The story of Jaycee Dugard is a story of both the best and worst in humanity. The absolute strength of a little girl turned woman held captive by a sexual predator and his companion who birthed two of her captors babies. And the awe inspiring failure of the law enforcement officials who had over sixty chances to stumble upon Jaycee, yet never did. As America demands answers to how such failures could happen, there will be the ever popular proposition of new laws and regulation to prevent something like this from happening again. As much as I sympathize with Jaycee Dugard, Elizabeth Smart, and the thousands of other children who have been abducted and subjected to untold cruelties, I am here today to explain why more law is simply not the answer to this problem.
We have laws on the books against kidnapping and unlawfully imprisoning people and we have set guidelines on how convicted sex offenders and parolees are to be monitored within this country, there does not need to be a new invention of law here. What we need, is better enforcement of the laws that are on the books. There was clearly a lack of enforcement in this case. If we haven’t enforced the laws we already have in place, how do we expect to better enforce new laws? Why weren’t the former laws enforced because had they been enforced, we probably would’ve found Jaycee years earlier. What is the point of new law here? We already didn't enforce the laws we have…so great we can just throw another layer of paper and bureaucratic tape over previous un-enforced laws to create, more un-enforced law leading to only more girls and boys like Jaycee.
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