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you're right. making an activity illegal always stops it.


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If the only problem with something is that it's illegal, why not stop making it illegal?

If you ban it, it'll still happen, just not regulated.

As we know, outlawing activities is a sure-fire way to prevent them from happening!

Make what illegal?

You might equally argue that murder should be legal, as banning it won't stop it happening.

Making something illegal rarely prevents it completely, but very often reduces it.


And why stop there? Let's outlaw everything people enjoy doing. It's for their own good.

Right. It's like saying you can't allow a plant. You can outlaw anything you want no matter how dumb it is. It doesn't mean people will comply. All it means is you created criminals.

You can’t _stop_ it. You can make it illegal in some countries. But outlawing it just means some obvious candidate countries or private actors develop it first instead.

We all know making things illegal means no one will ever do them again, obviously /s

We make things illegal for a reason. Often times, a very good reason. And there will continue to be very good reasons to ban things from society.

But just because we made it illegal once doesn't mean it should stay illegal.


If you can't effectively prohibit something you probably shouldn't try. Otherwise you're wasting resources and eroding goodwill towards law enforcement which will be involved in fighting something that people really want to do.

It's impossible to ban , but it's possible to prevent people from implementing and carrying out that idea. There's a difference here.

Stop making things illegal. Find a smarter way.

What do you hope to accomplish by this?

History says again and again that banning something doesn't make it happen less, it just lets criminal elements profit from it.


It's simple really.

Make everything illegal.


Would making it illegal have prevented this?

This is what I was trying to point too, and why I added the "ban it, then" argument. Because there's a considerable amount of people who operate with the "if it's not illegal, then I can do this" mindset, and there's a big intersection of this two mindsets.

At least putting a ban on it will make people think, I hope.


Banning something does not make it go away. What is does is taking control over it out of the state‘s hand, and giving it to criminals.

Your argument seems to be: why stop the little guys from doing something illegal if the big guys are doing it too? We should ideally stop them all, but it isn't surprising that the blatant examples of illegality are stopped first.
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