THE INSTAWIFE looks at the murder of an unarmed security guard here in Knoxville. He happened to cross the path of a criminal and was shot. No gun, no bulletproof vest.

As Dave Hardy has remarked:

Unarmed security guard sounds a little like a contradiction … at best a deterrence to the more stupid or minor criminals (don’t steal that bike — there’s a guy in uniform), at worst, a man put in an impossible situation, charged with protecting others, but having nothing but a radio to call for help, and maybe his fists.

Yes. People hire them, I suspect, because they don’t want to pay the premium it would cost to hire someone who can be trusted to carry a gun while dealing with malefactors and non-malefactors. But as with an awful lot of “security” efforts, they’re really paying for the appearance of security without its substance. Only someone else, the guard or a victim, sometimes winds up paying the price for the difference between appearance and substance.