March for Our Lives (2)

In last blog, I explicitly pointed out that we should avoid making new feel-good laws at federal and state level. 

 

But in reality this is almost impossible to resist. With all the MSM coverage of the March, passionate testimonies of the survivors, innocent kids tearfully pleading, and so many votes on the stake, which politician would risk his/her career to stand against the current? It doesn’t cost his money anyway.

 

So we see that Florida passed a new gun control law soon after the school shooting. 

Even President Trump tweeted: “Obama Administration legalized bump stocks. BAD IDEA. As I promised, today the department of Justice will issue the rule banning BUMP STOCKS with a mandated comment period. We will BAN all devices that turn legal weapons into illegal machine guns”. How neat!

 

There is indeed a law that the government can make which could reduce mass shootings with very low economic cost. That is: all mass shooters are tried as adults and, once convicted, are executed in a public, painful and humiliating way. But this won’t be popular. “How could we lower ourselves to do such cruel and inhumane thing?” People say. Of cause, to live with such a moral standard is not without cost. If the next mass shooting would have been prevented by such laws, that’s the cost of acting humane to mass shooters. In my opinion, the price is way too high.

 

As we can see, when emotions run high and the public opinion is dominated by such voices, our political system generates results completely opposite to what’s desirable: it introduces useless laws to increase our burden, and fail to enact laws which are more likely to achieve our goal.