Placebic Public Policy: The Ineffectiveness of “Feel Good” Legislation

As a society, we have a tendency to try to collectively make ourselves feel better about subjects that make us uncomfortable. Unfortunately, while legislation may make us feel better collectively, it also can be ineffective, or even detrimental.

When tragedy strikes, whether on a national level or a personal one, we feel we must take action to prevent such tragedy in the future. The most recent example of this is our response to mass killings involving guns in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut. But there is another set of public policies that are based on tragedy on a smaller scale, the tragedy of drug addiction. Anyone who has seen a friend or relative slip into addiction can understand that there is a need to address the drug issue and “fix” the problem of addiction, although as we have seen in the last 100 years, drug prohibition is a failed policy, albeit one derived from the best of intentions.

A November, 2012 Rasmussen poll found that only 7% of Americans believe that we are winning the “war on drugs.” In fact, despite ever-increasing spending on drug control, statistics show little decrease in youth drug use in the last two decades. It is becoming increasingly apparent to the American public that prohibitive drug policies fail to accomplish their intended purpose; that is, to curb drug use and abuse. The Obama administration has sought to distance itself from the idea of a “war” on drugs, and instead approach the issue as one of public health and safety (although whether that is anything more than a change in rhetoric is up for debate).

If history is any indication, politicians have a tendency to respond to public fear without much consideration to the negative effects of their actions. In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2011, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act, which, it came to light later on, was unread by most of the Congressmen who signed it. After its passage, the bill came under intense scrutiny for what was perceived by some as a degradation of individuals’ constitutional rights. On the other hand, it sure did make some people feel safer. When it came to marijuana, it has been said that many of the Congressmen who signed the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively prohibited recreational marijuana use in the United States, did not even know what marijuana was but passed the bill anyway in response to misinformation and fear-mongering about the drug.

In fact, this type of “knee-jerk” legislation seems to be the norm in response to public fears about drugs. Remember Rudy Eugene of Miami, of zombie-like face-eating infamy? After news organizations falsely reported that he had been high on “bath salts,” a synthetic cocaine analog, at the time, states rushed to outlaw the drug. Toxicology tests showed that Eugene did not, in fact, have bath salts in his system, but the legislation had already been passed.

The Rudy Eugene story is a prolific example of how politicians feel the need to try to legislate the public’s fears away, and the case is no different when it comes to gun control law. New York rushed to pass some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country; so restrictive, in fact, that they make illegal the majority of guns carried by their own police forces. Certainly that oversight will be corrected, but that’s not the real problem with the law. If the legislators had spent some time studying mass killings, guns, and history, they might have seen the major logical fallacies in their rhetoric and law-writing.

The first, and oft-repeated, flaw is that what they call “assault weapons” are no different functionally from non-assault weapons. The criteria from the federal assault weapons ban included accepting a detachable magazine, and two or more cosmetic features that cause the weapon to resemble its military-only full-automatic counterpart. Unfortunately for the arguments of gun control enthusiasts, cosmetic features do not give guns extra killing power. Charles Whitman, who in 1966 killed 14 people including an unborn baby, and injured 32 others, used three bolt-action rifles to do so. It appears that neither a folding stock or flash suppressor is necessary to create mass devastation. In a sick twist of irony, the gun with which Adam Lanza committed his crimes did not qualify as an assault weapon. The reaction of assault-weapon-banning legislation, to a very specific event, the Sandy Hook School shooting, would not have even prevented the very event that sparked its passage, and we saw evidence that even a Federal assault weapons ban failed to live up to its intent when the Columbine school shooting happened right in the middle of the original federal ban.

Even without specific examples, it is easy to defeat the logic of politicians who would lead you to believe they can legislate society to safety. In fact, I can do it in one sentence: criminals do not follow laws. Before Adam Lanza killed all those children at Sandy Hook, he stole his mother’s guns. That was breaking the law. He killed his mother. That was breaking the law. He stepped foot onto a “gun-free” zone at the Sandy Hook school, which was breaking a law. He was determined to commit an atrocity that day, and no law was going to stand in his way. Why should we think that any amount of legislation is going to stop someone who is determined to harm us?

It is worth investigating what causes mass killings and what can be done to prevent them, just as worth investigating what causes drug addiction and abuse, and what can be done to prevent and treat it. I chose the word “investigating” because legislation should only be passed when we have as many facts as possible in hand, not as a reaction to a tragedy. We do not need laws that make us feel better about darkness we cannot understand, we need laws that are effective.