Go to a local school board meeting on masks and be disabused of this notion fairly quickly.
edit: Votes on this one have been a wild ride.
edit: Votes on this one have been a wild ride.
We are not good at evaluating the less flashy risks to life. Wearing a seat belt saves a lot more lives than checking shoes at the airport, but we'll fight the seat belt a lot more.
~7 billion people aren't stupid. They just don't share your prioritization of whatever the societal issues you perceive to be most important today are. This trope is just a back handed way to call everyone who doesn't agree with you stupid, or some variation thereof.
In any case, you're either missing the overarching point (the charitable assumption) or you don't want to fight my point head on so you're nitpicking that my examples aren't good enough (the less charitable assumption).
Of the same sort of nature as masking during a pandemic:
Vaccinations, requiring docs to wear gloves during surgery, etc.
In this same fantasy universe jack-booted government thugs are beating up people who don’t wear seat belts or who mislabel the nutritional contents on a package of cheese, except that’s just not what ever actually happens in the real world. These kinds of laws can be appropriate when they make society better for us all.
To that point, anti-maskers have almost certainly killed more Americans at this point than terrorists could ever have hoped to. You might consider that when attempting to understand why people are seemingly so hard-pressed to get laws requiring their countrymen (and women) to do the literal bare minimum to protect the lives of their neighbors.
>Can we kindly stop using hyperbole... anti-maskers have almost certainly killed more Americans
That's a fallacy in itself, however I think there's definitely some merit to both sides here.