The only thing that separates us from the animals is superstition and mindless rituals. - Daniel Klein
In a recent conversation I had with someone regarding "gun laws" I heard something striking out of the mouth of my adversary that got me really thinking. "Should we have any laws at all?". This was a rebuttal to the commonly understood notion that laws written on paper won't/don't stop "bad guys" from getting their hands on guns.
I thought, "Wow, should we have any laws at all?" "How many laws are there?".
In an effort to find the number of laws, specifically the ones dealing with guns that are on the books I was amazed at the fact that I could not find an accurate number anywhere on the web. Some sites say it's as little as 300 "gun laws". Most of those laws apparently deal with the manufacturing, design, sale, purchase, or possession of guns. Other numbers I was able to come up with were as high as 20,000 "gun laws".
If I can't even figure out how many laws there even are, how on earth am I to be expected to abide by any such laws. Moreover how are the states enforcers supposed to know all the one's people are braking. Keep in mind we are only talking about one subject area, "guns".
What about all the other laws?
The Justice Department in 1982 tried to figure out how many federal criminal laws were on the books. It took 2 years worth of effort to determine that there were about 3,000 criminal offenses. I say "about" because they never figured it out. It was a guess. Ronald Gainer, a retired Justice Department official oversaw the committee and was quoted as saying "You will have died and resurrected three times," and still won't know the answer.
How on earth can anyone take this stuff seriously?
So if we don't know what the laws say or even how many of them there are, how is it possible that someone who doesn't care about some dusty law book in a building over there now going to be stopped from committing a new crime if one more law gets added to the already unknown number of laws that exist. It isn't.
I keep telling a guy who might be my brother-in-law, and might be a police officer, that may also be a state congressman from a really boring state that, "we are only 2-3 laws away from true.. actual.. freedom".
The truth is, writing all this crap down and calling it "law" doesn't do anything. People need to understand it, resonate with it. Laws or "rules" should feel natural. Then and only then will people respect them, and you won't have to write them down.
"Crime is a fiction... created by the state... a tool used to steal from everyone. The only real 'crime' is a violation of a person or property. The only legitimate response to crime... is victim advocacy... 'the state' does the opposite... and tortures people, creating super criminals for power and profit." - Ben Doolin
