Chris’s term. When the real wrong is expensive to reach one case at a time, law regulates a proxy that is cheap to reach: the tool. The fix over-reaches, because every innocent use is caught. It also under-reaches, because the determined wrongdoer switches tools (ban X, people do Y). And it changes who wins: take away an equalizer and the stronger party prevails. The whole time, it looks like a solution.
Links: Public/Private Boundary § the confiscation move — where the substitution rule was first stated (Johnny’s stick), Mens Rea § The cross and the chair, The Free Will Principle, The Slack in the Law, Common Law as a Discovery Procedure, Registration and Scope Creep, Scope Confusion, Failure as Mandate, No One May Dictate
Origin: Chris, 2026-09-29. It generalizes the cross-and-chair argument from the thread the blind-pill review started.
Chris: “we get similar issue with guns and bullets and the like.. again, the law puts the onus on the tool and not the wielder.. The bigger concept is what I call ‘lazy law’. It is easier regulatorily to try to ban a tool instead of dealing with all of the specific instances of the tool use. We saw this too in the early days of the internet when companies went after the software companies and toolmakers who published file sharing tools instead of being concerned with those individuals who were breaking the law.. why? because it was easier. A ‘fix’ that is broad and overcorrects because dealing with the specific cases is too hard. I probably have many more examples, but we see this too often where laws tend to cut across generically instead of focusing on what is actually wrong.”
Chris: “This applies to the cross burning case too.. you got to the point that the crime is terrorism, but since this is hard to write into law, they go after the simpler things instead and think they are solving.”
It looks like a solution. A broad rule feels like doing something (Scope Confusion). When substitution defeats it, the failure becomes the argument for the next ban, ban Y too (Failure as Mandate).
It changes who wins, not what happens. This is the cost that over-reach and under-reach both miss:
Chris: “the reason why victim is important is that ‘death by beating’ is usually done by the bigger guy.. the point is the gun, as a tool, is an equalizer.. it allows a frail woman to have a chance against a 250 lb man. I argue that everything that makes it harder to get a gun makes it harder for a woman to defend herself.. these laws don’t change human behavior, they only change the makeup of who succeeds.”
Take away the tool that levels a physical mismatch, and violence moves to methods where strength decides. The determined attacker substitutes. The weaker defender has nothing to substitute with. So lazy law is not neutral between the parties it disarms. It shifts the odds toward whoever needs the tool least. This is also Chris’s earlier “victim makeup” claim (round 2, below), now stated as a mechanism; the population data behind it is still unverified.
Symmetric grounding: the strongest counter, and how the thesis absorbs it.
This is the Slack page’s gradient, one step earlier. The Slack in the Law records Chris’s diagnosis that enforcement drifts toward whatever is cheapest to detect. Lazy law is the same drift at drafting: the rule gets written around whatever is cheapest to define.
| Specimen | The actual wrong | What gets regulated instead | The way around it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Johnny’s stick | Johnny hurting people | The stick | “he will find another” |
| Cross burning | Intimidation (Chris: “the crime is terrorism”) | The symbol | The chair, a coded sign |
| File sharing | Individual infringement | The software, and the people who publish it | Napster → decentralized P2P (Kazaa, Grokster) → BitTorrent |
| Guns and ammunition | Violence by the wielder | The firearm, the cartridge. Also feature bans, which Chris calls “just stupid and does nothing”: an illegal conversion “switch” makes a handgun fire faster than any semi-automatic AR-15 | Other weapons (see the evidence below) |
| England, after guns | Violence | Handguns (1997, after Dunblane), then zombie knives (2024), then ninja swords (August 2025). Banning pointed kitchen knives has been proposed (Farrell & Davies, 2025; parliamentary petitions) | The chase itself. Each ban’s failure is the case for the next (Failure as Mandate), all the way down to the most common homicide weapon, the kitchen knife |
On file sharing, “why? because it was easier” is on the record. The recording industry did try the individuals: it brought legal action against about 35,000 people between 2003 and 2008. It dropped the campaign after costly, embarrassing errors (children and dead people were among those contacted) and moved to working through ISPs. It chose the chokepoint because the specific cases were too hard.
And the law has an anti-lazy-law doctrine on the books. Sony v. Universal (1984, the Betamax case) held that selling a tool “capable of substantial noninfringing uses” is not contributory infringement. MGM v. Grokster (2005) narrowed that, but only by moving liability onto the maker’s own conduct: distributing the tool with the object of promoting infringement. Even the narrowing aims at an act, not at the tool.
