The right to bear drain cleaner?

[The_root_of_all_evil]

The right to bear drain cleaner?

Favourite Post Title of 2012 so far.

 

[Sentox6]

I was thinking about a semi-related issue recently. I went to buy a can of spray paint (automotive purposes), and I had to present ID to prove I was over 18.

My issue with this is that the age of consent in my country is 16.

So apparently you can have sex and possibly procreate two years before you're mature enough to be trusted with paint.

Ok.

 

[spartan231490]

So in Illinois, there's a new state law stating that:

A new state law requires those who buy drain cleaners and other caustic substances to provide photo identification and sign a log.

Why?

State Rep. Jack Franks (D-Woodstock) obtained passage of the new law following attacks in which drain cleaner was poured on two Chicago women, badly scarring them.

This leads me to a question and maybe it's a stupid question.

What in the name of all that is holy is wrong with the government officials in Illinois? In what possible way could this, even theoretically, help prevent(or even help apprehend) someone doing this exact same crime in the future?

Look, I understand gun registration or background checks and all that. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I understand where it's coming from. This just blows me out of the water.

What happened to those poor women is absolutely deplorable. I'm not going to suggest otherwise. But making people show a photo ID when the buy drain cleaner is not going to change what happened or prevent it from happening again. I even have serious doubts it'll help in finding the dirtbag that would have committed such a heinous crime.

I don't even have words for this anymore. Thoughts?

You're right, it won't help. There are just too many people who buy drain cleaner and the like for any registry to help. It's crap, but so is the NDAA, the SOPA, and a whole lot of other laws on the books both federally and in several states. Hell, look at the assault-weapon ban in california. It's practically a handbook on how not to make a gun law.

 

[godofallu]

This is actually a good law.

1 You don't have to be 18 at the moment to buy drain cleaner, which is an incredibly damaging acid. How stupid is that?

2 Gangs have been known to use it to melt bodies.

So you get a quick ID check, and sign a sheet. Who cares? We have ID checks for alcohol and cigarets too. It is no big deal.

 

[xPixelatedx]

You know what else is caustic? Stomach acid. So should we all have some form of ID and license just for having stomachs? You know, there are ways people can force themselves to vomit. It could be directed at a person. OH NO!

 

[teknoarcanist]

Why would a bear need drain-cleaner?

 

[Soxafloppin]

I went to buy glue from B&Q for some DIY my dad was doing, The guy asked me for I.D I knew why, he then asked me if I "wanted a bag", I didn't get the joke until I got outside.

 

[him over there]

This actually makes a lot of sense, it sounds stupid because of the subject matter but a quick check on purchasing a potentially lethal substance? Sounds good. Some people say it will set a legal precedent to tag and deny us really basic things but this is a legitimately dangerous substance. What I'm not okay with is that it's being applied to drain cleaner when there are so many other things that should have stricter purchasing laws like gasoline, but it's being applied to drain cleaner not because of real danger or logic but because of an isolated incident. I mean did you know it's illegal to have water gun fights in California? Stupid isolated incidents evolving into actual laws.

 

[redisforever]

Thats a bit excessive...

Though I've always wondered if any criminals ever tried using drain cleaner to dissolve bodies (Due to bathroom varieties being designed to dissolve hair and dead skin that clog up bath drains)

Also I recently found out that in certain shops I frequent that you need to be 18 and have ID to buy Lemonade Shandy (<0.1% vol of alcohol) and need to be 21 and have ID to buy lighters (Yet other shops allowed me to buy Zippo's and lighter fluid and the like at 16)

It seems some people are a bit paranoid about youths being idiots and criminals...

There's a brand of lemonade that's probably the same, it's just slightly alcoholized, and I was buying it since age 12, I think. It had only 0.05% alcohol, though.

OT: That's dumb. Drain cleaner, really?

 

[Jodah]

It's like the fact you need to sign for certain "over the counter" cold medications (those with pseuphedrine). They don't help but they make stupid people feel better about it.

Why would a bear need drain-cleaner?

All that hair clogs their shower drain silly.

 

[ace_of_something]

It's just a grandstanding law. Politician can point to it and say "look at the preventive stance I take on crime" Unless the law also includes ways of tracking drain cleaner. Well, all it does is stops kids from buying it.

We have similar laws regarding industrial amounts of ammonia (farmers need barrels to clean equipment and also to kill old crops etc) most because it's a key component in the creation of meth and other illegal drugs.

What's really funny is the dipshit who got this law passed would be horrified if you proposed being forced to show the same photo ID to vote. Ostensibly because poor(read black) people can't be bothered to find the time to get Government ID once every 5 years. In reality it's because it's much more hassle to get a bunch of fake IDs for your fake voters.

Apparently however he has no such compunction upon banning poor people from purchasing drano.

I umm... okay? Where the heck are you coming from here? Is this a concern in Illinois? Last time I checked poor people can vote too and a state ID isn't required by law. If it was it'd either have to be privatized or free.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

This is actually a good law.

1 You don't have to be 18 at the moment to buy drain cleaner, which is an incredibly damaging acid. How stupid is that?

2 Gangs have been known to use it to melt bodies.

So you get a quick ID check, and sign a sheet. Who cares? We have ID checks for alcohol and cigarets too. It is no big deal.

