Would it even be worth it to try policing superheroes?

[biostem]

Really, your argument is (paraphrasing), "Someone doing something good for the wrong people could result in something bad happening, WE HAVE TO OUTLAW THE WRONG PEOPLE!"? The Trump campaign welcomes your support.

Ah... personal attacks - the true sign of a strong argument.

First of all, not every incarnation of Rogue sapped the powers from, who was it, Miss Marvel. Take, of I don't know, every incarnation of Rogue in the X-Men movies.

If there were people walking around who could surpass a tank in damage output and durability, then yes, they should be regulated. Don't confuse my attitudes toward superhumans with those toward baseline humans.

[Khaat]

Let's say a person had the mutant power to essentially emits a 10MT blast, at will, and you knew about it. Now if
you were in a position to do something to prevent this person from wandering into a populated area, would you intervene?
You don't know if they'll use their power because they genuinely can't control it, or whether they'll use it because they're just really pissed off.
Don't you think it would be irresponsible not to take action?

Your new hypothetical:
1) Weapon of Mass Destruction Man has power
2) Mass Destruction Man wants to go to the movies in my town
3) I'm in a position to Dick With Him IF I Want To
4) I do not know if he'll use this power. [He has not been established to be a criminal*, but Trump Chicken Little says he might be]
Q: Do I Dick With Him?
A: Not with the information provided, any more than I bar the POTUS from coming to my town (POTUS controls even more than 10MT of destructive power!)

*How was his destructive power measured, exactly? Has he blown up before? Did it do any damage? This bit would trigger my "he should be registered after violating existing law" line.

So my question for you:
Q: Why is this guy being watched if he's never done anything wrong?

[Khaat]

First of all, not every incarnation of Rogue sapped the powers from, who was it, Miss Marvel. Take, of I don't know, every incarnation of Rogue in the X-Men movies.

Okay, movie Rogue: she was already covering up by reasonable steps of self-defense after her first and only accidental exposure (smoochin' her boyfriend).

If there were people walking around who could surpass a tank in damage output and durability, then yes, they should be regulated. Don't confuse my attitudes toward superhumans with those toward baseline humans.

So superhumans aren't "human" and don't deserve the same protection under the law (innocent until proven guilty)? Good to know....

[Starglider]

Simon, I agree that IF we observe significant abuse of metahuman abilities AND it is possible to meaningfully enforce the law THEN we should write laws that decrease the risk of material harm from metahuman abilities WITHOUT causing people to suffer merely for possessing metahuman abilities.

Your argument has fallen short of this on several points;

a) where you seem to propose writing laws in advance of actual experience of the likelihood and nature of abuse, noting that legislators are bad at getting novel legal frameworks right years after the fact never mind in advance of the issue, and

b) where forced registration is a novel criminilisation of privacy comparable to forcing all citizens to submit a full genome to be stored by (and immediately stolen from) the government, without any preceeding criminal act or intent, and

c) you gloss over issues of enforceability in a barely concealed total faith in the power of governments to control and subdue, where in the case of many comic-book metahuman setups this adversarial approach is doomed to failure. If self-policing of metahumans is more effective, e.g. forcing superheroes to be certified g-men reduces their numbers such that there is much less help available even if it is more trained/disciplined, then your emotional dislike of vigilanteeism will get people killed. If insisting on registration creates more 'super-villains', then your emotional love of beurecracy and control will get (more) people killed. If there are Doctor Manhattan style demigods in play, the strategy for dealing them must bow to pragmatism; how best to motivate them to act in a positive fashion; because military force will not work (at least not without massive casualties and collateral damage) and we are well beyond the boundaries of what conventional legalism and equalitarian rhetoric evolved to handle. One thing that does remain true; writing laws that you cannot enforce (or worse, selectively enforce) is worse than no laws at all, because it illustrates the impotence (and/or unfairness) of your legal system.

[biostem]

So superhumans aren't "human" and don't deserve the same protection under the law (innocent until proven guilty)? Good to know....

What do we do with a person that has a deadly contagious disease? Do we wait until they kill someone else before we quarantine them?

Regardless, what is the base of the word "superhuman"? Show where I said they aren't human.

[Starglider]

The example of someone who can create a 10 MT blast (presumably without committing suicide) illustrates the futility of an adversarial approach. How can you possibly capture or contain this person? You will just take massive casualties and presumably collateral damage in the attempt. Your only realistic option is assassination; any attempt to knock them out and keep them sedated is (a) too risky and (b) in the long term, equivalent to killing them anyway. But how did you find out that they have this power in the first place? There are few places on earth you can create a 10MT explosion and not be a mass murderer, and most of those are (a) difficult for an average person to reach and (b) so remote as to make it very hard to track the supposed metahuman who caused the blast. Is this an extrapolation from other observed abilities? How can that be accurate? Even if it is accurate, why would anyone demonstrate that they have this power or even more stupidly sign a form saying they have it if the government is going to assassinate them for it? And of course once you start assassinating or even life imprisoning some metahumans just because of what they could do, everyone with unusual abilities has to assume they're a target. Or if you do it by genetic screening, literally everyone has to worry about being a target, because who knows what latent markers might be in your genome.

