More restrictions, more masking requirements. President Biden stepped up yesterday, asking large businesses to require either vaccinations or regular testing.

“Overreach!” my governor, Pete Ricketts, declared. “This plan isn’t about public health — it’s about taking away personal liberties!” So I guess he’s asking me to believe that rising COVID deaths are just a convenient excuse to restrict freedom. Then, as he always does, Ricketts threatened to sue.

On the same day, David Brown, president and CEO of the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, weighed in: “Employers, large and small, have a responsibility to the health and well-being of their workforce and customers, and it is our belief that they can, should and will exercise that responsibility as the market demands.”

Can we get more leaders like that guy?

On average, three Nebraskans died of the virus each day last week, and the week before that, and… Being on a ventilator is the opposite of freedom.

I spent twenty years being a staunch Republican. Old-school conservative values? I get it. It goes something like this: individual responsibility earns individual freedom.

iI you break laws, go to jail. That’s on you. If nobody breaks a law, someone will notice it’s a dumb law and take it off the books.

Making laws isn’t fun. It’s incredibly tedious and boring. We have speed limits because a dozen people a day insist on driving 60 mph through my residential neighborhood. We shouldn’t have to have speed limits. We all know what too fast is. Laws are the result of irresponsible individuals who restrict their own freedom, and mine too.

I once asked my dad why my friends had a curfew and I didn’t. He answered, “You know when you’re out too late.”

Demonstrating your individual freedom by taking away someone else’s? That’s not liberty. That’s bullying.

So back to those three people per day dying in Nebraska. If someone shot and killed three innocent people a day, every day, day after day — well, that’s why it’s already against the law to shoot people. People don’t want to be shot. It violates their individual liberty.

Do you want fewer laws and more liberty? Start by doing the right thing. Like my dad would say, you already know what that is. Tell the truth. Be responsible. Show a little charity. Help out. Don’t wave your gun around to scare people. Lend a hand to your elders.

Governor, it is 120% about public health. And it’s about individual liberty too. They need each other.