Thanks to regulatory capture oversight is weak, and this is not an accident but an intended outcome of the political system.

Yes, because it's obviously good for business to have your plant blow sky high, destroying the entire surrounding neighborhood and killing most of your employees. If I were a plant manager, I'd make sure to put doing all that right at the top of my TODO list.

Or, maybe, just maybe, not everybody who owns/runs a business in a capitalist system is a greedy, evil, soul-sucking bastard, and maybe, just maybe, accidents happen, some of which are damn near unpredictable and unavoidable. And maybe we can't regulate our way to a society where nothing bad ever happens to anybody, ever?

You know how this is - most often poor working practice has no immediate consequence. Perhaps a critical patch is installed a few days late, and the website does not get hacked, no adverse consequences most of the time. At some point someone will run the numbers, and conclude that good safety practice isn't that necessary. That's a recipe for disaster. Most everyone here should be familiar with the Challenger explosion and the runup to it.

> maybe, just maybe, accidents happen, some of which are damn near unpredictable and unavoidable.

That's the issue of fault-tolerant design. In an ammonium nitrate plant there is a risk of explosion; they quite simply do not belong anywhere near a town.

That's a fair point in a sense, and I'm not arguing that it isn't beneficial to have some independent eyes looking at things and helping avoid bias. I would argue that it's not necessarily required to regulate that sort of thing and make it the job of government to try and prevent every possible contingency though. I think working to develop a voluntary certification process, something akin to ISO9001, where being certified would be a "badge of honor" and - eventually - all but a prerequisite to doing business, would be preferred.

In an ammonium nitrate plant there is a risk of explosion; they quite simply do not belong anywhere near a town.

That was definitely a sub-optimal design, for sure. I'd be curious to know the history of how that setup happened, actually.

OTOH, to play devil's advocate a little bit... how often do ammonium nitrate plants explode? One could probably argue that the industry actually is very safe if you look at it over the long-run. Or not... I don't actually have those statistics. Just a point of discussion.

But maybe, just maybe, added regulation doesn't need to hurt the honest business owners, and can be used to keep those whose ethics may be a little more sketchy in check.

Nobody ever said that we will regulate our way to a perfect society. Nobody said that every business owner is a greedy, evil, soul-sucking bastard

Not overtly, but it seems implied by a lot of the verbiage you hear from people arguing for more regulation and blaming business owners for pretty much everything. (Note: I don't mean just here, now, in this very discussion. I'm generalizing based on other experiences)

But maybe, just maybe, added regulation doesn't need to hurt the honest business owners, and can be used to keep those whose ethics may be a little more sketchy in check.

I would argue that that is an awfully big maybe. Government regulation, however well-meaning, is notorious for having unintended consequences... sometimes even to the point of having an effect totally counter to the original intent.

If for example cars were allowed (mechanically and legally) to only accelerate to maximum 50mph many of those accidents would never happen, but people are not willing to loose their freedom to drive at crazy speeds but somehow they are willing to loose other freedoms for extremely rare events such as terrorism attacks just for the emotional effect it haves over them because it is an attack (and not an accident) with nothing rational backing it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Act#The_Locomotive_A...

The general citizen, even when armed, will often run for his life instead.

America isn't the wild west. We value our right to keep and bear arms, but not that many people actually carry weapons with them. Most gun owners keep their guns at home.

The best numbers I could find [1] indicate 8 million active concealed carry permits; so at most ~4% of the adult population has a permit to carry a gun outside the home. And most of those (anecdotally) don't do it often.

[1]: http://www.nraila.org/news-issues/articles/2012/7/new-federa...

Also, even with someone who religiously carries a gun as much as possible it would be unusual for them to carry a full-sized duty pistol and the ammunition that most cops do (stereotypically a Glock 22 w/ a 15 round magazine and 2+ additional magazines, a total of 45 or more rounds). Certainly some folks do but I'd doubt that number is even in the double digits throughout the entire US, excluding off-duty LE and people working security in some capacity. People who carry concealed tend to choose smaller, lighter guns and not quite as many total rounds, because ammunition is heavy (stereotypically a Kahr PM9 w/ an extra magazine, a total of 14 rounds, or maybe a Glock 26 w/ an extra magazine, a total of 20 rounds).

It's within the realm of possibility that there are "tens of thousands" of folks who concealed carry with that amount of ammunition, but I would be surprised if that was the case.

Also, even if it is that many, it's still a tiny fraction of the populace. Even in the most enthusiastic pro-gun states only a tiny fraction of the public carries on a regular basis.