[Khaat]

What do we do with a person that has a deadly contagious disease? Do we wait until they kill someone else before we quarantine them?

There are a few points with this you seem to have over looked:
1) We have to a) know about the hypothetical deadly contagious disease, b) confirm they have it and c) prove it to be a threat to public safety
2) We have laws to co-op civil liberties in the case of a legitimate threat to public safety
And sadly, yes, quite often, we do lose people before quarantining anyone. Deadly contagious diseases tend to do their thing quickly.

Show where I said they aren't human.

Conceded, you never specifically said they weren't human, you merely said they didn't deserve the rights we afford to other humans, like racists historically did when talking about minorities: no granted equal protection under the law.

[biostem]

you merely said they didn't deserve the rights we afford to other humans, like racists historically did when talking about minorities: no granted equal protection under the law.

No, I only advocate resorting to such measures when, and I quote:

prove it to be a threat to public safety

Of course, we'd have to know details about the nature and extent of someone's abilities. Once that has been determined, then we can take appropriate measures. And how can we accomplish the first part? I don't endorse forcibly performing some kind of DNA check on everyone, but requiring some sort of disclosure for when you have abilities above some level makes sense.

[Purple]

How often is that flesh-to-flesh? Really, bare skin-on-skin?

Every time I use public transport on a summer day that involves wearing short sleeves for a start. In fact, every one of those occasions listed will involve flesh to flesh contact with elbows and forearms assuming a temperature of over 15 degrees Celsius.

[Khaat]

No, I only advocate resorting to such measures when, and I quote:

prove it to be a threat to public safety

Of course, we'd have to know details about the nature and extent of someone's abilities. Once that has been determined, then we can take appropriate measures. And how can we accomplish the first part? I don't endorse forcibly performing some kind of DNA check on everyone, but requiring some sort of disclosure for when you have abilities above some level makes sense.

Your answer to "equal protection under the law" is "a disclosure of powers of a handgun or more", "because these people have powers"?
Without proving these people to be a threat to public safety, first. (*psst* You never did this part!)

Well, I look forward to NOT being in your police state when it happens! I think the name "Genosha"* is available, since you seem to have a thing against mutants.

*Seriously, Google it. Read them, they were some dark themes about racism and fear, state authority and human rights.

[Khaat]

How often is that flesh-to-flesh? Really, bare skin-on-skin?

Every time I use public transport on a summer day that involves wearing short sleeves for a start.

Yeah, see: Marie isn't stupid, so I think she's already got this covered.

[Simon_Jester]

Simon, I agree that IF we observe significant abuse of metahuman abilities AND it is possible to meaningfully enforce the law THEN we should write laws that decrease the risk of material harm from metahuman abilities WITHOUT causing people to suffer merely for possessing metahuman abilities.

Your argument has fallen short of this on several points;

a) where you seem to propose writing laws in advance of actual experience of the likelihood and nature of abuse, noting that legislators are bad at getting novel legal frameworks right years after the fact never mind in advance of the issue, and...

I suppose I was thinking in the context of an existing 'comic book universe' where superpowers have, as a rule, existed since the Second World War. In which case there'd be ample precedents and experience of the kinds of abuse of power that are likely to occur.

b) where forced registration is a novel criminilisation of privacy comparable to forcing all citizens to submit a full genome to be stored by (and immediately stolen from) the government, without any preceeding criminal act or intent, and

I am a bit unsure that it should be classed this way. What it comes down to is that superpowers are both like, and unlike, other personal characteristics. On the one hand, they are a fundamental part of who and what you are. On the other hand, they allow people to perform actions that would normally be impossible without heavy machinery or billion-dollar fortunes... and the things you can do with those are inevitably regulated.

c) you gloss over issues of enforceability in a barely concealed total faith in the power of governments to control and subdue, where in the case of many comic-book metahuman setups this adversarial approach is doomed to failure. If self-policing of metahumans is more effective, e.g. forcing superheroes to be certified g-men reduces their numbers such that there is much less help available even if it is more trained/disciplined, then your emotional dislike of vigilanteeism will get people killed...

I wouldn't advocate forcing superheroes to join government-run programs, but if they're going to run around trying to enforce laws, shouldn't they be obliged to take some training and screening? Otherwise you're going to have heaven knows how many cases a year of the self-appointed Nation Defender tearing some poor swarthy teenager's head off because he "looked like he was in a gang."

