Same goes for kitchen knives. I don't hear them call for banning those, or have every sale of one tracked and monitored (which would only illustrate the lunacy of their "argument" even more).
(from 2005 but it was brought up again last year...)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4581871.stm#:~:text=%22Off...
The proposal was from a hospital research group who argued that many stabbings are impulsive and that long knives cause extremely serious penetration injuries. So they suggested banning those knives for home use, or at least blunting the tips.
The response to this is usually "well people could sharpen them?" and sure, but the purpose is risk mitigation. You'd still be able to buy a smaller pointed knife if you wanted.
> The researchers said a short pointed knife may cause a substantial superficial wound if used in an assault - but is unlikely to penetrate to inner organs.
They allegedly consulted with chefs who agreed that if you really need to use the tip, a paring knife would be OK. Anecdotally I'd agree - the only thing I use the tip of my chef's knife for is for opening packaging.
I still don't get the idea that having a weakened security system could somehow benefit security. Based on many real-life hack stories I've heard, it's usually the "bad actors" who's taking advantage of unsecured apps to attack normal people, this is the very reason why developers are making apps more secure to begin with.
Another point is, insecured systems are usually easy to take control of (By injecting malwares payload into the brokenly-encrypted traffic for example), then "bad actors" can turn those systems to a trojan proxy. How does that help if you want to make things safe?
Last point: I know this is about big companies encryptions. But really, "Roll Your Own Encryption" is not that bad anymore if all other "secured-encryption" was bugged. And, really, roll your own encryption is not that hard today if your only goal is to annoy the FBI.
Real last point: Even if companies such as Google and Facebook did banned encryption, does that also prevents "bad actors" from using real encryption on top of their service? You can even send your nudes to me safely by encrypting it with my public key and publish the encrypted data here (Don't actually do that). The point is, even if you've successfully banned encryption in big companies, users will then just add a layer of encryption of their own, and that layer can be very very secure.
That's what projects like Maskbook do[1]. The problem with those is that the use of such technology can be detected, and thus the small number of users singled out. You'd need steganography for this principle to work, and AFAIK that's already what paranoid criminals are doing. So in reality making E2E encryption inconvenient only penalizes regular honest people.
[1]: https://mask.io/
However, a system can be designed to do that with ease. You can encode data in video streams with Fourier transform, you can encode data using English words, you can put encrypted data as JEPG payload etc.
"Bad actors" will do whatever it takes to protect themselves from law enforcement, they'll kill the police in a blink if their account balanced out (On the same note, they can also join and control the police from within), let alone to learn to use encryption. It is the normal people who will feel most of the hurt, because after that they don't even have the protection against bad actors.
[1]: http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1990/act/12/section/9/ena...
"Normal use of pocket knife" is how the police formulates one of the exceptions or carve-outs for legitimate use of a knife in public spaces. There is a lot of leeway there.
If so, then do people have to take the fish home before cleaning them or can they prepare and eat them while camping, etc?
When you place the burden on the people and not the state - often through "common sense laws/regulation" - you inherently enable subjective and arbitrary enforcement of the law.
This unfortunate trend not only creates and enables petty tyrants, but disproportionally afflicts the most vulnerable in society and politically disfavored minorities.
it also gives police discretion to avoid getting people into trouble because of too rigid rules. Many countries have a lot of lenience about the enforcement of relatively harmless drugs, for example.
Lenience and judgement on part of a police force is a good thing, and a necessary thing because reality is complicated and rules don't always make sense. The way you frame the issue just shows that you have low trust in your respective police force, in which case the issue is quality of policing, not rigidity of the law.
Of course, shockingly few of these ban-heavy countries, with the exception of the East Asian ones, have considered the much more effective strategy of adopting laws to reduce the number of bad actors. Switzerland is almost unique in only adopting laws to reduce the number of bad actors (very strict immigration system) but having fairly lax object laws (knives are mostly fine, guns are relatively loosely regulated) and it works well for them.
Strict? 25% of Switzerland’s population is foreign-born[1], and they are in the Schengen area, so no passport needed to cross the borders. I’ve cycled through at least three, none of which were even marked.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Switzerland#/...
* a large number of people
* from a distance
* with basically no effort
With knives on the other hand it's hard (especially for untrained attackers) killing/injuring
* even a low number of people (IF even more than one)
* from arm's reach
* with large physical effort.
Following that firearm restriction to those who may actually need them (law enforcement etc.) is then quite obvious.
Saving lives is not a rational explanation for the political strategy of anti-gun activists. If it were, I would be more willing to consider what they had to say. Based on what they do rather than what they say, I can only conclude that their motivations have nothing to do with rationally increasing safety, and are more related to mindless irrational fear, disarming people for political reasons, and simply pandering to people who have also done no real research.
Finally it ends with 'do you trust current authority?' and depending upon the social circle you will get various answers.
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence it is force! Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
The US was setup to protect individuals from both government and the majority. Sadly through out history we have lost respect for this separation of powers resulting is elimination of many checks and balances that where builtin to the system
Short answer... No I do not trust any government, or authority. Nobody should
Cough cars, police officers, food that doesn't taste like grass and cardboard, cough, cough.
There are costs to freedom, including the potential for abuse. Just like predictive policing is wrong because it goes after those who haven't committed crimes, banning guns is wrong. The death of a ten, a hundred, a thousand, or more people doesn't justify restricting liberty. All guns ought to be legal.
If so, can I please be allowed to have my own private nuclear warhead? I promise to only use it as a deterrent against a similarly armed government getting too "oppressive".
I promise not to set it off in a bout of drunken depression.
Sure, how about a howitzer then?
What you're failing to see or refusing to admit is that you too want to restrict access to weapons based on a certain threshold of collateral damage/body count each of them can inflict.
It's just that for some (perhaps most) of us, an AR-15 is way past our threshold.
As for the truck you mentioned that was used in France: if it's ever found that a certain truck model makes it particularly easy to run over people with, I bet my bottom dollar that soon after there will be legislation enacted restricting access to it.
Also good luck filling out all the paperwork. There's a difference between outright banning something and placing an astonishing number of administrative hurdles in the way. Private nuclear weapons come with so much paperwork as to be esssentially impracticable, but never the less possible.
At least that was the verdict last time I looked into the question.