Class 1 felony charge? Something's wrong with law enforcement in Illinois... or I guess slightly less wrong now. But how does this kind of BS pass muster in the first place.
1. The proponent of the new law wants the support of the police union, appear to be tough on crime, and point to his support for law and order in the next election. 'Protecting people' -- with a subtext of 'people like you, my campaign donors'.
2. The rest of the legislators are either in on party lines, want to show law-and-order support, or just didn't pay attention. Yes, I'm serious about that last bit.
When was the last time you heard of laws being repealed voluntarily rather than being found unconstitutional? Massachusetts' knife laws read as though the person who wrote them had just been watched a 1970s martial-arts film marathon and called it research. In New York you can sell slingshots that you can't legally possess.
Look at the incentives for legislators: they're not well-aligned with the goals of having a good government, no matter what you think that means. All the incentives are to pass more legislation or to score political points that bear little resemblance to what ordinary rational citizens want.
> When was the last time you heard of laws being repealed
For the most part, laws aren't 'repealed' anymore. They just pass a new law that says the old law doesn't count anymore, making the legal code even more obtuse.
On occasion I've idly wondered about what would happen if you started enforcing a relatively strict '1 in, 1 out' policy.
There must be plenty of crap on the books that either is completely outdated, subsumed by other more recent statutes, or could be implemented as an amendment to another item.
Extreme refactoring! (also potentially life imprisonment if you fail a test-case)
"Everyone has a video camera on them these days, and the last thing we need is honest cops being taken off of the street because some lawsuit happy ambulance chaser thinks they can make a quick buck off of the police department."
All the ones without elections. They just appoint people instead, which is what you'd eventually be forced to do in an elective society if everybody was apathetic.
Although, if everybody was that apathetic in this fictional society they might not appoint anyone at all and just go and eat some donuts instead.
That's what happened in Iran? China? People just didn't care enough?
I'm trying to understand your perspective of history here. It seems to me despotism more often is the result of fervor and extremism. Whipping the populace up into a frenzy. Apathy is pretty much the opposite of that.
Has there ever been an election where they said "well, voter turnout was extremely low, guess we can just appoint some nutjob instead"?
I only said that total apathy would be a precursor to appointed government in states that would normally be holding elections. Also, not all appointed government figures are despots, there have been some relatively benevolent kingdoms in history, Tuvalu is apparently quite nice.
Widespread political apathy can be a precursor to despotism as it allows a minority to seize and wield power more easily over a majority. This is arguably part of the current situation in modern Russia IMHO.
As for making appointments due to voter apathy, there's the 2003 Serbian presidential election, which was canceled due to voter turnout being extremely low and so the incumbent stayed in, despite not even getting the most votes out of those that were cast;
