Bad laws are not respected or obeyed.
A law (ordinance, regulation, etc.) if you haven’t heard me explain it before, is a “Government declaration of an acceptable or unacceptable behavior.” Be the law about injuring another person, filing your tax returns, registering your motor vehicle with the state if you operate it on public roads and so on. The thing of it is, the law (and the government issuing the law) must be respectable. Everyone agrees that injuring or killing another person is wrong, so there’s no discussion on the validity of the laws about Murder.
The punishment for breaking a law is almost totally useless at this point as well. The 5-year recidivism (committing another crime) rate for felons is almost at 90%. So if a person spends 5+ years in prison, then goes out and reoffends, it's obvious that the penalty (years in prison, again) is not an effective deterrent to not committing a crime again. There are zero well-paying lawful jobs for a felon, which is the major reason for the recidivism right there, and deserves a 3,000+ word tirade for just that point.
And even more important, we must have citizens who have a strong moral core and a desire to adhere to the reasonable dictates of government. Because when the law isn’t respected, then it isn’t obeyed. And when our children are raised without the strong moral core at home, the schools get to fill their heads with all of the nihilistic, hedonistic crap they currently are doing. We have only to look at the Volstead Act to see that.
If you have forgotten (or have never been taught) Constitutional and American History, the Volstead act came out of the 18th Amendment, which prohibited the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” in the United States. The 18th Amendment was ratified in 1919, thanks to post WWI anti-German fears, since many breweries had German-sounding names. Volstead was the Congressional legislation that enforced the 18th Amendment.
And because this was a Social Engineering effort, it failed horribly. While the state and federal governments were for prohibition, the people themselves were not as enthusiastic about it.
The long-term effects were things like a growing disrespect for authority, the rise of organized crime to deliver the desired but illegal product and so on. This went on for fourteen years, until the Twenty-First Amendment was ratified in December of 1933. We repeated this error again in the 60’s and still continuing today with the “War on Drugs.” At least we didn’t go quite as far as an Amendment about it this time. And it hasn’t stopped. The attempts by Leftists to socially change the US is continuing. Be it by lawfully forcing Transgenderism, pronouns, firearms restrictions, you name it.
And you have the biggest folly of lawmaking: “IF IT SAVES ONE LIFE!”
This is an idiotic trope for idiotic laws, namely anti-gun laws. This is brought up time and time again as the banner to wave for “reasonable gun laws.”
Here’s something to toss back at them when this line is brought out:
“You talk about saving one life. I offer you the chance to save over 40,000 lives a year. Will you take it? Or maybe we could start small and save just 13,000 out of those 40,000 a year? Are you with me? Good. To stop the first 13,000 deaths, we must ban all alcohol and drugs in the United States. To save the other 27,000 deaths, let’s lower the speed limit on all streets and highways to 5 miles per hour.”
You will get laughed at by this point, and the next words out of your mouth should be,
“If you don’t think people will obey not driving impaired, or obeying those speed limits, why would you have the impression they would obey the laws you are proposing on firearms?”
And there’s the rub. Just because it’s the law, duly constituted by the correct procedures as dictated in the machinery of government, do not make those laws good or right. After all, the institutions like Slavery, Jim Crow and all the rest were laws, properly passed through the machinery of government.
And here is the terrifying part: Thanks to the administrative government, their regulations have become arbitrary and punitive. These kind of laws Lavrentiy Beria would have shed a tear for joy over. You see, Beria was the head of the NKVD, which was at the time the USSR secret police, before the KGB. Beria was the one who coined the term, "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime." There are right now tens of thousands of rules and regulations that the government can send you to prison for, but they are ignored until you gain the attention of the government. Once you have caught the attention of the government's Eye of Sauron, that oppressive government has the option of 372 different laws that they found you broke when no one was looking at you.
A case in point, the BATFE has just put out a regulation that if/when you sell a firearm, even a single firearm, you MAY be subject (at BATFE's discretion, of course) to being required to have a Federal Firearms License to sell said firearm. An FFL is the license dealers (gun stores, firearm manufacturers, etc.) must have to buy and sell guns. FFL holders are required to keep meticulous records of when and from you bought or sold a firearm. And there are hefty fines or federal prison time for not keeping your paperwork in order to the BATFE's specifications. The very least is you will have the license revoked, meaning you can't buy and sell guns any more.
This asinine idea is aimed at tracking private sales that takes place between individuals, which don't have a government record generated by the background check done for the transaction. A background check has most of the information about you, as well as the firearm you are purchasing.
We have moved from a federal government that used to have very little to do with the individual citizen, to this overbearing monstrosity of an administrative state that has infused itself into almost every aspect of our lives, with a metaphorical sword of Damocles hanging over our heads. And all it takes is the wrong word, the wrong opinion, even the wrong meme to cut that single hair, bring that sword down upon your head.