As I said in my intro, I didn't go to law school. I haven't been a cop or in the military. I haven't ever been arrested. I've never owned a gun.  My interactions with anything that can be called 'law enforcement' have been limited. So I try to be humble in my assessments, but...

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A few years ago I knew someone who was put in jail for a small amount of marijuana. At the time, he was working with me and living in his car. As is usually the case, jail didn't 'scare him straight', it didn't make him reevaluate his life, it didn't do anything but make him 'hate the system' more than he already did. For what? We tried prohibition of alcohol 100 years ago and found out that criminalizing addiction and/or use was a complete failure. Yet somehow we have kept doing it for other substances since.

 

I mention in the attached audio the experience from The Netherlands where they have stopped criminalizing addiction—crime has plunged in areas with endemic heroin use and there are almost no addicts under the age of 40.

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What does an addict *need* every day? Money for the addiction.  What will they do to get? Often steal, prostitute, or worst of all—get others addicted so they can act as a middle man. What better to ensure a steady supply of cash than having someone else have to go through you to feed *their* addiction? With legalization and government sourcing you take away that need for cash, you take away the destructive behavior that addiction fueled.

 

Furthermore, how many cops want to arrest people for drug addiction? How many ICE or DEA agents?  How many more people in law enforcement have to die in this war against addiction? Let's start with not asking law enforcement to carry out laws they probably know themselves aren't doing any good.

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References from the video:

 

Do people need AR-15's? In certain areas, I will admit that more government control is sometimes my policy preference (such as we had during WWII - rationing on some especially climate unfriendly practices, price controls if necessary, huge government contracts to certain industries to accelerate the transition to clean energy, etc...). I'm not sure others advocating for this would agree with me, but I think part of the way to maybe make people feel less threatened by these changes would be less talk about gun control, at least the part about taking away the AR-15. I think this article gives a pretty good reason why that's not a totally insane position to take. More on video sidebar to the right.

(I will note that the author seemed to leave out theft of firearm/ammo as another possible way for personal firearms to become deadly) Is there a case to be made?

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Australia - could their model work here?

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Andrew Yang on guns and gun safety technology