Picture George Zimmermann with superpowers.

And at that point you're a long step further down the road to anarchy, in which the "good" and "bad" teams of superheroic individuals may be fighting for deeply confused ideals and causing endless, intense harm to bystanders until civilization starts to become a giant revolving lava lamp of chaotic crazy.

Which, come to think of it, is more or less where DC and Marvel spend a lot of their time...

If there are Doctor Manhattan style demigods in play, the strategy for dealing them must bow to pragmatism; how best to motivate them to act in a positive fashion; because military force will not work (at least not without massive casualties and collateral damage) and we are well beyond the boundaries of what conventional legalism and equalitarian rhetoric evolved to handle.

This is true- but, again, you really, really don't want to concede the principle that the government has sovereignty over its own territory. Once you concede that, things start to unravel pretty sharply. And granted that 'demigod' heroes have the power to cause such an unraveling without any great difficulty, it's still... deeply problematic.

Not something you just shrug and accept without trying to limit the problem.

---

I suppose that would depend - it would be prudent to legally require Cyclops to wear some form of his ruby quartz eyewear at all times, (at least in public).

Not just in public, but for his own safety, but he already does that as a function of his everyday survival. Why does it have to be proscribed by law?

Frankly, it already is. For Cyclops, taking off those glasses under any but the most desperate circumstances is homicidal negligence. Because you cannot knowingly perform an action that a reasonable person would know could result in harm to innocent bystanders or major property destruction.

It would make sense to legally require Rogue to wear reasonable levels of body covering while in public or crowded areas, (gloves, long sleeves, etc).

Doesn't she have the right to her own body? Doesn't she have the right to not be grabbed, bumped, jostled, groped, etc.?

She has a right not to be deliberately grabbed or harassed.

She does NOT have a reasonable expectation that she can walk down a crowded street and never bump into anyone. That is not realistic, because being bumped into accidentally is a routine human experience that happens to virtually everyone, including accidental skin contact once in a while.

I mean, she already does this, she already wears gloves and so on. Precisely because she knows perfectly well that otherwise she'll end up with accidental skin contact and someone gets hurt. The point is that even under existing law she could reasonably be held responsible for damages suffered by others if, say, she forgets to wear her gloves and puts the bookstore cashier into a coma by touching their hand while getting change for her purchase.

How is she more dangerous than the average girl walking down the street? She has to act (or be acted upon by others) for her power to be a danger. Like, say, someone trained in martial arts. Or someone with PTSD and martial arts. She should be careful, but she should not be presumed to be a danger to others on the mere basis of her biology.

Except that she is such a danger, in a way that baseline humans are not. Not all skin contact is deliberate, and certainly not all skin contact is the result of strangers acting in deliberate bad faith who 'deserve whatever they get.'

Plus, one can argue that putting someone in a coma for grabbing your hand without permission is excessive force and is not permissible even as a matter of self-defense.

So, like the woman with nitroglycerin saliva, she can carelessly cause serious injury to other people if she goes out in public and does normal things without taking proper precautions. And she knows, or should know, of this. And it is in everyone's best interests if this is determined well in advance, before anyone gets seriously hurt, so that she can take appropriate precautions.

In the case of someone like Kilgrave, ... then perhaps legally requiring him to wear some form of speech or noise cancellation device, or barring that, a gag, may be necessary.

Great, ball-gags. I don't think it was made clear in Jessica Jones or not, but not everything he said was a "push". Some was just talking.

Since I was basing everything I said on the assumption of a person who cannot control (or does not control) his ability to exercise mind control power over other humans, I hope you will interpret my words in that light, whether or not the original example of Kilgrave qualifies.

I'm required to go through licensing and background checks if I wanted to buy and carry a concealed firearm, and even then, I would need to disclose that I am carrying or can have my firearm taken away if I wanted to enter certain venues.

Yes, but your firearm is not a random result of your biology. Or a result of being bitten by a radioactive goat or whatever, it is a choice you made to carry a tool designed to injure or kill humans. Registration after breaking existing laws must be the line.

Firstly, some crimes may be difficult if not impossible to even press charges for in the absence of registration, because it's hard to tell which random passerby read your mind, and very hard to catch a mind-controlling hypnotist if they end every hypnosis session with "and you won't tell the police any identifying details about me."

Even something relatively innocuous like a string of robberies by invisible people would be hard to pursue if you don't at least have a list of invisible people in town as an option for where to start looking. You don't have to arrest any of them, and shouldn't without further evidence, but it lets you narrow things down a bit.

