If you feel that that's the case then you must realize that what stopped this status quoue wasn't legislation but industrialization and guns. Legislation is always after the fact.
Also, of note, is that guns were invented in China thousands of years ago and it has been a monarchy or dictatorship since then.
Which brings me back to my point, the current status of civilization is due much less to legislation than people say it is.
But if you say that the systematic codification of rules (i.e., laws) matters less than people say it does, we disagree completely. Laws literally defined every major civilization back to the dawn of recorded human history.
For more modern examples, CA's employee rights laws are the reason that SV happened in SV rather than New York, Boston, Chicago, or Detroit--all cities with larger scientific and industrial bases than SF or LA. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act literally made the internet as it exists today possible; without it Youtube, Twitch, Facebook, Twitter, and even Amazon and Google couldn't exist as they do today.