Once Again.... If You Don't Like France...

[Jacob(smooth)]

This point has been made by various people here and it just doesn't hold up. You think French bank robbers won't be wearing masks any more?

Of course some still will. Do you think any legal proscription stops the crime it proscribes? Murders still happen. Are you telling me that laws against murder shouldn't be on the books?

No, the law makes it possible to stop an incipient incident, because after all, the criminal cannot wear the covering from home, and donning it in view of others (say, in the men's room, or in an alleyway) will immediately denote the wearer as someone intent on a crime.

Let's turn this around: do you think a person has a right to privacy in the public sphere? If so, why?

---

Can see the scene in the smoky cellar.

"Well **** if we are not allowed to wear masks without breaking the law this heist is a bust. Let's just not bother! "

See my above point to rebut this clever, but vapid, reply.

Then by all means let me unwrap my vapid reply

The difference between the two is that murder is the crime, whereas the mask is one of the things which facilitates the crime. Murder has very specific negative consequences, somebody dies. Wearing a mask does not. It might make a heist (marginally) easier and it might make oppressing your wife (marginally) easier, but in both cases it is peripheral to the actual crime, so banning it is less likely to affect the likelyhood of someone committing said crime very much. THAT is why we need a law for murder but not for niqabs.

A better analogy than murder would be gun control, from the perspective that owning a gun does not, of itself, have a negative outcome. It can however lead to a negative outcome and certainly facilitates murder. But even then its a poor comparison because of the alternatives available.

If we are going to try to control an actual crime (be it bank robbery or murder) by regulating things which make it easier (face coverings or guns) one would have to consider how required the secondary thing is to the actual crime. Having a gun makes it MUCH easier to kill someone so its quite impactful. The wearing of a niqab however is not really going to make much difference to a crim planning a heist as he has many other options. A large pair of sunglasses, a hoodie and a fake mustache / beard would conceal him perfectly adequately and could be worn from home or indeed donned on the street quite easily.



Reckon you could pick this guy out from a lineup?

Here's a fun question for you. How many crimes have been committed, in the country where you live (not in iraq which is a completely different scenario), by people wearing niqabs to conceal their identity? Because if that is a significant figure, AND you don't think that the above is an effective disguise, then I'll grant you that a ban would make a significant impact on crime.

---

Let's turn this around: do you think a person has a right to privacy in the public sphere? If so, why?

Kind of a wide question, it depends entirely on which bit of the public sphere. For EG, in the NHS, we all have to wear name badges, and that seems fair. But here on a web forum we don't expect to tell people who we are. And that seems fair to.

I would say the question is back asswards. Why should anyone have a right to invade your privacy? And the answer to that depends on the context.

I don't ever want to be stopped by a policeman and told that too much of my face is being covered up and for security reasons he's going to require me to show myself, not just to him, to satisfy himself of who I am, but in general.