The people who are not having police encounters with any regularity, who aren't drawn on when they do get pulled over, who perhaps have property or other reasons to be invested in the status quo, often want things this way.
The people on the wrong side of the gun feel differently. Giving cops lethal power does not create safety. It shifts around what the danger is and who is in danger.
And then, stringent training can be mandated for drivers too! Just make simulators of the quality used for pilot training and require people to pass difficult tests where they react to unexpected events while driving.
Making something illegal for law abiding citizens is the point!
When someone (either in authority or anyone) sees a person with X, and it's legal, then they don't know if it's a criminal or not without further investigation.
When they see a person with X, and it's illegal, then they do know it's a criminal. This is an enormous advantage to enforcement, if that is the goal.
Obviously you can, and many people do, make arguments based on crime statistics that outlawing guns works, but I prefer a logical approach.
A phrase I've seen on HN is "thought terminating cliché". Would that be a better way to express my opinion, by calling it that?
Currently both anti-social and pro-social individuals possess firearms. If possession of firearms is criminalized, those who tend toward pro-sociality will give them up disproportionately. Such a policy would therefore tilt the balance of power toward those with anti-social inclinations. This is a bad outcome.
And I don't take a position on whether the authorities are grouped with the "anti-social" crowd. Some people would say they are.
Purely for the sake of discussion, I presumed the conceit that there is a "justice system" which is "pro-social".
In that context, it seems clear to me that criminalizing things is a very useful tool.
If you reject the premise, you might be perfectly correct, yet I would still expect people to be addressing those who believe there is a "justice system".
Surely all sensible anarchists can imagine believing in "law and order", and assume that a random person probably does?
Even if one doesn't believe there is a justice system, one might believe there could be. I automatically assume anyone who wants to discuss topics like crime and justice believes in the concepts.
The judgement "obtuse" comes with the sense I have that the context is otherwise violated.
We're up to something like 1/3 of the population having some kind of criminal record, though, so the balance could tip in the coming years. The culture wars we are experiencing right now may be a manifestation of that.
That is definitely not a tautology. It is common that the majority of people views the status quo as undesirable.
The status quo is likely to always be some sort of local maxima/minima.
So most people may prefer it to most available small changes, but most people may prefer a large change if there was a way to get there in a coordinated way.
No, that's still not true.
I can't believe it if I can't imagine it, and if you think it's possible, you should share how.
I think this is a dispute over semantics. It's not very productive to argue whether something is true or false when people define terms differently. Better to explain how you define them.