IF LAW DOES NOT PREVENT CRIME HOW ARE WE SAFER?

[Dan]

Imagine you are part of a group just forming a society. You have no laws so nothing is forbidden and no one is punished for murder or theft or adultery. Soon you have to assemble and agree to put a stop to some behaviors. Now stretch your mind a bit more and imagine that your choices in life are like an enclosed playground and that you can roam all over it from end to end and side to side without getting into trouble but then you and all your friends say the NE corner and a 100 foot circle in the middle is off limits and if you stray into those areas you will not be allowed in the playground again. No fences are erected. You’re just supposed to know where the boundaries are and literally ignorance of the law is no excuse. Modern life is like that analogy on steroids. Our playground is pockmarked in random places with spots so deadly that just looking in their direction is dangerous.

Somebody did something bad and we thought we’d be safer if we said nobody can ever go into that area again (even though people walk through there all the time) without hurting anybody, so we cut out another chunk of our playground. Well we kept doing this until we couldn’t walk through the playground without worrying that someone would accuse us of being too harsh with our children or accuse us of damaging the self esteem of foreign children if we displayed the US Flag in the classroom.

Think of some reprehensible act of criminality and try to define it narrowly enough to distinguish it from other acts which are similar but not criminal because there is no criminal intent in them. You wind up doing the best you can but recognize that you either have too broad a law that will incarcerate and ruin the lives of hapless people or so narrow a law that very few will change their behavior to avoid it's sanctions.

Most laws are broad so as to provide the greatest degree of "protection" for the general public. Imagine that these "protections" are proscribed areas in the marketplace of life that are not well marked and into which we ourselves may step when we are off balance, incurring the penalties required. We demanded the laws and their penalties because we were angry or maybe afraid of others who had offended our sense of right and wrong. We create our own earthly hell as we multiply and enlarge our "protected" areas in the marketplace of life, leaving less and less room to walk. Be kind and forgiving to one another lest we find ourselves in need of forgiveness and looking around see no tender eyes among the crowd.

[Dan]

Jesus said to the lawyers of his day that they laid heavy burdens on men and would not lift a finger to help them. Nothing has changed except that everybody wants to help with the judgement - not realizing that they could be the next victim.