Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
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Read what I said: exactly the same thing and exactly the same circumstances. Imagine a case where someone steals a crate of 1000 oranges. He dumps them on the side of the road to rot, but you happen to have come by and you recover all the oranges except one. However, the police then arrest him. Police time is not cheap; in fact, the cost of arresting this guy happened to equal 1000 apples.
Also, the guy surrounded himself with apples and the police had to step on them to get him. Much of the 1000-apple "expense" was really this.
In this situation, claiming that you spent 1000 apples to make up for the loss of one orange is stupid.
By your reasoning, if someone tries to shoot me, and misses, the police can't even put him in jail because the guy caused almost no damage, so the judge is not justified in causing damage to him.
No, by my reasoning, if someone shoots in the general direction of a crowd and misses, police shouldn't drop a bomb at him, likely miss as well, but kill 1000 people. Because if the police starts doing this, they're failing at minimizing danger to the public, very spectacularly so as well.
There is a reason why getting rid of a murderer should not cost far more lives than projected deaths from the murderer. That reason is police being here to minimize violent deaths.