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What isn't illegal but should be? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by Varven@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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[–] MxRemy@lemmy.one 4 points 3 months ago

I feel like my answer might break AskLemmy's rule 2 about "Overt Politics", but so do a lot of the other answers? Feel free to delete if so.

overtly political answer, also CW for violence.

As far as the current American system goes... nothing. By and large, even laws that seem good are mostly only used in service of the elites, against the people. Consider this series of events:

In 2015 a white supremacist in South Carolina commits a mass shooting, killing 9 people.
In 2017, the Georgia state gov expands the state's domestic terrorism laws, directly in response to this shooting, because the previous version wouldn't have covered it.
In 2022, this expanded law gets used... against people protesting police brutality, who hurt no one, despite the fact that the cops killed one of them.

Unfortunately, this general sequence is not uncommon at all. Neither is the inverse, where the bureaucrats/judges/etc decide "that doesn't count, actually" when it comes to an elite very clearly breaking an existing law, or else changing the law so it doesn't apply to them in retrospect.