If the law says you can’t kill people by driving into them, and then someone slides into them (intentionally), is that illegal?
It depends on how it’s defined in the law. States generally don’t write laws that define vehicular homicide solely as striking a person specifically with the front of a passenger car for exactly this reason. Further, the need for precision in law is why intentional acts and negligent acts are generally defined separately e.g., murder vs manslaughter.
Beyond that, judges exist and are given sentencing discretion (or at least should be) because there are mitigating circumstances… in other words shit happens.
Discretion in enforcement/prosecution is not the same thing as enforcing something that isn’t defined in law. One is arguably a necessary component of real justice, the other is how authoritarianism functions.
The National Firearms Act has very specific language defining what constitutes a machine gun. It does not include language giving the executive branch power to expand that definition. Either something meets that legal definition and is legally a machine gun or it isn’t.
I’m not even saying that it’s impossible for an enforcing agency to be given those powers – the FDA, for example, has been given pretty sweeping authority to classify drugs. In fact, they have the explicit authority to classify analogs of illegal drugs as illegal. That’s basically the parallel to what’s being discussed here with the NFA and the ATF.
The difference is that Congress hasn’t given the ATF the authority to do so. If you want the law to grant the ability to enforce a less specific definition than what exists in the current law then you need to either change the law to carry a more expansive definition and/or give the enforcing agency the power to make that definition outright. Either of those things would allow the sort of enforcement the other commenter was calling for, but it would be within the letter of the law.
The point wasnt that you can’t enact a particular law or even that you can’t allow for enforcement to be adaptive – it was that rule of law requires that adaptiveness to be defined within the law itself. It’s totally okay if the law says “it depends and here’s who decides.” It’s not okay to decide to enforce the law on the basis of “this is what I feel like the law should do” even if the actual language of the law doesn’t support it.
It depends on how it’s defined in the law. States generally don’t write laws that define vehicular homicide solely as striking a person specifically with the front of a passenger car for exactly this reason. Further, the need for precision in law is why intentional acts and negligent acts are generally defined separately e.g., murder vs manslaughter.
Discretion in enforcement/prosecution is not the same thing as enforcing something that isn’t defined in law. One is arguably a necessary component of real justice, the other is how authoritarianism functions.
The National Firearms Act has very specific language defining what constitutes a machine gun. It does not include language giving the executive branch power to expand that definition. Either something meets that legal definition and is legally a machine gun or it isn’t.
I’m not even saying that it’s impossible for an enforcing agency to be given those powers – the FDA, for example, has been given pretty sweeping authority to classify drugs. In fact, they have the explicit authority to classify analogs of illegal drugs as illegal. That’s basically the parallel to what’s being discussed here with the NFA and the ATF.
The difference is that Congress hasn’t given the ATF the authority to do so. If you want the law to grant the ability to enforce a less specific definition than what exists in the current law then you need to either change the law to carry a more expansive definition and/or give the enforcing agency the power to make that definition outright. Either of those things would allow the sort of enforcement the other commenter was calling for, but it would be within the letter of the law.
The point wasnt that you can’t enact a particular law or even that you can’t allow for enforcement to be adaptive – it was that rule of law requires that adaptiveness to be defined within the law itself. It’s totally okay if the law says “it depends and here’s who decides.” It’s not okay to decide to enforce the law on the basis of “this is what I feel like the law should do” even if the actual language of the law doesn’t support it.