Tragic government: strengthening the state to avoid the unavoidable.

• Author: Doherty, Brian

Sometimes a tragedy can be the state's best friend. People don't like to believe in unavoidable atrocities, don't like to accept that deeply regrettable events can and will happen because the universe - or someone in it - is Unpredictable, imperfect, and unmanageable. We crave control. Vain attempts to manage the unmanageable at any cost are the strongest impetus turning citizens into supplicants, begging for a government solution to every potential problem.

The Empire State Building shooting spree of Palestinian immigrant Ali Abu Kamal is almost too good to be true for two coalitions set on restricting freedoms: anti-gun and anti-immigration forces. An immigrant killing people with a gun draws forth the predictable suggestion that if people weren't free to take the perfectly innocent actions that contributed to the tragedy's occurrence - in this case, immigrate and own a gun - then we could ensure such tragedies never happen again.

Any sinister deed by an immigrant becomes a weapon in the hands of anti-immigration warriors. Arch foe of immigration Peter Brimelow, who writes for National Review and Forbes, made much hay from our last well-publicized shooting spree by an immigrant, former Jamaican Colin Ferguson. For every Albert Einstein, Brimelow implied in his anti-immigrant book Alien Nation, immigration gives us both a Sacco and a Vanzetti.

Republican members of Congress - coincidentally? - used the day after Kamal's crime to excoriate the Clinton administration for allowing 180,000 immigrants to become citizens without adequate criminal record checks. On the front page of The New York Times, the story of this assault on Clinton's Immigration and Naturalization Service ran next to the story about Kamal's background. Of course, even the most stringent background check would have done no good in the case of high-profile immigrant criminal Kamal: His previous life in Gaza was by all accounts a quiet one of teaching English and translating.

Others, meanwhile, led by New York's Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani, were quick to blame not lax immigration policies but the lax gun laws of Florida, where Kamal bought the gun he used to commit his mayhem. Kamal did go through the Brady Act shuffle of waiting five days, showing a Florida ID, and undergoing a criminal background check (which he passed).

But Florida didn't have access to any national database that could show another way in which Kamal was forbidden to own a gun - a 1994 law barring...