Another excerpt from Nation of Cowards

By now it should be evident that the project of all laws that criminalize innocent conduct in order to prevent crime is: to so arrange the material conditions of life that those disposed to act upon their evil intentions will have no means of realizing their designs.

Matters must be so arranged that, though criminals will want to use guns, they just won’t be able to get them. People will want to use drugs; they just won’t be able to buy them. Crazy people will want to blow up buildings; they just won’t be able to. Thus will the world be made a safer place.

And now we come to the critical point, the self-destructive contradiction inherent in laws that criminalize innocent character to prevent crime before it occurs: their goal is to make responsibility irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if criminals want to commit murder with guns; we will arrange things so that they simply cannot. Pass Brady and a few other well-crafted laws, vigorously enforce them, and it won’t matter whether people act responsibly or not. Their irresponsible intentions will be rendered impotent and irrelevant.

Query: how does the law have the moral authority to hold people responsible for their behavior, if the law is engaged in a project whose operative presumption is that responsibility and irresponsibility can be made irrelevant, and are a matter of indifference? How do criminals, how does anyone learn that they are responsible for actions, if the law is engaged in a mighty project to render it irrelevant whether one does or does not want to act responsibly?

And if we think that laws designed to prevent crime can indeed make the world a safer place, we should ask ourselves this: How, exactly, is the world made a safer place by making self-control and responsibility irrelevant?

— Jeff Snyder, Nation of Cowards (2001), p.76-77