Would you rather be safe or free?

(It’s funny what 22 years can do to something you wrote. This chapter, incorporating two newspaper columns I wrote back in the day, may be the most chilling bit in my book Refuse to be Afraid.)

Would you rather be safe or free?

It’s been the central question in the United States of America for two decades now.

In April 1999 a couple of kids at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., committed an atrocity, shooting 35 students and teachers, killing 13 of them, before turning the g...