The bizarre concept of "law abiding citizens" and its misuse.

This seems to only come into play in the minds of “gun rights” folks, with regard to gun regulations. Nowhere else in our society do we even suggest we should have separate rules and regulations for some Calvinist-like list of the chosen and the damned — though we do all too often apply punishment based on class and race. But we don’t generate laws, set up regulations, set up rules in general, according to some precognitive ability to predict who will follow them, who won’t, and who shouldn’t have to. The “gun rights” crowd wants us to, though, when it comes to guns.

Laws are set up for everyone — at least they’re supposed to be. We don’t discriminate based on priors or lack thereof. We don’t discriminate based on the impossibility of predicting future behavior. And the concept itself of “law abiding” actually requires laws in the first place, not their absence. No one can really claim to be “law abiding” in the absence of those laws. A person could, in fact, commit murder and still be considered “law abiding,” if there were no laws in society against murder. Laws are, of course, quite different from “morality and ethics,” and sometimes in conflict with them. But no one is “law abiding” for following some fiction about “natural rights” or some “higher power.” They are “law abiding” for obeying human generated laws — for good or ill.

The vast majority of people who commit gun crimes in America had no priors, and were, themselves, “law abiding” until that moment. Which is why, when it comes to gun regulations, it’s absurd not to have them, based on the supposedly “law abiding” standard. Or to exempt the supposedly “law abiding.” Laws aren’t set up that way. They’ve NEVER been set up that way. They’re set up to hopefully prevent someone from crossing the line from “law abiding” to “law breaking,” but if there is no line, there is no attempted prevention — at least from that side of the equation.

Effective or not, the justice system isn’t designed to predict these things, or withhold rules, regulations and laws in the cases of people who, so far, haven’t broken them . . . Which would, of course, mean they couldn’t. If they don’t apply to certain people in the first place, those chosen ones get to skate and we’ll never know if they would conform or not.

Which is pretty much the paradox, conundrum and absurdity of the “law abiding” stance in the first place.