EDITORIAL - Small price to pay for security

The latest word from the Palace of Justice in Cebu City is that some people are grumbling about the stringent security measures hastily put in place there in the aftermath of the shooting rampage by Canadian John Pope, in which he killed two people, wounded another, then shot himself.

It is hoped the grumbling is only due to the fact that people always need time to adjust. Or that, owing to the swiftness with which the new security measures have been put in place, they do need some fine-tuning to become smooth and effective.

For if the reason for the grumbling is that people do not want security measures at all, then it would be such a pity as the measures are all for their own benefit and any inconveniences that may have arisen from them are but a small price to pay for their own safety.

People should give the security measures a chance to work. They must learn to cooperate and bear with the birth pains. It is never the intention of these measures to inconvenience or to antagonize people.

Times have changed. The world is no longer what it used to be. We no longer live in a time when people knew most everybody else. We now go through life crossing paths with strangers, anyone of whom could be a potential threat to everybody else.

Nothing pleases those with evil intentions than to move along a path of least resistance. The lesser security measures there are, the more we help along these threats toward a successful conclusion of their criminal motives.

Except for the employees working in the building, who it must be presumed have their own separate security clearances, most of those who go into the building are infrequent guests and therefore do not have to endure the inconvenience daily.

In other words, guests can always console themselves with the fact that it is not an everyday thing and that, in the end, enduring delays and queues is always better than getting involved in an untoward incident that happened because security is lax.