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by knucklesandwich
3636 days ago
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Sure, my point though is that it's being disingenuous to put the blame on the laws themselves for enabling these circumstances. As a society we tend to want punishment for theft, violence, etc. so it's a little absurd to say that the solution is to get rid of the laws that penalize those. A lot of people here seem to be complaining about minor infractions... some of these things have a social history and context that caused the laws to be created in the first place. Some of them, frankly, are racist or are a means of criminalizing race or innocuous behavior, and we really should be fighting to repeal those laws. But that's a discussion unrelated to the thesis here. The problem is not per se the laws... I'd wager that most Americans favor roughly proportional response by law enforcement, and the penalties of laws usually reflect that. The blame belongs in the constitutional powers we give law enforcement to investigate crimes and respond to perceived danger. As long as the police are free to investigate suspicious persons and respond with deadly force if they feel that a person is an imminent danger, it doesn't actually matter what laws we pass. |
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In a world where offenders will readily comply with the punishment, you can just have purely civil enforcement, no need for a special class of sworn officers to deal with it.
This is the point of the essay: law enforcement gets to use physical, ultimately deadly, force, and this is the case everywhere, even if US cops are significantly more trigger-happy than pretty much all their peers.
If you're never comfortable using violence to enforce the law, there is literally no need for it to be a law. There is no point to employ police officers to check on the size of sodas if they are not allowed to initiate force to prevent people from buying and selling them.
On the contrary, if you are comfortable using violence, you have to own that anf accept that ultimately such violence will be deadly.