The Slack page records Chris defending bright lines: “people would rather take clear lines and deal with the ‘injustices’” (rules and standards). That doesn’t conflict with this page, because the difference is what the rule is about:
| A bright line on the act | A bright line on the tool | |
|---|---|---|
| Example | no turn on red | no burning crosses, no file-sharing software |
| Where its errors land | at the edges of the conduct (a rolling stop that happened to be safe) | built in: every innocent use, and every substitute |
| What it buys | predictability, at a known error rate | nothing for the public; the savings go to the regulator |
The test: does the rule name the wrong, or the instrument of the wrong? A rule on the act compresses the wrong. A rule on the tool swaps it for something easier to write down. A quick tell: restate an act rule as a tool rule and it turns absurd, so no turn on red becomes ban cars that can turn right.
Chris’s actual preference (2026-09-29):
Chris: “I don’t mind how you cleared up the tension. But I think the point here was that instead of intricate, complicated law that no one understands, the system is better with clear and precise rules that are easy to understand, and let courts bicker over the details.”
This is where lazy law fails on its own terms. It is cheap to enact, but it grows intricate: defining the tool means listing features, and each substitute needs another amendment. Feature-based weapon definitions are the specimen, a long list of features that still misses the conversion “switch.” Lazy law starts as a shortcut and ends as exactly the intricate law nobody understands. A simple rule on the act doesn’t have to grow, because the act doesn’t change when the tool does.
The boundary these suggest (not yet argued with Chris):
Reach the act, and pay for the aim.
Case-by-case aim is expensive, and Common Law as a Discovery Procedure says what the expense buys. The information about what went wrong exists only in the individual case, and a broad statute is a central plan that skips the discovery.
Chris’s version of the cure keeps the adjudication and drops the precedent: simple, clear rules on the act, and courts settling each case’s details on its own facts. “I am not really a fan of ‘precedent’ as it is culpable of mistakes as much as it gets it right, and no 2 cases are the same.” That answers an open question on the Common Law page (is precedent an aggregator or a lock?). It is recorded there.
The impulsive-act boundary. ◐ Answered for homicide; still open for suicide.
Chris: “I have heard the impulsive case argued a lot, but it doesn’t seem to have much merit.. knife crime has become so rampant in England, now they are considering it too.. and my usual go-to is that the total homicide rate did not change in Australia too much (it went down, but so did the entire world) after their gun bans.. Australia was interesting that it was hand-to-hand combat that replaced guns! So this argument that it is ‘easier’ to use a gun or that guns are ‘more deadly’, doesn’t really play out in the statistics.. same amount of killings, just different methods, and because of the differing methods, it changes the victim makeup (more women/elderly/children).. so again, it is the act that is dangerous, not the tool. Where there is a will, there is a way.”
The evidence, checked 2026-09-29 (symmetric grounding):
So what’s left open is narrower. Chris’s evidence answers the impulsive argument where it is weakest, homicide, where most acts are deliberate and “where there is a will, there is a way” holds. It hasn’t yet met the argument where it is strongest: impulsive, self-directed acts. It also raises a question the vault hasn’t taken up: whether a self-regarding act is society’s to regulate at all. That is the harm-principle question sitting behind No One May Dictate.
Round 3 (Chris, same day):
“of course GUN violence decreased after the bans, but I don’t care how someone is killed, just that they are.. that mass shootings went down.. fine, but how about the total number of homicides? in both the UK and Australia case (as well as others), total homicide fell by the same amount as the rest of the world, there is no indication that these bans did anything but change the method.”
On suicide, Chris answers on measurement.
“The suicide point is good, and this matches the idea that men tend to take actions with higher degrees of success, but I am not sure this matters much. I am reminded of an example where a man fell off a platform and was run over by a train. The coroner ruled it as ‘suicide’ as ‘accident’ would imply legal recourse on the village for not having ‘safe’ platforms! … Is a slip off a roof an accident or suicide? much of the problem is how the legal system treats the 2.”
How a death gets coded depends on what each category costs, and that cuts against the substitution findings. If people switch to methods that get recorded as accidents (falls, overdoses, single-vehicle crashes), the switch drops out of the suicide series. The test this implies: where firearm suicide fell, did accidental and undetermined deaths by those methods rise? This is filed as an extension of diagnostic #3.
⚠ Source checked: the article Chris cited reports the medical examiner’s suicide ruling and witnesses saying the man “stepped off the platform in front of the moving train”. It gives no liability motive. Nor do the three further Des Plaines cases Chris found (2011, 2017, 2019): three of the four reports describe a deliberate act, and one gives no basis (details on diagnostic #3). The documented case of coding bending with a legal rule is Maughan (2020), now on diagnostic #3: when England lowered the standard of proof for a suicide conclusion, deaths moved from undetermined to self-harm. The pattern-level test has since been run on Cook County’s records: an even 219/219 suicide/accident split for rail deaths, and a tagging artifact posing as a trend (details on diagnostic #3). The mens rea angle is on Mens Rea § Manner of death.