Food Stamps, Guns, Illegal Downloads, and the TSA

filkerdave posted a link to a story of someone whose life was saved by food stamps.

This led me to repost the link on Facebook, with a sort of stream-of-consciousness/flow of ideas preamble that became a discussion linking together all of the concepts above and more. I'm reposting it in its entirety here, but the TL;DR summary is: all of them are the focus of actions that punish the majority for the damage done by a very small number, and result in a large number of people viewing that majority as criminals/lesser citizens... with security and law enforcement being one of the primary professions infected with this view, since all the new laws get dumped on them to enforce.

( Babbling rant after the cut... )