Sociopaths tend to be nervous and easily agitated. They are volatile and prone to emotional outbursts, including fits of rage. They are likely to be uneducated and live on the fringes of society, unable to hold down a steady job or stay in one place for very long. It is difficult but not impossible for sociopaths to form attachments with others. In the eyes of others, sociopaths will appear to be very disturbed. Any crimes committed by a sociopath, including murder, will tend to be haphazard, disorganized and spontaneous rather than planned.

If "Kilgrave" wasn't an unrepentant criminal in the story already, his powers are no more a threat than the baseball bat in my garage (which is also unregulated until used in the commission of a crime).

That's not true.

For one, your baseball bat can be seen by others. I can see a Khaat coming down the sidewalk carrying a baseball bat, think "uh-oh," and walk the other way. Moreover, you cannot use your baseball bat to easily get past an armed guard, or a squad of armed guards, or a locked door with keycard access. You can't easily use your baseball bat to get someone's passwords. You can't use it to compel them to forget they ever talked to you; I suspect Kilgrave can do that.

And, again, normal citizens have no way to know he poses such a threat, and may not even be able to report the crimes he commits against them except with extreme difficulty for all I know.

He's a lot more dangerous than the average mugger, or for that matter the average crime syndicate leader. And holding him accountable for his actions is hard enough if you don't have any way of knowing who the anonymous man with the compelling voice is.

Unless of course you use the versions of the story where Kilgrave is colored purple... in which case my being alarmed when I see a purple man is unfair because it's just racial profiling, right? RIGHT?

Whether its standing in public transit, trying to move through a crowd at a concert venue or sporting event or just walking down a busy street people will brush off against you all the time. It's just normal. Happens to me all the time.

How often is that flesh-to-flesh? Really, bare skin-on-skin? Because that's what it takes to suffer from Rogue's unique biology.

Often enough that it would happen any number of times in Rogue's life if she didn't take those precautions. And the point is, if it does happen, she would be liable given how law regarding negligence works.

She has a right not to be deliberately assaulted or anything, but she does not have a right to cause danger for other people that she could reasonably prevent by taking precautions of her own.

But we're back to Cyclop's rubyslippers-quartz glasses: she's already taking sufficient precaution in order to just live her life, why does it have to be legislated/regulated/registered?

Because if the government knows who needs to take such precautions, and if the law is set up correctly (as I personally would do it with my proposed Superhuman Protection and Accountability Act, SUPAA)...

The government might well compensate Cyclops for the cost of his glasses, or the cost of replacements if a pair he owns is damaged. It's analogous to disability insurance, and also a good investment in public safety. It might fund research programs to help treat the consequences of common superpower-related disabilities (if there are any).

Besides, none of this really changes anything significant, because even under existing tort law, if Cyclops knows he has laservision that cannot be contained without his rose quartz glasses, and he takes the glasses off or takes risks that make it likely they will be damaged... People can sue his ass off. Just as they could sue you if you carelessly handled explosives and caused an explosion that damaged their property or injured them.

(Granted, the would-be gropers are in for a surprise when this sweet little number knocks them on their ass, in self-defense, for trying to get a handful....)

Yeah, shame about that little old lady who grabbed the pole on the subway to keep from falling over and touched her hand. And the cashier at the store. And the guy walking around with his shirt off, who was looking the other way when she was carrying an armful of groceries, and bumped into her.

You seem to have this weird narrative locked in your mind where nobody ever does anything that might cause harm to result from superpowers, except if they have evil intentions.

That's my point: she hasn't super-powered anyone to death casually any more than you have beaten anyone to death casually. She should be prosecuted for existing laws for what she does if or when that happens, not added to a Registry merely because "that's what she might do."

Having a registry allows us to come up with an organized, peaceful way of finding out which metahumans pose a threat to others, and finding the least harmful possible way of mitigating that threat, before anyone dies.

Why is this not a desirable goal?

Imagine she's out somewhere and trips - someone goes to grab her to stop her from getting hurt, an they're put into a coma because of it. In these types of cases, then her rights end where contact with other people begins.

Stop her from getting hurt. Really. I must have grown up reading different comics. The Rogue I know a) flies, b) has better dexterity and coordination than some random ass-grabbing troglodyte or even amateur gymnast, and c) has, let's face it Ms. Marvel-rated invulnerablity.
If we're going by movies, well, Marie is already taking precautions, she has taken these precautions in order to live her life as well as she can.
"Someone might mistakenly rip off her clothes and get zapped!" I say they got what they deserved. Before or after she knocks their head off.

Okay, so what about another hypothetical person who isn't a flying brick and actually lives a semi-normal life, but has similar "touching this person could injure or kill you" traits?

This is not an unreasonable or unrealistic scenario if we're talking superheroics. There are several comic book characters it's dangerous to come into close contact with. Rogue's not the only one, and the exact details of Rogue's powers don't negate the validity of the question.

