High on the list of things we should probably stop saying is “every life is sacred.” Similar to “clean coal” and “easy weight loss” it is something that has no address on Reality Street.

If we really believed every life was sacred, the national speed limit would be 25 and cars would not just contain air bags, they would become an air bag upon collision and just gently bounce around in traffic. We would completely ban cigarettes, obese people would go into lock down until they reached a healthy weight to height ratio and all bullets would be made out of marshmallow.

I’m sure that right now you’re saying “Dennis, you’re crazy; you can’t make people drive slow, eat well and arm themselves with soft, tasty bullets.” Well, I may or may not be personally crazy but almost everything sounds crazy on the margins.

It works like this. If I suggest a 25 miles per hour highway speed limit, that sounds crazy because we have become accustomed to 60 to 80 mph and a cheating 5-10 mph on top of that. If I were to say the national highway speed limit should be 150 mph, you’d also say “Dennis you’re crazy.”

Likewise, you’d label me the village idiot if I said we should let people start smoking at cigarettes at age five and hand them out for Halloween; we should give tax incentives to supersize yourself; and legalize assault weapon target practice in your back yard.

The point is that everything sounds crazy on the lower and upper margins. If I proposed a national speed limit of 50 mph or 90 mph, fewer people would think I was crazy and many would even support those numbers. Because of this phenomenon, we have learned to live with, even to legislate, an acceptable amount of death and mayhem.

We don’t ban cigarettes but we make it expensive and inconvenient. We hate obesity in advertisements but we promote it in the drive-through food troughs. It’s also okay to have a concealed weapon as long as you’ve taken a course on how to properly use it when you un-conceal it. So, is every life really sacred; probably not. Our own personal life clocks are ticking and we need to get places and we would be embarrassed to drive cars that looked like carnival bumper cars. Inhaling smoke from burning objects, eating deep fried bacon rolled in cheese and arming the local militia are all part of our lifestyle.

Sure, personal freedoms play into these decisions. I’m not sure where, but probably in that pursuit of happiness that is seems to always win in the rock, paper, scissors game with life and liberty.

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Dennis Hinkamp is not a communist, socialist or on any other list of “ists.”