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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (692338)	1/11/2013 1:23:31 PM
From: i-node	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575535

>> The problem is a difficult one...trust me I didn't say it isn't difficult. I'm only saying that cheap materials WILL be available that can make cheap, reliable parts. And over time they will be available to home users. Whether it is two years or five years just doesn't matter. Any criminal who wants one will be able to get the equivalent of an AR15. The real problem with banning them, IMO, is it takes peoples' eyes off the ball. The comparison with the drug war is a good one. Today we have the most serious drug problems the country has ever faced -- with thousands addicted to prescription pain medication. Yet, we spend 10s of billions, probably more than 100 Billion/year all in on a "drug war". You've heard all those arguments. The point is that when you undertake a program without appropriate statistics and measurement, it is going to fail. And that failure serves to exacerbate the problem. At the beginning of the drug war the FBI conducted a series of tests in which they focused on two cities and literally cleared the streets of heroin. They dragged in every dealer and every SUSPECTED dealer. The point was to determine the effectiveness of arresting dealers in the drug war. The supply of heroin in these cities was stopped immediately and effectively. In both places, supply was back to pre-raid levels within 30 days. We can now see two lessons that should have been learned from this: (1) You can't get rid of something people are willing to pay for; a market (legal or black) will develop; and (2) the inertia of a government program cannot be stopped, regardless of how ineffective that program is.