[Just_Smith]

It is indeed an argument, and the idea that the laws around landmines and chemical weapons are what caused them to occur less is very selective reasoning. Those two cases are weapons that have a blowback towards those who wield them (Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan are still cleaning up landmines), and it's just as likely that their diminishing was due to there being less costly ways to kill people.

Inability to enforce is exactly why prohibition has been a colossal failure, so how is the ability to enforce irrelevant to a law's success?

[atoav]

Things like these are hard to judge, but a ban is a sign of intent and not a perfect solution to prevent a certain situation.

We collectively agree to ban certain things (e.g. murder), because there are multiple reasons to do so. Some of these reasons are humanitarian, some rational, some economic etc. Yet we see proof each day that neither laws nor punishment will stop murder from happening.

The idea of a ban is not to stop things — but to increase the (social, economical, ...) cost of certain behaviour.

Any actor who fears that cost will abstain from chemical weapons for example. But just like with murder you will always have actors that either decide it is a prize worth taking, or they never ever thought about it at all.

Hard to say how effective those bans were, but they certainly helped to nudge some actors into adopting higher standards.

And once there is a standard the majority agrees on it is hard to go back to a lower standard..

[hutzlibu]

"and it's just as likely that their diminishing was due to there being less costly ways to kill people."

Politicaly costly, as more and more people pressured for more human ways of war. Because mines are a very effective and cheap military strategy. (where mines are you don't need so much troops). I say it was the boulevard pictures of children without legs, that did it. And maybe will so again after the first killbots gone rouge..

Because I doubt any big military would miss out the opportunity to at least be able to flip the switch to let them operate and shoot autonom, when you have more cheap massproduced robots than operators and need them and or the enemy is jamming you and the situation is critical.

[learc83]

>and it's just as likely that their diminishing was due to there being less costly ways to kill people

Land mines are by far the cheapest modern method for area denial unless we're considering dirty bombs.

[sergioj97]

I don't think he has said it was irrelevant. He said it was no argument for not banning them.