretch John Muhammad and Lee Malvo shot in several different instances resulting in 3 wounded and 9 killed. They used an AR-15 similar to the one in the Connecticut shooting and got the nickname of the "DC Sniper" because they chose to remain hidden when they shot at people. Because of their tactics it didn't matter that they had a semi automatic. They could have used a bolt action and had similar results. In fact, had they not been caught they could have killed a couple hundred people using those tactics. If you ban semi automatic rifles as assault weapons someone can (and probably will) use a hunting rifle for a sniper rifle. Ban hunting rifles and people can make bombs. You can't stop evil by trying to control good people. The good have to be ready to fight back against evil. That's my opinion anyway.