Remember that woman in rural LA county who was killed by a pack of dogs last week?

[rrneck]

213. That's the problem.

They are difficult or impossible to enforce. If, for example, you want to have a safe storage law, you have to have certain criteria to make it work. Types and methods of storage have to be defined. Authorized users have to be defined. Due diligence has to be verified. If an accident occurs the district attorney has to be able to prove in court that the law was broken. Residents have to be able to abide by the law and the law has to work within the reality of their lives. It's simple enough to mandate safe storage, but that mandate extends into people's homes and personal relationships which are considered sacrosanct for obvious reasons.

Laws regulating personal behavior, even if that behavior can result injury or death, are very dangerous. For every liberal that wants to regulate how people handle guns, there is a conservative that wants to regulate how people have sex. Safe sex and firearms safety have one thing in common - they occur in the context of people's private lives.

I don't see how we can effectively fight the erosion of the commons when we are simultaneously working to blur the line between public and private space. Surely, if there were any space that should be considered private, it's people's homes.