And what if the conservative position of total depravity

turns out to put totally depraved people in charge of running the system that is supposed to protect us against evil? That only magnifies the problem. In fact, I've never understood the people who claim that the universal pervasiveness of human evil means that we need a strong state. What guarantee do we have that the people who run the state will be less evil than those who are run by the state? If people are irredeemably corrupt, don't we have even more reason to reduce the chance that evil people will get hold of the mechanisms of power?

--Lew Rockwell.
Further along in "On Evil Acts" he says:

In the case of Virginia Tech or any other institution, there must be some way in place to protect against violence in the future. But that system needs to be carefully calibrated to match the level of danger. Otherwise, we end up with the current situation in airports in which the official policy assumes that every single passenger is a likely terrorist. Every person is investigated inside and out. And yet even the investigators know that this is going too far, and therefore they become lax and the system eventually fails.

Matching security to risk is a very complicated undertaking, so firms work with insurance companies to discover the right means. Clearly, a convenience store in a violent East Coast urban environment is going to need more protection than even a fancy jewelry store in a Midwest suburb. Customers would think the owner was nuts if they encountered bulletproof glass in a 7-Eleven in Caldwell, Idaho, but this is the norm in the Bronx. Of course firms make errors, but competitive pressure drives them always to adjust security to match the facts as they know them.

Ah, heck! Put these in too:

For this reason, it is not enough to say that Virginia Tech ought to ban guns or ought to arm students and teachers. Neither solution is necessarily right. One can imagine that some universities might not want students to carry sidearms. For other places, this might be just great and even essential for putting parents at ease. Which is the right solution? Only when such decisions are left to private owners and the competitive marketplace can we know for sure. One-size-fits-all doesn't work any better in security provision than in clothing.

With the market, there are many decisions that we as a society do not have to make collectively but instead we make them individually as buyers. We do not have to decide collectively what cars to drive, what websites to visit, or what food to eat. So it is with security.

And so it is with the problem of human evil. We do not have to side with either liberals or conservatives. We only need to say that whatever is the intrinsic nature of man, the market will find the best possible means to deal with it, and whatever the outcome of that market process, it cannot be made better by involving the state.

No Procrustean Bed for security. [Procrustean security blanket? Naw, we'll have none of that either!]