Really, your argument is (paraphrasing), "Someone doing something good for the wrong people could result in something bad happening, WE HAVE TO OUTLAW THE WRONG PEOPLE!"? The Trump campaign welcomes your support.

Who said anything about outlawing anyone?

SUPAA includes registration, the creation of a Department of Metahuman Affairs to provide outreach, career certification, medical and other social assistance for the metahuman community. The only way to be an outlaw is to be such an anarchist idiot (or would-be criminal) that one can't get one's head out of one's ass and cooperate with the law.

The point of the registry is not to oppress. It is to make it possible to have law and order in a world full of metahumans, while also ensuring that the government has basic ability to contact and interact with metahumans when necessary. And to keep the responsibility for metahuman issues comfortably out of reach of the security organs and 'black operations' community.

Okay, so in your hypothetical, you have, say, a slingshot loaded with poisoned darts, or a compound bow, whatever... my answer is, "Yes, until you use it to break existing law*, then fuck you, to the fullest extent of the law."

*We'll just presume for the moment that slingshots and poisoned darts aren't already regulated where you live. Somehow. Because it's drain cleaner. Whatever.

That's the point.

Things which, empirically, have been proven to cause severe harm to bystanders on a regular basis get regulated.

Comic book superpowers have been hurting bystanders or destroying property since the '40s. By now they'd be regulated in any sensible society.

[Purple]

How often is that flesh-to-flesh? Really, bare skin-on-skin?

Every time I use public transport on a summer day that involves wearing short sleeves for a start.

Yeah, see: Marie isn't stupid, so I think she's already got this covered.

But that's a function of her good will. And our point is that when your body is a weapon society needs methods which inspire more confidence than the honor system.

[Khaat]

Simon, you've got a lot going on in that post, so I'm just going to outline my position in general terms: once someone breaks the law, have at 'em. Until that happens, hands off, they are deserving of full protection under the law.

I'm fine with culpability for everyone, in fact, I fully endorse culpability after the event, but not before.

[Khaat]

But that's a function of her good will. And our point is that when your body is a weapon society needs methods which inspire more confidence than the honor system.

Like "Purple should submit to routine 72-hour mental health evaluations because it often ascribes to hold anti-social and psychotic beliefs. Just to keep us all safe. We really don't know what it might just do!"?
Or illegal extra-terrestrials! (oh, wait, that's the premise for Batman Vs Superman....)
How about we just hold up the rule of Law and those who cross it, face it?

[Khaat]

Things which, empirically, have been proven to cause severe harm to bystanders on a regular basis get regulated.
Comic book superpowers have been hurting bystanders or destroying property since the '40s. By now they'd be regulated in any sensible society.

Exactly: THINGS. Things are regulated. Not people.
And yet, supers (humans, nominally) are only baddies once they've done bad things!
But a sensible society would have a functioning government, not one stonewalled because a man of the "wrong color" was elected head of the Executive branch.
A sensible society would remember that deescalation should be the first, second, and third weapon law enforcement employs.
A sensible society would make allowances for social services for the mentally ill because they honestly cannot help themselves.
But we don't have one of those.
And neither do the comics.
And movies only have 3 hours to sell us their entertainment.
{sorry about the edit, tagged the wrong name in the quote!}

[Simon_Jester]

You are explicitly using the dumber things about the US's legal system as arguments that the US in a superhero setting shouldn't have laws regulating superpowers?

Or are you using them as arguments that it wouldn't?

I'm not sensing much thematic coherence in your objections here.

...

On the subject of why things are regulated, not people... frankly that's because in real life people aren't much of a threat without their things. In a superhero setting that is laughably untrue.

[Starglider]

I suppose I was thinking in the context of an existing 'comic book universe' where superpowers have, as a rule, existed since the Second World War.

Granted. It's an ambiguity in the thread premise that contributed to your disagreement with Formless.

a novel criminilisation of privacy comparable to forcing all citizens to submit a full genome to be stored by (and immediately stolen from) the government, without any preceeding criminal act or intent

I am a bit unsure that it should be classed this way. What it comes down to is that superpowers are both like, and unlike, other personal characteristics. On the one hand, they are a fundamental part of who and what you are. On the other hand, they allow people to perform actions that would normally be impossible without heavy machinery or billion-dollar fortunes... and the things you can do with those are inevitably regulated.

The extent of the abilities does not change the basic analogy; if you prefer a legalistic mindset then this should be apparent. Metahuman abilities are private in the sense that the ability to run fast or knowledge of how to assemble a nuclear bomb or the ability and training to break a human spine in one blow are private. It isn't explicitly mentioned but most portrayals of metahuman abilities come with some sort of limitations or weaknesses as well, which are private in the sense that an invisible chronic medical condition is private. For the licensing metaphor, the ability to fly a plane is not regulated. Only the act of flying a plane without a license is regulated. The ability to drive a truck is not regulated and in fact the actual operation of a truck is not regulated if you do it on private land. Only the operation of a truck on a public highway is regulated.

