Ultimately, banning {whatever} is the lazy-man’s way to public behavior management.
Trying to educate implies reaching a mass of people. Many of whom have their fingers jammed in their ears and their eyes screwed shut. And many more who will choose to do {whatever} precisely because the Man told them not to.
Trying to regulate implies a need for some manner of police force to observe the actual behavior out there and apply corrections via fines, detention, friendly in-person education, deterrent effect against the deterrable, etc. All of which costs seriously improbable money and manpower to police a product used in industry, and insanely impossible money and manpower to police a consumer product.
By comparison, banning is easy. Call the 4 companies who make the {whatever} and tell them that particular product line is closed in 6 months after which they can run down their stocks. They’ll grumble but comply, a comparatively small market will spring up at the border for black market imports, and the gov’t has 99.44% achieved its goals on the cheap.
None of the above speaks to whether {whatever} should or should not be controlled in whose varying opinion(s). But it does explain the attractiveness of bans as a methodology once control is desired by TPTB.
All of which goes back to the problem that it’s hard to have a collectively sensible and responsible civilization when the humans in it generally are neither sensible nor responsible. In one of my brother’s more famous quotes: “What America needs is better Americans.”
Pardon the zombie, but as has already been pointed out about the “pint” hyperbole, it should also be noted that not even the best equipment will consistently remove the entirety of some of the more strong-rooted weeds from driveway cracks, (like UGH Spanish Broom - HATE IT!!!), as the crap grows right back, hence the only solution being the most absolutely minimal application of that dreaded “R” word, which is basically the only time this gardener (for a livlihood) will deign to use that certainly noxious grossness.
Just two, three at the most quick mists from a small mister bottle on a small patch on a dry, windless day - then, boom - bango bongo bungo or whatever NJ mobsters say.
As noted upthread, when attempting to eradicate buckthorn or poison ivy, I’d like to heat any effective alternative to painting the stumps with Roundup. And when I recently undertook to remove some phragmites from a private lake, I was surprised that my pretty extensive research of government and environmental sites offered no effective alternative.
I fully agree that the pursuit of a perfect lawn is undesirable. My wife and I often disagree as to what chemical weed controls to use.
In Berton Roueche’s “Leaves of Three”, there’s an account of a passenger train with the windows up that was stopped for some reason out in the countryside. Nearby, brush was being cleared by burning, and a heavy dose of smoke drifted into the cars.
Apparently that brush contained a lot of poison ivy, because passengers suffered severe reactions, including eyes swelling shut from the airborne urushiol.
Back in my Boy Scouts days, someone found some wood that must have have Poison Ivy on it. A bunch of us ended up being covered in rashes, all over our faces, necks, and arms. I don’t think that anyone had really bad reactions, like ending up hospitalized for it, but it was extremely unpleasant.
OTOH, it somehow made me immune, as I’ve never had it since, even though I know I’ve gotten into it a few times.
