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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not sure why so many people are under the impression legislation will be able to keep up with perversely motivated individuals or groups.

Because overwhelmingly it does each and every day.

[edit] This bias comes down to the same issue as folks in infrastructure roles have in the tech world demonstrating their impact. How do you demonstrate impact avoiding SEVs when, if you're successful, the SEV never happened? It's very hard to count the number of things that don't happen.

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> This bias comes down to the same issue as folks in infrastructure roles have in the tech world demonstrating their impact. How do you demonstrate impact avoiding SEVs when, if you're successful, the SEV never happened? It's very hard to count the number of things that don't happen.

The problem is the "bias" runs in both directions.

If you pass a bunch of laws after 9/11 and then another 9/11 does not happen, does that mean you actually need all of those laws, or that it's all overreach and bear-repelling rocks and all you really needed was to tell the passengers on planes to resist hijackers?

In other words, it's not bias, it's uncertainty.

> It's very hard to count things that don't happen

Interesting problem.

Just thinking about this particular issue, maybe some options are:

1) counting time and then expressing success as the longest period of time during which the bad events didn't happen,

2) letting it happen initially to have a base "bad rate", then taking action to bring that rate down, and continuously make an effort to keep the occurring rate down

People preventing accidents at industrial sites have good experience doing this.

Although the incentives are a bit different when it comes to law enforcement, as in the US it's quite common for those who hold all of the discretionary authority in invoking the criminal justice system - prosecutors and sheriffs and Attorneys General - to be elected positions, and at the same time, the continued existence of their bailiwick in the same size and with the same funding requires a show of at least some evident criminal behavior that they're preventing, whether that actually corresponds to actual crimes or not is sometimes entirely incidental. Innocence Projects around the country have found a significant percentage of those freed by their efforts to not only have not committed a crime, but also no crime had taken place in the first place. Coercive plea bargaining makes actually going to trial to hold the state to its burden of proof an exceedingly rare practice. On some level it is a performative exchange and has always been. Criminal statutes are also written in ways that don't necessarily fit what we generally imagine a word means. A burglary in many states simply mean the commission of a felony while trespassing. A conspiracy requires usually no more than two participants, a meeting of minds, and a substantial step in preparation. Accidents in industrial sites are, in comparison, far more objective and far harder to game for various interests. Crime, on the other hand, really represents much more abstract sets of guidelines applied to alleged conduct and state of mind, and much easier to game in terms of numbers.

let's consider an example. Better to do this experiment on popular social media platforms for US audience.

Consider gun related crimes in Australia before gun buy backs ("bad rate") and gun related crimes in post. You would have a solid number of averted deaths and injuries.

Now let's wait for thoughtful opinions from US users regarding the topic of gun regulation :)

I think it's very much dependant on where you live, I don't think someone in Detroit for example is likely to hold the same view

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