When there is freedom, there is security. The second ammendment is a prime example of that.

"He who trades liberty for security deserves neither and will lose both."

— Thomas Jefferson

The classical debate in political science is Freedom vs. Order. To what degree must freedom be relinquished to establish an orderly society?

In his classic work Leviathan, Hobbes argued that without a strong government to establish order, men would be animals.

A more contemporary argument is drug use. Should we as individuals give up the freedom to use whatever harmful drugs we choose, in order to maintain an orderly society?

I would gladly trade security for freedom. I hate long lines at the airport. I'd rather die ;)

Think of it this way. Security is like a dog's life. You pretty much spend your entire life sleeping through it. That's no life!

Freedom is a wolf's life. No one tells you what to eat, when to eat, when and where to go for a walk, etc. Specifically, no one tells you where in the woods you can crap!

Although....., if you're a dog, you have a human to pick up after you've finished crapping. Yeah, now I see your point. It's kinda of a hard choice ;)

Freedom and security go hand in hand. You can't be guaranteed one without the other.

It is hard to think of the two terms as completely separate. I think the best place to start for me is a democrat idiom I heard once, I'm not really sure where it originates. "The government should do for people, what they can not do for themselves." Now with the world as heavily globalized as it is, companies that span the entire earth; and the state of medicine these days, I think pretty soon we're going to have to answer the question of what we can really do for ourselves. I don't think most people, or most people who deserve to be called people i.e. productive members of society, agents of progression, need the government for a whole lot. One aspect of the Security argument is healthcare. Feeling secure that if you need medical attention you will receive proper medical care. There's nothing really wrong with that idea, but I do think there's something wrong with a system of "universal" health care, where an obese patient receives free or discounted treatment for a health problem that is a result of their weight at taxpayers' expense, when it's their own fault for not taking care of themselves. The same goes for people with liver disease from drinking, or lung cancer from smoking tobacco. I'm not saying we shouldn't treat people like that, but they should pay for themselves, or rather their insurance should. If we're looking at this on a spectrum, like a line and security is on one side, freedom on the other, Freedom is going to look a lot more dangerous for various reasons. Mainly because we're separating it from security, which isn't always the case in real world situations. Take the police. If we're going with freedom, let's say the drug war is over. Everything is legal and sold in literal "drug stores." Maybe this leads to an increase in addiction among adolescents and adults, possibly an increase in drug related deaths. But, with the entire market for controlled substances legalized, there's no drug war. The drug war takes up so much of law enforcement's resources. Every police officer would now be spending 100% of their energy on the job responding to domestic violence calls, pulling over drunk (or otherwise inebriated) drivers, responding to accidents, and in effect, protecting our rights, rather than what I would say has been infringing on them in the current system. At this point with all the potential lives saved, and tax dollars that we can put into other things like, education or something, we've got a much larger and better educated workforce that can take care of itself, and pay it's own way, rather than the way it is now, with a much larger than necessary portion of the population relying on the government for one thing or another. Welfare, healthcare, work, what have you. It's a really complicated problem, and I don't think anyone can say that either extreme is really going to be the best, but I think, or hope, that if you give people more freedom to do the right things, the choice to live productive and progressive lives, over the choice to murder people, or spend all day getting high on the worst and most harmful drugs they can buy, that the overwhelming majority will see their chance to succeed and take it. And the minority, well.... You know how human's have reached a point where we have no natural predators so the population is just kind of increasing without any kind of quality control? I mean I hate to talk in callous terms like that, but can anyone tell me how it wouldn't help to have a few more subtractions to the lowest percentile of the population? Just for the sake of natural selection? I mean it's proven to work.