Ah, a fellow humanitarian! I trust you support my campaign to ban hot dogs. It's for the children.
While hard candies, popcorn, nuts, grapes and chewing gum are all potential problems, hot dogs cause more choking deaths than any other food.
http://wbztv.com/local/choking.hazards.food.2.1511024.html
What people don't realize is that hot dogs are EVERYWHERE! Not just in your home, but in the schools, day care centers, arcades, amusement parks, beaches...Anywhere children are, the dreaded hot dog can be found. It's time to end the hot dog's reign of terror! Join with me in trampling the freedom of the individual for the sake of the children! No pleasure recieved from a hot dog outweighs the safety of our young ones!!
My argument with the other poster wasn’t about choosing specific things and deciding to ban them.
It was about the generic reaction to suggesting that something could be banned if it was found to be hazardous, even if it also had some benefits.
Remember, I’m here to point out that the coconut argument was fallacious and silly. I’m not here to support banning pit bulls. But I also don’t think it is dictatorial to consider banning pit bulls, any more than any of our laws are dictatorial.
Our nation is founded on the principles of liberty, but government does have an assigned duty to, at some level, protect citizens from certain harms that come from others.
Law weighs the protection of some people against the inconvenience to others; the rights of one person to life or safety against the rights of others to liberty and happiness.
It is why we have speed limit laws — someone weighed the liberty of a person against the life/safety of others, and decided that liberty would be curtailed to a certain speed. Note that nobody would be killed if cars were banned, and then the opportunity for death/injury increases as you allow cars and increase the speed they can drive.
Why 25 on some road, and not 30, or 35, or 50? In every case, someone decides; we hope it’s based on some measurement of risk/reward, but mostly it’s a cookie-cutter formula. Some people could drive over the limit and never hurt anyone. In a perfect world, people would be allowed to drive any speed they wanted so long as it didn’t hurt anyone, but since that would lead to people being killed/injured before government could act, it has become an unacceptable method of controlling behavior. In that perfect world, watching people get punished would make sensible people behave better, but deterrence has not been the rule in legal circles for a while. We pass laws to protect people directly.
That’s why we have drunk driving laws, rather than just harsh penalties for those who hurt people while driving drunk. It’s why we have speed limits; why we restrict the sale of medications, why we have all sorts of laws that restrict our liberty simply to lower the possibility of others being harmed.
I’m not defending or attacking these types of laws here — I’m saying that if a person argues that only a fascist dictator would ban ownership of a dog simply to lessen the chance of others being hurt, that person is a hypocrit if they don’t also argue against the speed limit laws, because those laws also limit our liberty and freedom simply to lessen the probability of others being hurt.
Only an anarchist can in good conscious argue that the government has no right to limit anything a person might want to do simply because the person’s actions increase the risk of harm to others. The rest of us have long since accepted that government passes laws like this all the time.
In the end, we need to do a risk/reward analysis, to decide whether any particular action can or should be banned (that is, when the constitution doesn’t specifically prevent the government from action, as is the case with banning guns).
We don’t ban hot dogs because millions of people love them. We don’t ban pools because the reward of being able to swim outweighs that certain death of random children by drowning. We don’t ban cars even though they kill up to 50,000 people a year. But I am pretty sure someone has been looking at the risk/reward of hot dogs.
As a last point, I will note that I can completely protect myself from the risk of choking to death on a hot dog, by NOT EATING A HOT DOG. So in the end, I would argue that government should not be banning things that are a danger only to myself, in which I can freely choose to accept the risk.
If it is shown that pit bulls are a dangerous breed of dog which will attack children without provocation or warning, and without the owner ever knowing the attack is possible, then the danger of a pit bull attack is not something I can reasonable protect my children from, other than by making sure they don’t go NEAR pit bulls.
The question is, how does a parent ensure a pit bull never comes near their child?