Any analogy made to existing licensing must accept that we only insist on licenses when undertaking an activity with danger to (generally non-consenting) bystanders. The vast majority of metahuman characters have the option of not using their powers at all, only using their powers on private land / with consent of those present / etc, below a 100ft ceiling, at reduced power so as no to perform an exceptional threat etc. To insist that they must be licensed because of mere potential is to insist that an immigrant who was once in a foreign country's airforce must get a private pilot's license due to the mere possibility that she might fly a plane. And of course the analogy there is obvious, if you're concerned about her going postal and flying a light aircraft into a building, you would do much better to concentrate on social integration, job opportunities, positive role models etc than making sure that if she does decide to crash a plane into a building, at least she will have obeyed all FAA regulations on the flight over from the airport.

I wouldn't advocate forcing superheroes to join government-run programs, but if they're going to run around trying to enforce laws, shouldn't they be obliged to take some training and screening?

'Some training and screening' is a different position from 'must be an authorised law-enforcement officer'. What fraction of potential vigilantee superheroes do you expect to reject? How many can you reject before you are weakening the world's protection rather than strengthening it? A straight analogy to existing law enforcement will not work, because in that case we have a large pool of relatively homogeneous recruits available to match a relatively small number of dangerous criminals.

You appeal above to an existing universe for letting us guess sensible legislation. If we look at the Marvel comic universe, the number of 'superheroes' and 'supervillains' seems to be at rough parity with widespread vigilanteeism. Cut back on the later and the villains have the upper hand, assuming (reasonably I think, and evidenced in canon by the civil war storyline) that many heroic characters will refuse to be employees of government agencies. Furthermore for each unique supervillain power-set, there seems to be a handful of heroes (often only one or two) who have the right opposing power-set to be their nemesis/hit their achilles heel. Even a relatively small drop in opposing 'heroes' could rob you of necessary power coverage and leave the door open to a lot more crime (of the grandoise, lots of collateral damage style).

Of course that is a specific fictional universe that does things in that way to maximise drama and storytelling potential. But if you reject it you are back to very fuzzy speculation and appeals to nationalism about how many metahumans will 'do their duty'; while meanwhile saying they are dangerous and if they do not comply they will be imprisoned.

Otherwise you're going to have heaven knows how many cases a year of the self-appointed Nation Defender tearing some poor swarthy teenager's head off because he "looked like he was in a gang." Picture George Zimmermann with superpowers.

That doesn't seem to happen (often enough to be statistically significant) in the marvel universe you were using as a reference. Metahuman-on-metahuman violence seems to dominate, particularly for the self-proclaimed heroes. And frankly, I fail to see how pre-emptive registration and licensing is going to significantly reduce the incidence of this. If there is a clear case of excessive lethal force then you can prosecute, in absentia if necessary, and hopefully there will be enough government-employed or at least justice-system-supporting metahumans to bring the meta-Zimmermanns to justice. Noting of course that the very legal system you champion did not convict said person for using lethal force of an entirely mundane kind.

And at that point you're a long step further down the road to anarchy, in which the "good" and "bad" teams of superheroic individuals may be fighting for deeply confused ideals and causing endless, intense harm to bystanders until civilization starts to become a giant revolving lava lamp of chaotic crazy.

Oh come on, slippery slope fallacy again. Civilisation is not that fragile. Countries deal with terrorism, violent sectarianism and racism, natural disasters, full scale nation-state warfare without becoming post-apocalyptic wastelands. If it is on the scale of one super-fight a day in some city in the world doing damage on the scale of a few buildings destroyed, that's a blip compared to all the accidental death, conventional murders, buildings catching fire, and other challenges we already deal with. The UK lost a million buildings and 50,000 civillians to bombing in 1940 and civilisation continued just fine. It was awful but not the apocalypse. Most metahuman settings do not have destruction on that scale.

Now if you do have warring factions of demigod level individuals levelling or mind-controlling entire cities on a regular basis, yes that certainly would be apocalyptic, but at that point any kind of legal effort would be pissing in the wind. Entire branches of government would literally evaporate if you tried it.

Which, come to think of it, is more or less where DC and Marvel spend a lot of their time...

The US seems to take the brunt of the damage in those universes and it is hardly a failed state. Outside of the unfortunate few thousand who get hurt or traumatised, life seems to continue as normal with higher property insurance rates. Of course in a realistic scenario without narrative stasis, we would be seeing far more benefits of metahumans using their powers for useful non-violent purposes. The stuff that isn't interesting enough to put in a comic book, but would greatly help many industries and areas of scientific and medical research. Huge benefits to the common good that any plan of action which alienates metahumans from the rest of the population risks reducing.