While we're at it, why don't we have a registry for everything else potentially dangerous at the hardware store, like hammers, bolt cutters, wrenches, paint thinner...? Might as well just log every purchase everyone makes just in case, because I'm sure a tiny fraction of them will be used for something nefarious.

 

[godofallu]

This is actually a good law.

1 You don't have to be 18 at the moment to buy drain cleaner, which is an incredibly damaging acid. How stupid is that?

2 Gangs have been known to use it to melt bodies.

So you get a quick ID check, and sign a sheet. Who cares? We have ID checks for alcohol and cigarets too. It is no big deal.

While we're at it, why don't we have a registry for everything else potentially dangerous at the hardware store, like hammers, bolt cutters, wrenches, paint thinner...? Might as well just log every purchase everyone makes just in case, because I'm sure a tiny fraction of them will be used for something nefarious.

If someone is buying 50 bottles of drain-o frequently, that should be recorded and someone should know about it. The thing is people aren't stupid, they don't buy all 50 at once. They buy a few from one place then drive to the next store over and over. This is then used for making meth and melting human flesh.

If there were giants groups of criminal organizations that beat thousands of people to death with hammers, then I would support a law that made it so the government knows how many hammers you are buying. Kind of like how every place in the world checks gun sales.

 

[lacktheknack]

But why?

OK, you've gotten the names of everyone nearby who bought drain cleaner. So now what? Pretty much everyone does, and the people who didn't buy any could have taken it from someone else's house.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

If someone is buying 50 bottles of drain-o frequently, that should be recorded and someone should know about it. The thing is people aren't stupid, they don't buy all 50 at once. They buy a few from one place then drive to the next store over and over. This is then used for making meth and melting human flesh.

If there were giants groups of criminal organizations that beat thousands of people to death with hammers, then I would support a law that made it so the government knows how many hammers you are buying. Kind of like how every place in the world checks gun sales.

If someone is buying 50 bottles of Drano frequently, they probably run a plumbing business. If someone is doing something "evil" with caustic chemicals, they can just steal them (or use fake IDs, etc.) instead of getting their names recorded. The vast majority of people who buy and use hammers are carpenters and other people doing construction work, and they still would be even if all gun-related crime were replaced overnight with hammer-related crime.

The cost and inconvenience of tracking and monitoring a lot of these things is absurd when considering the relatively small amount of harm done compared to the overwhelming amount of legitimate use. There's still plenty of debate on the effectiveness of gun control laws and registries and background checks, and guns have much higher demonstrable levels of harm than any of these other things. How many people do you really think are running around using Drano to dispose of bodies? There aren't exactly a whole lot to dispose of in the first place compared to drains that need to be cleaned. Then realize that someone needs to pay to maintain the database, every single store that sells the products needs to implement a registry and report the sales to the central database...and on top of that, there's absolutely no way to link the contents of a purchase with where or what they're used for, because all bottles of drain cleaner are the same. You think maybe there might've been a better way to spend that money fighting those crimes instead of on what amounts to an ineffective knee-jerk reaction?

 

[SilentCom]

Silly politicians. They just want control over the population. What next? ID and registration to buy pencils because you can stab people in the eye with them?

 

[godofallu]

Snip

All governments have to manage privacy vs need. To compare drain-o to a hammer is idiotic, you can't create meth or destroy evidence or poison people with a hammer.

Having a list that tracks this kind of stuff isn't resource expensive at all. Almost every store you go to RECORDS EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION. To have those lists added to a database costs nearly nothing.

Following up on large buys of drain-o are as simple as checking someones employment records, which uses the internet and takes less than a minute. This person is a plumber, this person bought 50 bottles at 50 different stores all in 2 days. Seems strange maybe it would be a good idea to have someone check in on this guy.

 

[Lazier Than Thou]

OT: Wow, great idea, Illinois. Funny how you have to show ID and sign for drain cleaner, yet anyone can buy GASOLINE at a pump and put it in one of those red plastic jugs with no suspicion whatsoever, then find a lighter and burn some shit up.

More likely in that case the only victims would be the prospective arsonist's eyebrows you know. ^_^

I don't even have words for this anymore. Thoughts?

It occured to me that the only other countries I'm aware of having had such attacks on women, are Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.

Doesn't the US test their senators for mental retardation before putting them in office? :/

They don't [http://www.gop.com/index.php].

Actually, on second though they definately, totally, completely don't [http://www.constitutionparty.com/].

Just a quick note for you:

When you're planning on doing an attack on right wing sensibilities, it's a good idea to find out if the stupid people the thread is about is actually about someone on the right wing. See, the guy that pushed this law? Democrat. Last I checked, yeah, not right wing.

There's no shortage of stupid people. Democrat, Republican, Constitutionalist, Libertarian, Communist, Socialist, etc. Singling out one group of people for being stupid is, in itself, stupid.

Try to be bipartisan in your bashing. It's something everyone can get behind.

Edit:

By the way, genital mutilation takes place all over in Africa, the middle east, and some parts of Asia. To suggest that only in America and a few places in the middle east are women horribly mutilated is flagrantly false and also horribly bigoted.

 

[Craorach]

I've always considered it a given that you don't want kids buying dangerous chemicals...

Of course, now we have to worry about all those minors who won't be able to unclog their drains?