Sane laws are the ones against violent and serious property crime. One symptom of our current insanity is that solution rates are atrociously low, and declining.
As for the "pseudo military" thing, how many SWAT teams and police snipers do you think are needed, versus the number we now have?
The psuedo military problem is this, (as I see it and have been told) if an 'incident' occurs and a city does not have a SWAT team, or someone specially trained to handle such an inident, John Edwards and his ilk come to the rescue and sue the pants off of the city for not having a SWAT team.