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sundin13 on 24 August 2019
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KLAMarine said:
sundin13 said:

I think it is a little more complicated than that. Laws serve both a proactive and a reactive function. They exist both to punish people and to prevent additional crimes from occurring.

Proactive function is one of the important and overlooked aspects of gun control legislation in my opinion. It essentially allows creates a situation where the police are able to intervene before an incident occurs. For example, if an individual is stockpiling illegal weapons to use in a shooting, the fact that these weapons are illegal allow the police to step in and arrest this individual. If these weapons were made legal, the police would be unable to act without further information. This is also one of the goals of "red flag" laws.

Your description sounds reactive: police are reacting to a law being broken, in this case possession of illegal weapons.

Proactive would be someone not possessing illegal weapons to begin with because they're illegal.

I think it's easier to tally up cases of the former than the latter.

You seemed to have missed the point.

Its reactivity is an ends to the means of proactivity.

It comes down to why something is illegal. Why is owning extended magazines illegal in some places? There is no victim there. The reason it is illegal is in order to allow law enforcement intervention before someone is victimized and to prevent victimization in general. It is reactivity in service of proactivity. I'm going to call it "Fundamental Laws" vs "Proxy Laws". A "Fundamental Law" is a law against something that is fundamentally wrong, such as murder or robbery. These crimes deprive individuals of their rights and harm society in the process. A "Proxy Law" is a law against something that is not fundamentally wrong or harmful, but still is beneficial as a law in order to either aid in prosecuting fundamental laws or aid in the prevention of other illegal activities.

You could also argue that this all loops around to the idea of the purpose of the prison system. In a healthy prison system, punishment isn't the primary purpose. The four goals are as follows: Retribution, Incapacitation, Deterrence and Rehabilitation.

Three out of those four goals are proactive. They exist to both deter an individual from committing that first crime (like you mentioned) and to prevent that individual from committing another crime (through incapacitation and rehabilitation).

Basically my point is a response to the "Criminals don't follow the law" line of thinking. While that is sometimes true, there are a lot of proactive benefits to enacting new gun control legislation, including allowing police intervention before a "fundamental law" is broken.