The entire concept of laws is insane delusional anti-materialism.

I'm not going to spend time on the inequities of punishment, the inefficacy of punishment (we're still punishing people for murder! Tons of them! Every year! Can you name a culture where its generally legal? I fucking can't!), the necessary selection and injustice of enforcement when trying to impose an often complex abstract ideal on reality through brute violence which is itself usually contradictory, the history of law as excuse, the inherent injustice of violence, or the problem brought up in this thread of variance between jurisdictions of law being used to exploit. Those are all issues that require volumes to fully understand or you've already picked a side on and its not worth arguing.

I'm just going to point out that if the goal was preventing bad thing, we would focus on training education infrastructure and constantly refined best practices to help us achieve the desired (lack of) result. That is what works. We know that's what works, because in the places where there's no power over others to be gained, or where the result is the most important to the powerful, that's what we've done for over a century, arguably for millennia, across every border and language and nearly every religion. It is in fact the foundation of modern safety, infields as diverse as architecture and medicine, where procedures and design conventions are optimized to reduce room for error without reducing the agency of practitioners. Things like hoses for different parts of general anesthesia being different sizes and the switches being linked in an appropriate gear ratio, doctors signing areas to be operated on before a surgery, or railings being built over long falls anywhere a person the system cares about might ever stand.

If people –especially kids– getting where they're going –especially school– safely and quickly were the priority, we would be building trains and getting cars off the use, with constant robust well maintained professional busses as a bridge to get us there. We don't do that. We build more highways and more cars to the exclusion of all that.

The idea that anyone thinks laws are a good tool for avoiding bad outcomes is endlessly frustrating. They're not in the top ten in use today, and that's not even what they're fucking for. That's like arguing I should use a floppy silicone dildo to put a screw into a hole while we're standing in the middle of a fully stocked hardware lending library. It was funny the first few times; now I just want to scream.