Rusty Schweickart Quotes
Anytime we can save lives or prevent the destruction of property, we should do it.
Schweickart, Russell. "An Asteroid Could Wipe Us Out." Interview by Olaf Stampf. Der Spiegel, 28 Feb. 2013.
She told constituents that she would try and implement some gun control measures. She, later in her career explained to critics of Congressional inaction via gun control--see {640804}.
This quotation is one of the few honest answers that government politicians give to questions about the effectiveness of prevention. All prevention whether it is to reduce terrorist attacks, fatal crashes on out highways, illicit drug usage or anything else, have two major problems in terms of communicating effectiveness. First, it is impossible to accurately measure what did not happen. Second, whereas prevention failures have real people and faces of the victims can be identified, it is impossible to identify the specific benefits of prevention. We know who died in the Boston Marathon bombing, but we do not know exactly who was saved by the prevention of a planned terrorist attack that was thwarted in New York. Even when the government does know that a terrorist attack was thwarted, it is rarely a good idea to make that information public as then the tourists will learn details of how a particular planned attack went awry, whereas if the government is silent, they have much less information and cannot easily adjust their strategy and tactics.
Russell Louis "Rusty" Schweickart is an American aeronautical engineer, and a former NASA astronaut, research scientist, U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, as well as a former business executive and government executive.
