“It’s going to change the way we look at things,” a security consultant told Fox’s Megyn Kelly on the day of the Newtown elementary school massacre. America’s schools will need armed guards, “perimeter security, CCTV, preventative issues with the school psychiatrist [and] police department … ” Newtown, he summed up, “is going to be for schools what 9/11 was for airports.”

Let’s hope not. If the reaction to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School is anything like the reaction to Sept. 11, we’re in for a decade or more of frantic overreaction and wasteful, destructive policies based on the false promise of perfect safety.

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