Former 'Onion' editor: Freedom of speech cannot be killed | MSNBC:
Our society is possibly the freest that humankind has yet produced
and that freedom is predicated on one central idea: the right to speech.
That right is understood as a natural extension of our very existence.
In America, free speech is so important that the men who wrote our Bill
of Rights put it first, but followed it up with our right to bear arms.
To me, that’s always been a pretty strong message: Say what you want
and, here, take some guns to make sure no one tries to stop you. But in
this state of widespread social change – probably the most profound in
centuries – we need to make sure that the ideal of the second amendment
never, ever trumps the power of the first. That brute force never
negates ideas.
This is a loss for all of humanity. The victims, people who believed
with passion and intellect that humankind can be better, were struck
down in the birthplace of the Enlightenment, the movement from which the
modern world emanates.