Quote Originally Posted by GGT View Post
Only 1 hundredth of 1 percent have extremist ideation.....but nearly 90 percent of laws are based around that tiny fraction. After all, just one person can conduct mass killings. Whether it's by shooting semi-automatic military-grade guns into civilian crowds, or detonating a bomb concocted in a pressure cooker at home, or a single plane flying into a building.....those are all tiny fractions of the greater populace.

But modern society, and its laws, have to consider these long-tail probabilities. And weigh them against constitutional rights, in a constantly changing world.

I know it sounds simplistic, but I think seat-belt laws might be a good comparison. When laws start out as "good" protections for consumers, but turn into liabilities for manufacturers....and the only (or main) reason car makers changed their manufacturing process to adapt 3-point seat belts was in response to these law suits.....shame on them.

Maybe I made the OP title wrong, and should have asked who/how decides what to do about the fraction of people that commit most crimes, but fuck it up for everyone else.
I think you might want to take into consideration two things:

1. Although only an extremely tiny fraction actually end up engaging in the most severe kinds of extremely violent behavior (whether by that you restrict yourself to actual terrorism or include other things like murder in general), a much larger group is at risk of doing so, and the impact of their actions also has an outsize effect on society at large, influencing the behavior--either through increased risk and uncertainty or more directly through the loss of friends and loved ones, orphaned children, lost knowledge, lost business etc--of tens of millions of other people. This is in reference to laws that have to do with extremely violent crimes. The prevalence of other forms of crime can be much higher of course.

2. Laws can be restrictive and repressive from the individual's perspective, but they can also be designed in other ways, eg. laws that serve to help people remain integrated in society, get access to mental health services etc.