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QuantumFreakonomics's comment did the most to influence my thinking. The car analogy is a good one to ponder.
Implement of mayhem aside, the issue of concern in my book is another small step forward to "lock up the crazies fast" but now expanding to the indirectly crazy - the parents.
Ever since the Virginia Tech shooting (possibly earlier) a steady mid-brow point has been "people with, ya know, really bad mental health problems, shouldn't have firearms ... and maybe knives ... cars could be bad too ... maybe we should commit them." The obvious slippery slope there is (a) There are plenty of well adjusted people who have mental health histories - what's to stop the state from arbitrarily deciding they are now a threat and (b) The obvious market adjustment that those with new mental health problems will simply conceal them and not seek help because of the risk of deprivation of basic rights. Where this gets especially dystopian is when known associates of any individual start to use "hey, you know he/she is really crazy right!" in vindictive personal lawfare. The best existing example of this is the weaponization of mutual restraining orders in divorce proceedings to try and secure an advantage in custody. I can see an easy early version of this in parents who, exasperated with a rebellious child, decide to inform "the authorities" that their angsty teen is, in fact, super coconuts and should be sent to one of those padded wall spots (while Mom and Dad enjoy some childless stay-cation time).
With this case, the message has been sent to parents of "troubled teens" that they might want to consider severely restricting their child's access to myriad things/activities/privacy/independence and, perhaps, even to begin involving "counselors" and other semi-state apparatchiks all to avoid personal liability in the event something drastic happens.
OR
The message has been sent to parents to not at all engage with their child's problems, and essentially hope they go away. But its important to maintain that plausible ignorance - again - to avoid personal culpability.
Being shitty parents has to absolutely remain 100% legal. If it becomes illegal to be a bad mom or dad, we're directly on the road to State-As-Parent, the elimination of privacy, and the enforcement of current political majoritarian monoculture at the nuclear family level.
The problem of people no longer seeking treatment is to my mind one of the more serious problems with this ratchet. Managed properly, people with even serious mental illness can live somewhat normal lives. But untreated mental illness can easily become a time bomb in which the person muddles until they can’t anymore. And removing guns for mental illness or cars or knives doesn’t help when the people with those mental illnesses decide not to risk losing their guns or their car by talking about their anger issues or depression or bipolar. Then it goes off in an explosion when the person with anger issues takes them out on a room full of people.
Yes, but this is not something a safetyist culture is equipped in any way to constructively deal with (as a bonus, whenever this happens, it gives them more justification/fervor to ban and confiscate their outgroup- or in other words, "the demand for violence in society vastly exceeds its supply"- so it's only neutral at best).
Naturally, every other approach tacitly posits accepting a base rate of abuse of rights for the existence of rights themselves; that is why the Dead Kids South Park episode is the way that it is [but it only really works if you understand that viewpoint, since they don't actually go out of their way to fill in that blank].
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No, I'd say that being a bad mom or dad is actually required by the law. And... uh, it's required already in a good few places with CPS visits for the crime of letting your kids play outside and felony charges for having them walk half a mile, refusing to call them a girl even though they insist they are, etc. Basic 1984 stuff, internalized oppression begins at home after all.
As far as the gun thing goes... private firearms ownership by the 10-18 crowd was higher (and trivial to accomplish, just send the cash in the mail) 60 years ago yet the murder rate (and the rate at which they ran amok) was far lower, and I think the way society treats that crowd now (as opposed to what you were allowed to do in those years) has a lot to do with them deciding to act like this. They used to just bring their guns to school to go hunting afterwards in areas that weren't even that rural, but then again, you treat them more like adults when their biology demands it and you'll see better behavior.
Parents [and by extension, their kids] have been continually losing this battle for the last 40 years (with no indication yet they'll stop losing); it's not a surprise that prospective parents just adopt pets rather than have to fight the State and the demos tooth and nail for the right to parent correctly. Probably worse for the birth rates than the car seat thing, though data on how much isn't exactly easy to come by.
It would have been better had we simply banned daycare when society had the justification to do so in the '80s. But they didn't, so here we are.
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