New Laws

Great Debates
1

Why is it that people think that new laws are needed if the old ones aren’t being obeyed?

People break a law. Instead of figuring out why the existing law was broken, (and fixing it!), a lot of people want new laws added to make what happened even more illegal.

For Instance:
The Gun Control Debate: Every time there is a shooting, people call for new gun laws. This happens even when the existing laws were broken.

This happens with just about everything. It has always baffled me why this occurs. Can anyone help me out?

2

Because they can’t write a goog rock song?

3

The banal realities of law enforcement and the funding of same are less satisfying to complain about.

4

Part of it is ignorance. (That might well be the answer to any question on here) Likewise, part of it going to be deliberate playing of the base by politicians.

Part of it is probably down to the highlighting of flaws even when laws are broken. If the Joker goes out and guns down a hotel lobby before Batman can stop him, for example, breaking a theoretical law that says he can’t carry more than one gun on him at a time, people might well suggest that even if Commissioner Gordon had taken away one of his guns he might well have been able to carry out his nefarious crime. And vice-versa, of course, too; if the purpose of the one-gun law is to try and stop such acts, there might well be suggestions that that law is purposeless.

Part of it is probably also a matter of unexpected consequences of a law being brought to light. If a law is passed so that costumed vigilantes like Batman have greater powers to make citizen’s arrests, and in practice it turns out that actually that just means the Penguin gets to sign up as a a deputy and get away with detaining people legally, even if he ends up getting charged with assault when he sets his flunkies on them people might rethink the law.

5

With regard to gun laws there are a lot of loopholes. Gun show and private sales not requiring any kind of background checks are two of the big ones off the top of my head.

Banking laws are another big one. I’ve seen a lot of threads on this board where the question comes up regarding why none of the bankers involved in the 2008 crash were prosecuted. The answer is always that they did not break any laws. Why shouldn’t the response to that be that if everything they did was legal, let’s change the law to make some of those things illegal?

6

Its probably because proposing and passing new laws looks better on the re-election resume and its all about getting & keeping power?

“John Smith. He wrote the “Shoot all Drug Dealers, their Spouses, and all their children” anti-drug bill. John Smith: Tough on Crime.”

PS… wouldn’t fixing an old law Be a new law…?

7

In my experience, there are two extreme approaches to making laws:
[ol]
[li]Let’s have very few laws, charge everybody and let the jury sort them out.[/li][li]Let’s make a law for every possible specific case. And make a new law for every new crime that hits the news.[/li][/ol]
And most people are somewhere in-between, usually whichever better serves their interests at the moment. I’ve had a very conservative friend who’s moto was “murder is murder, and hang them all”. Yet when it comes to self-defense, he wanted a law with a hundred paragraphs spelling out all possible situations, because a liberal hippy jury could get it wrong. (I am exaggerating to make a point, but not by much.)

8

Because humans are adaptive and find out ways to avoid consequences of law.

Why do they add razor wire to security fences?

9

I’m not sure if I understand what the OP is asking. Some specific examples would be useful. But I’ll take a guess and offer a possible explanation.

To use the gun control example, if somebody goes out and shoots several people in a public place and then shoots himself (or gets shot by the police) then obviously the person was guilty of several counts of murder. Gun control advocates are going to point out that laws against murder didn’t prevent the crime. So they’ll suggest maybe we should enact a law that would prevent murderers from buying guns. Their argument will be that the existing law against murder didn’t prevent these murders so a new law is needed that would have prevented these murders and hopefully will prevent other future murders of a similar nature.

10

How do you propose to fix a law without passing a new to fix it?

11

One example is the seemingly endless enactments of new laws related to convicted sex offenders. It happens like this:

  1. Kid gets raped. Government creates the Sex Offender Registry and requires convicts to register once a year.
  2. Another kid gets raped. Government requires convicted offenders to register twice a year.
  3. Another kid gets raped. Government requires convicted offenders to also stay at least 1000 feet away from public schools.
  4. Another kid gets raped. Government requires convicted offenders to stay at least 2000 feet away from public schools and also private schools, daycare centers, orphanages, public parks, libraries, and zoos.
  5. Another kid gets raped. Government requires convicted offenders to live under a bridge.

This happens despite the fact that most sexual offenses are committed by people with no prior sex offense conviction and who are well known to the victim.

12

Sometimes legislatures just completely screw the pooch.

Now, you could argue as to whether the Oklahoma legislature is fixing to “pass a new law” or is going to “figure out why the the existing law was broken and fix it”, but whichever you call it, the Oklahoma House of Representatives and the Oklahoma Senate are going to have to pass some bill (including agreeing with each other on the exact wording of that bill), which will then have to be signed by the Governor of Oklahoma (or else re-passed by a two-thirds majority of both the Oklahoma House of Representatives and the Oklahoma Senate if for some reason the Governor of Oklahoma chooses to veto the resulting legislation).

13

Right. Fixing what’s broken with the law as it is requires legislating again – only legislation can change or repeal legislation (absent an overturn on constitutional grounds by the courts - and then you really should legislate again to conform to the decision rather than leave a moot law on the books and depend on court orders to get things done)

14

I took this to mean figuring out why the person broke the law and not that the law itself was broken.

For instance, someone steals an RPG from an Army post and blows up a school bus full of nuns, children, puppies on dialysis, and 2000 boxes of thin mint girl scout cookies.

Are there any additional laws that could have been passed that would have prevented that? If not, then screaming for new laws wouldn’t actually accomplish much.

15

Sorry but I am trying to figure out why my city keep making new laws when they can’t enforce the one they have now. I guess the city councilors in my city like to feel importance so they spends hours making up new laws.

16

Nail, hammer, etc.

Also, actual governing is hard. Writing some shit down on paper is a piece of cake, though. It’s like prayer. All the satisfaction of having done something, with none of the actual doing something.

17

Best answer I ever heard when asking why no one in the government did something - “That sounds hard, so of course nobody is going to do it”

18

If that’s the actual source of the problem. It seems that when there’s a headline issue, there isn’t actually a studied, well considered attempt to solve an actual problem so much as a panic to rush and do something. A kid gets a gun from his parents and shoots someone, the answer is obviously to close the gun show loophole. An illegal immigrant brings a gun from Mexico and kills an American and obviously we need to limit magazine size. 18 terrorists fly planes into buildings and so it’s essential that we monitor what people are checking out at libraries.

New laws usually aren’t what’s needed in these situations. What is actually needed 90% of the time is better enforcement of current laws, and another 5% of the time there’s nothing that can actually be done. Or in the case of 9/11, some bureaucratic changes like letting the FBI and CIA share intelligence. Heck, whatever happened to good old fashioned crackdowns, where police suddenly focus huge on a certain problem. Seems like they do that against vice fairly regularly for no particular reason, but can’t ever seem to work up the gumption to do a good crackdown on illegal guns.

19

The obvious answer is, if you can’t enforce the law you have now, might you not be better of with a law that is more enforceable? So you enact a better-thought-out, more focussed, more practical law.

I’m not saying that every law enacted in response to public concern at the failure of existing laws is of this model. But if existing laws are shown not to work, trying harder to make them work is not the only, nor necessarily the most rational or most promising, response.

When you have a strategy that experience has shown not to work, pursuing that strategy ever more vigorously is not likely to yield good results. You have to try something else.