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Consider. In modern mega-states, like ours, legislatures...in order to justify their existence...tend to pass endless laws to protect people from themselves, from seat belt mandates to motorcycle helmet laws, from jay-walking regulations to the notorious laws against ingesting forbidden substances. The rhetoric used to justify this incessant regulation of other people's behavior...for their own good...is couched in depressingly similar terminology:
We guess it's easy to believe, if the CEBBTO is harping on a subject involving one of your deepest fears, that he or she really does have the well being of society, especially that of the children, at heart. On the other hand, why is it that dangers are always expressed in terms of what MIGHT happen to others, rather than what IS happening to the "culprit?"
Hey, gang, we live in a FREE SOCIETY doncha know? Whenever politicians get too rambunctious about saving us from ourselves, the question of why government needs to be involved at all inevitably arises. Furthermore, forever casting the blame for aberrant behavior on outside entities...drug dealers cause drug usage, the NRA causes gun deaths, the liberal press and media are responsible for EVERYTHING...has the effect of removing all responsibility for our behavior from us personally. Or as Bart Simpson simply says, "I didn't do it."
So, the CEBBTOs are saving OTHER PEOPLE, or society as a whole...especially the children.
Still, it seems that the children aren't being "saved" at all by all this regulation and control. While trigger guards on handguns used only for target practice may keep a few accidental deaths from occurring, they also remove all responsibility from the owner for taking care of those guns responsibly. If the trigger guard somehow fails..."I didn't do it! Remington did it!" Of course, if the purpose of the handgun is to protect the owner, the trigger lock effectively negates THAT use.
But, what does all this have to do with scaring the horses?
Remember a few weeks ago, when we said that we favor laws to forbid the playing of automobile stereos at high volume in the middle of the night? Or laws to make home owners keep their property up to standards? Rather trivial stuff, but important to the orderly functioning of society. It has even been codified in a general law enforcement theory called the "broken window" theory. The idea is that if you control the little annoyances, if you take care of the "little stuff," then the incentives for the total breakdown of civilization, the rampant out-of-control criminality that infest so many of our inner cities, will diminish as well. Experiments in Eastern cities seem to suggest that they DO have some positive effects. And, of course, regulations about the upkeep of property have long been in place.
So, if open drug use is infecting our children with "bad" ideas, make laws against the OPEN use of drugs...public intoxication...rather than the draconian...and really, really stupid and destructive...laws now in place. If guns really are so dangerous, why not, as the NRA suggests, mandate gun safety instruction rather than trying...futilely in a free society...to regulate them out of existence. We...finally...turned from banning pornography to simply putting age limitations on its purchase. Whether any of these regulations will really work in the long run is problematic. They do, after all, regulate INFORMATION rather than behavior. As we all know, information wants to be free.
On the other hand, society might even consider what we have heard was once practiced in Korean villages. The villagers would get together and subsidize one "village drunk." Each day, that person would be given the wherewithal to purchase enough alcoholic beverages to get drunk as a skunk. In return, the villagers could bring their children to observe...firsthand...the ravages of out-of-control alcohol usage. Not a bad idea for discouraging out-of-control heroin use, doncha think? The sight of a real live ravaged junkie trying to find a live vein into which to shoot-up might go a long way toward discouraging "first use" of this habit forming substance. Or, as is currently being done in Europe and Canada, pictures of diseased lungs are being printed on cigarette packages. These approaches tend to replace the suppression of information with its wide dissemination. They are cheap and easy to implement, although they require an unusually enlightened society to even attempt.
It is ever so much simpler to simply try to sweep evil under the carpet, or, as is the case with most of the forbidden activities, simply exaggerate their bad effects enough to convince people to allow the CEBBTOs to ban them. That is, to replace one set of perceived evil with an even greater publicly supported evil...like putting people in jail for decades for selling drugs that people freely choose to use...or putting murderers to death.
So, King Henry may have had a point when he suggested that we should not scare the horses. It is certainly better than the hangman's noose or the guillotine to keep us under control. But, we suggest that the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is a much better remedy.
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