If there are Doctor Manhattan style demigods in play, the strategy for dealing them must bow to pragmatism

This is true- but, again, you really, really don't want to concede the principle that the government has sovereignty over its own territory.

You act as if 'government sovereignty' is sacred. It's not; you need to think outside (or at least, be able to think outside) of the territorial nation state box. It's a model that's mostly worked (in the sense of only killing a few hundred million in national wars and purges) for the last few centuries but it is far from the only possible model, not with modern technology combined with radically more diversity in the population, many of whom can trivially ignore border control.

Not something you just shrug and accept without trying to limit the problem.

I am saying that you must not fixate on 'how can I preserve the status quo of the current system of law and government' over the actual problem of 'how can harm be minimised, using cultural consensus and conventions'. Sometimes the later resolves to the former and sometimes it doesn't.

[Simon_Jester]

The extent of the abilities does not change the basic analogy; if you prefer a legalistic mindset then this should be apparent. Metahuman abilities are private in the sense that the ability to run fast or knowledge of how to assemble a nuclear bomb or the ability and training to break a human spine in one blow are private. It isn't explicitly mentioned but most portrayals of metahuman abilities come with some sort of limitations or weaknesses as well, which are private in the sense that an invisible chronic medical condition is private. For the licensing metaphor, the ability to fly a plane is not regulated. Only the act of flying a plane without a license is regulated. The ability to drive a truck is not regulated and in fact the actual operation of a truck is not regulated if you do it on private land. Only the operation of a truck on a public highway is regulated.

Part of the problem is that there are a number of examples of metahuman abilities where just the mere act of going out in public becomes the equivalent of operating dangerous machinery or handling dangerous materials. Rogue of the X-men, who could seriously harm someone with an accidental touch, is an example of this. Formless's scenario of the woman with nitroglycerin saliva is another good example.

Any analogy made to existing licensing must accept that we only insist on licenses when undertaking an activity with danger to (generally non-consenting) bystanders. The vast majority of metahuman characters have the option of not using their powers at all, only using their powers on private land / with consent of those present / etc, below a 100ft ceiling, at reduced power so as no to perform an exceptional threat etc. To insist that they must be licensed because of mere potential is to insist that an immigrant who was once in a foreign country's airforce must get a private pilot's license due to the mere possibility that she might fly a plane.

The only "licensing" requirement I'd advocate is some degree of assurance that this person is at least aware of any liability issues that might arise from accidental or involuntary actions on their part.

And registration is mainly in play so that:
1) We know who to call if for some reason metahuman assistance is urgently needed,
2) We know who to suspect and who NOT to suspect in case metahuman crimes are committed by an unknown suspect with known powers.
3) So that the federal government can be involved in an orderly way, rather than leaving the question "how do we deal with local superheroes" up to every local jurisdiction and having half of them get it wrong in an exciting spray of random directions. As I mentioned earlier, if local police are the ones to decide how much police pressure it is proper to apply to metahumans suspected of being the Invisible Jewel Thief or the Masked Bank Snatcher, most of them will probably err on the side of "witch hunt." That's not in anyone's interests.

And of course the analogy there is obvious, if you're concerned about her going postal and flying a light aircraft into a building, you would do much better to concentrate on social integration, job opportunities, positive role models etc than making sure that if she does decide to crash a plane into a building, at least she will have obeyed all FAA regulations on the flight over from the airport.

I agree with all this and have explicitly, repeatedly mentioned that I believe that the same laws which try to impose some kind of orderly registration on metahuman abilities should also be empowering government agencies whose primary job is integration, providing job opportunities, and supporting positive role models. Well, okay, I didn't actually mention the positive role models, but I would have embraced the idea if anyone had thought of it until now.

I wouldn't advocate forcing superheroes to join government-run programs, but if they're going to run around trying to enforce laws, shouldn't they be obliged to take some training and screening?

'Some training and screening' is a different position from 'must be an authorised law-enforcement officer'. What fraction of potential vigilantee superheroes do you expect to reject? How many can you reject before you are weakening the world's protection rather than strengthening it? A straight analogy to existing law enforcement will not work, because in that case we have a large pool of relatively homogeneous recruits available to match a relatively small number of dangerous criminals.

Honestly, many of the people I'd be trying to reject are those who would be borderline between hero and villain; in comics this isn't very common but in a semi-realistic setting I suspect this would be a common issue.

