Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

> Are you saying everyone should be allowed to have a gun?

We can probably make an exception for people who are currently in prison.

> I would be interested if there is research into these indirect effects you talk about.

This is a political question so all of the research is performed by partisans for one side or the other. On top of that, most of this stuff is inherently hard to measure, e.g.:

> For example I'd like to know how often people actually snitch, whether there are attempts/procedures to protect info about who snitched, how often they are killed for snitching, how often having a gun helps them, etc.

The government is going to try to avoid disclosing who snitches and the criminals are going to try to find out and retaliate. But if the criminals have a way of finding out (e.g. bribe the cops) then it will be illegal and no one will want to admit it's happening, and likewise if they successfully retaliate they'll want to do it a way that doesn't catch them a murder conviction.

So now someone few people are going to notice winds up dead. If they were an informant at some point in the past, those records are closely guarded for obvious reasons, so how is someone trying to collect statistics even supposed to know that? Likewise, if their death is made to look like an accident or the killer is never caught, how do you know how often it was actually an accident or an unrelated crime?

Which then leads into this:

> E.g. because if a hit can come at any time from anywhere, having a gun might only give a feeling of safety.

Part of the premise of having a weapon is as a deterrent, which gives you another measurement problem: If a lot of the snitches are keeping weapons even though they're not allowed to and that's successfully deterring anyone from trying to kill them, neither the snitches nor their hitmen are going to admit to either one because they're both breaking the law.

The lack of anybody having good numbers also feeds into the problem itself, because then the snitches have to guess whether it will help them and a lot of them are going to regard the risk of getting killed as a bigger threat than the risk of getting caught with a gun. Or worse, the hitmen will like their chances better when the law requires their target to be unarmed. And both of those happen stochastically as a result of the inherent uncertainty regardless of your own guess for how effective the victim having a weapon is at deterring retaliation.

Yeah, so some guy is selling his zkps by the millions for a dollar each. Since they're zkps you can't find out who it was, and the system is pointless.

> FWIW, this is why i said "anti-social" and not criminals in my original post. I think with many habitual abusers, the warning signs are there for a long time (often from childhood) before they break the law and before they are convicted.

But then what are you proposing to do? Tell people they lose a right based on vibes even though they've never been convicted of anything?

> Maybe what we need is a post-prison evaluation to determine which case we're dealing with and whether restrictions (if any) should be temporary or permanent.

Maybe we should reorient prisons into places that actually rehabilitate prisoners and then release the ones that are actually rehabilitated.

> FWIW regarding domestic violence, I think any target of it would be crazy to stay with the aggressor in the same household.

This is one of the things which is hard for the system to tell from the outside. There are legitimate predators with no record because they have the right friends. Then there are alcoholics who are violent drunks and therefore have a record, but haven't had a drink in ten years and then everything seems fine until they have a relapse. Or the exact same thing except that they stay clean and then everything actually is fine.

There are also people who live with an occasionally violent partner because the alternative was their relentlessly violent parents. I find it hard to judge people who have only bad options and then pick one of them.

> the abuser should be required to pay for housing for a reasonable period of time so the target can move away, etc.

The situation commonly happens to begin with because they're both poor and can only stay above water by sharing accommodations. If you want shelters then build shelters; we don't need things that would only work when the perpetrator has enough money to lawyer their way out of it anyway.

And lobotomies are a legit cure as is all the other quackery that profession has provided as facts.

Sort of, except OP also says:

> This doesn't mean every device needs to implement child locks

Which is the exact opposite of what the California law says, going so far as to mandate that open source embedded operating systems ask users for their age.