White House Barricaded?

By: Robert Turk

Dear Senator, If you read this personally I will be amazed; but let me start by admitting that I expected to disagree with your site. Then, when I found it, and I read your statement, I see your point. I agree that the street approaching the National Home (if you will) should be publicly accessible. Washington, D.C. was designed by architects to represent paragons of all the virtues of the young Nation in its infancy. What they have done with the urban landscape around the White House makes it appear that our Capitol is in the middle of a warzone. Have we sunken so low? When I was in Washington, D.C. three years ago I felt a stillness in the air, a freshness, and as I toured the Smithsonian and the museums I was proud to be an American. Of course, I didn't have enough time (it seemed like it would take years to explore all the museums!) to see the White House, but if it was barricaded like that, and I was on vacation and I saw it, I'd think that the Big One (read: Big Nuclear Bomb) was on the way down, you know? That'd be one bummer of a vacation. Now, is the threat from the wacko who flew the plane onto the White House lawn, or the shooters, or even some sort of nuke-yielding International Terrorist, so great that that one street has to be marred aesthetically like that? For that matter, is this same boogey man threat just as likely to divebomb, shoot, or nuke someone when they're not in the White House? My point is that the risk is omnipresent, and barricading off streets as if the White House was in a warzone is no solution. Since I believe that Americans should have the right to bear arms specifically was written in the first place to defend citizens from the Tyranny of the Government, should it at some point become despotic and corrupt (Iran-Contra? S&L? Pardon, me...Mr. President...Bush?) so I won't say ban handguns. But it should be awfully difficult to move around in a civil society of Free Americans with weapons of mass killing...the rocket-propelled grenade launchers that the Chinese smugglers tried to get into San Fracisco last month, the assault-weapons, the nuclear devices, or biological weapons. Surely, a society of Free people can agree that NO ONE should posess such items (including our Government) and that persons with them should be stopped, imprisoned, and rehabilitated. But I don't think that our White House, our National Home, where every kid dreams that he'll get to live some day, is barricaded off from the rest of America, for better or for worse. Sincerely,