Tonight's Rant

Tonight's rant is about useless laws. It is spawned by an article I just read on cell-phone delivered porn, and how (at least in Britain) the industry is trying to crack down on it's delivery to the underaged before regulations are imposed upon them.

I am not in favor of children having access to hard core porn, but the thought of new regulations points up something that has long annoyed me: Passing new laws when old ones will do.

A few years ago, we had the Digital Decency Act (or whatever it was called), making it specifically a crime to traffic in child pornography over the internet. Why? Child pornography is already illegal. Has been for many years. That law has no limitations on it, as written it doesn't say "...unless you get your dirty pictures of children via an electronic medium". Making, selling, distributing or possessing child pornography is illegal. So what did we gain by passing a law to make it explicitly illegal over the internet?

The most likely answer is: Nothing, it just allowed the politicians who voted for it to talk about the tough stance they took on crime.

Alternately, it might be argued that the existing laws were not being enforced. But if that's the case, then how does adding a new law help? Somehow the same people who don't feel it's necessary to enforce the current laws will say "Oh, but this one is new, so we'll enforce THAT one."

Another example of these laws-of-dubious-need are anti-hate-crime laws. Again, virtually everything prohibited by these laws is already illegal, the new laws merely set new standards of punishment if the crime was perpetrated based on some form of prejudice. But again, why? If I get beaten up, robbed, assaulted, car jacked, or otherwise victimized, does it really matter whether I was picked because I'm white or because I'm convenient? And who decides which prejudices are "hate crimes"? It's somehow more heinous if someone comes after me because I'm gay (if I were) than if they come after me because I'm fat (would that I weren't)?

The fact is, assault is illegal. It should be prosecuted. In order to assault someone, you have to have a certain level of anger or hatred in your heart, so at what point is it NOT a hate crime? And if it's always a hate crime, then why have a special law for when it is?

Gun laws are another great example of excess. Why does it seem that every make, model, category and caliber of firearm has it's own specific laws? It's illegal to assault someone with a deadly weapon. A gun is a deadly weapon. Do we really need a law making it SPECIFICALLY illegal to assault them with an AK-47?

My final example of the night is DWI/DUI laws. They're already on the books, and every so often, someone pushes to make NEW ones, with STIFFER penalties. Do you know why this is necessary? Because the ones we have already aren't being enforced. Making the penalties stiffer is not the answer.

Regardless of what some people think, police officers are human beings, they don't (in general) relish punishing people any more than we as parents relish punishing our children.

Imagine for a moment that your community passed a law that said children must not talk back to adults, and it was left to parents to enforce. Now imagine that the punishment was set at 24 hours without meals. How many of us would tend to look the other way, pretend we hadn't seen the infraction, because we felt the punishment was excessive for the crime?

Now imagine that because so many people were looking the other way, the incidence of children talking back did not go down (or perhaps even went up), and imagine that because of this, the town's governors stiffened the penalty to 50 lashes with a rattan cane AND 24 hours without food. The logic SEEMS sound, if the previous punishment is not sufficient deterrent to the crime, make it stronger. However, it doesn't address the problem, because the problem wasn't with the deterrence of the punishment, the problem was with the enforcement of it. By making the punishment even more extreme, all that's accomplished is making parents even LESS likely to "notice" when the kids break the rule.

This same is true of DUI/DWI laws. Yes, we have a problem in this country, and yes, we need to do something about it. But when we stiffen the laws such that any infraction, first offense, requires a minimum 30 day license suspension, we just incent the officer to look at the harried mother-of-two who can't afford to miss 30 days of grocery shopping and decide to "overlook" the crime this time, so that she doesn't lose her license.

More and tougher laws are not always the answer. Enforcement of the laws we already have is USUALLY plenty.

Copyright (c) February 25, 2005 by Liam Johnson. http://www.liamjohnson.net