I am Libertarian, so my interest in government is about giving people freedom, trusting people over government. I oppose taking away rights and freedoms we have unless it can be clearly shown to help us all.
Left over from Prohibition are draconian and nonsensical laws against distilling alcohol completely out of whack with normalcy. If you distill your alcohol that is $10,000 plus ten years. Even just possessing illegally distilled liquor is $5,000 plus five years. So if you want to talk about reasonable laws in the USA we need to first start with simplifying the existing ones or we continue a very bad trend. To be fair, the ATF says they do not prosecute de-stilling violations very much, which puts us further at the mercy of the generous legal system that allows us to do things that are illegal at their own discretion. I thank them and honor them for this generosity but still believe the unenforced laws should be repealed.
I have a pistol license but I do not own any guns. If I thought the laws were going to change, though, I just might buy some. I enjoy target shooting, and have hunted a few times…not much into fishing either. But shooting a pistol in a range is fun. If you want to go with me some time the range I use allows us to borrow guns.
My point is the judicial industry in the US sux and if you think prohibiting something will change people’s behavior, well, I have some pot right here and that is illegal in every state by Federal law. Speeding (every single person who has ever driven), prostitution (the offer of money), pirating music (Happy Birthday and the Macarena are copyrighted), copyright laws (don’t get me started), peeing outside, connecting to public wi-fi without permission, poker, and don’t even start examining building and fire codes and zoning and sewer use and environmental ….
Police have too much discretion as we see in the news every day. They could arrest anyone at any time if they name a law that might be broken. And there are lots of laws. You must be very white to suggest a new law will help. Most of us are now aware that if you want to make a bad situation worse call the police, or involve the government.
Suggesting we make things MORE restricted irks me. Things are restricted enough. Everyone is a criminal and we just exist at the generosity of cops who are either not aware of all the laws or don’t like to do a lot of paperwork. Although I am not a fan of confidentiality it seems necessary to have such laws just because nearly everything is illegal and if police can look at personal photos and records they can arrest us (not that they would do so, of course).
And when we start talking about our prison system we have double the prisoners and double the costs to the taxpayer for them per capita than any other country. China has a few more prisoners than us, but China has three times the population. We imprison five times more than the world average, about 0.01% of our population (touching the families of nearly 25% of the population) while the world average is 0.002%.
So more laws will not help fix any problem. I think we should try education. And we start by simplifying and repealing the STUPID laws we already have. When we do that we are making a step toward a solution to the social problems, the divisions, the education of our people. The government isn’t going to do this for us. We have to take responsibility for our people, our friends, our families, our own lives.