Bryan D. Brown

Browsing through the news at lunch today, I came across this innocuous headline, Bush Says Patriot Act Makes America Safer. I wouldn’t pay much attention to this nonsense under normal circumstances, but I found it very ironic that I saw a different headline yesterday, “Man With Chain Saw, Sword Is Let Into U.S.

What exactly do you have to be carrying in order to NOT be let into the United States? This guy had a sword, chainsaw, hatchet, brass knuckles, and bloody clothes. Short of a nuclear weapon, what more did he need to have on him? Granted, they did confiscate the weapons at the border, but just take a look at this guy. Even without a chainsaw, there’s plenty of crazy.

But my favorite quote from the article is this:

“Nobody asked us to detain him,” [a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection] said. “Being bizarre is not a reason to keep somebody out of this country or lock them up. … We are governed by laws and regulations, and he did not violate any regulations.”

True, being bizarre isn’t a reason to be locked up. But it really makes you wonder - if you can use racial profiling as a way to determine if someone is a potential terrorist, then why can’t you use, “Hey, this guy - with the bloody chainsaw - looks and acts like a wacko. Maybe we shouldn’t let him go just yet.” And there’s this quote:

[The spokesman] conceded it “sounds stupid” that a man wielding what appeared to be a bloody chain saw could not be detained. But he added: “Our people don’t have a crime lab up there. They can’t look at a chain saw and decide if it’s blood or rust or red paint.”

I’d actually take it a step farther, and say that it’s a tad beyond sounding stupid, and it actually is stupid. And I’m not entirely sure a crime lab is necessary to determine the differences between red paint, rust and blood. The fact that he even tried to bring a chainsaw across the border should be enough to hold the guy for as long as it takes to determine whether or not the blood is real. Call me crazy.

The big thing for me is all of this talk of how 9/11 has changed the way we view security. You can have all of the security you want - if the people minding the store all suffer from cranial-rectal inversion, it won’t stop a thing. Nothing shows more incompetence then allowing a man to enter the U.S., who had just killed (presumably) two people, when he shows up at the border with the murder weapon still covered in blood.

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The original links to the story and photo at Yahoo! seem to have moved, so I’ve replaced it with a link to the only link I could find with the original quotes. Despite the fact that it is Fox News, I assure you the quotes are accurate.