Basically, the people you need to avoid having running around on the streets 'fighting crime' are:
-Those who seem inclined to use powers in unrestrained and harmful ways against mundane suspects. We don't need the Masked Discombobulator running around vaporizing people's skulls on suspicion of being petty criminals. Maybe he'd be useful if aliens invade, but he's a liability rather than an asset in the meantime. Quietly discouraging him from pursuing his dream of Fighting Crime is better than having to publicly declare him a villain after he kills too many innocent people.
-Those whose behavior indicates that they are seriously mentally ill. This one should be fairly obvious.
-Those whose powers by nature will cause more collateral damage than their participation merits, except in emergencies.

People in categories (1) and (3) might well belong on the "don't call us, we'll call you" squad. It's not that they don't have a role, but they really shouldn't be out there wrecking things when it's not the right time for them.

To make sure there's a carrot here as well as a stick, I would advocate the Department of Metahuman Affairs making funds available to run professional development for vigilante metahumans who want to improve their skills or learn ways to take down the bad guys without unnecessary destruction or loss of life. Also insurance programs and benefits for those injured in the line of duty, et cetera. Maybe we could organize it as a sort of loosely structured and irregular militia?

You appeal above to an existing universe for letting us guess sensible legislation. If we look at the Marvel comic universe, the number of 'superheroes' and 'supervillains' seems to be at rough parity with widespread vigilanteeism. Cut back on the later and the villains have the upper hand, assuming (reasonably I think, and evidenced in canon by the civil war storyline) that many heroic characters will refuse to be employees of government agencies. Furthermore for each unique supervillain power-set, there seems to be a handful of heroes (often only one or two) who have the right opposing power-set to be their nemesis/hit their achilles heel. Even a relatively small drop in opposing 'heroes' could rob you of necessary power coverage and leave the door open to a lot more crime (of the grandoise, lots of collateral damage style).

This is a legitimate concern.

Most of the 'real' comic book heroes I can think of would probably pass muster under my idea of how SUPAA would work. My concern is mainly that in real life there wouldn't be so much of a black-and-white divide of ethics in real life. And 'gray' metahumans operating under the sincere conviction that they're on the side of the angels could cause a LOT of harm.

Another note is that if I ran the US or another major country in a superhero world, I'd advocate the death penalty for chronically recidivist metahuman criminals whose crimes cause death or serious risk of mass death. If you've arrested the same guy three or four times for committing destructive and harmful crimes, and/or for nearly getting everyone in the city killed, and he's somehow escaped jail each time... I'd think the citizens of the city would be calling for the death penalty in self defense. It's always amazed me there aren't more Gothamites demanding that the Joker go to the electric chair.

This might tend to thin out the ranks of the supervillains a bit, to compensate for the thinned ranks of superheroes. And many of the 'heroes' I'd be trying to discourage and/or threatening with prosecution are the ones most likely to end up switching sides and acting as 'villains' anyway.

Of course that is a specific fictional universe that does things in that way to maximise drama and storytelling potential. But if you reject it you are back to very fuzzy speculation and appeals to nationalism about how many metahumans will 'do their duty'; while meanwhile saying they are dangerous and if they do not comply they will be imprisoned.

The only ones who get thrown in jail are the ones who commit crimes- but the ones who don't register might well be fined if we can figure out who the hell they are.

Also, "committing metahuman crime while unregistered" would be an additional offense you could charge people with in federal court, and "person knew they had metahuman powers but did not seek registration" would be a strike against them in determining liability and recklessness in case they're being charged with crimes related to accident, negligence, or property damage.

Otherwise you're going to have heaven knows how many cases a year of the self-appointed Nation Defender tearing some poor swarthy teenager's head off because he "looked like he was in a gang." Picture George Zimmermann with superpowers.

That doesn't seem to happen (often enough to be statistically significant) in the marvel universe you were using as a reference. Metahuman-on-metahuman violence seems to dominate, particularly for the self-proclaimed heroes. And frankly, I fail to see how pre-emptive registration and licensing is going to significantly reduce the incidence of this. If there is a clear case of excessive lethal force then you can prosecute, in absentia if necessary, and hopefully there will be enough government-employed or at least justice-system-supporting metahumans to bring the meta-Zimmermanns to justice. Noting of course that the very legal system you champion did not convict said person for using lethal force of an entirely mundane kind.

Yes- and that plus similar issues is causing considerable political unrest in the US. With super-'heroes' who are quite capable of operating without any reference to or participation in organized activities, even on the 'neighborhood watch' level, I suspect it would be worse.

And at that point you're a long step further down the road to anarchy, in which the "good" and "bad" teams of superheroic individuals may be fighting for deeply confused ideals and causing endless, intense harm to bystanders until civilization starts to become a giant revolving lava lamp of chaotic crazy.

Oh come on, slippery slope fallacy again. Civilisation is not that fragile. Countries deal with terrorism, violent sectarianism and racism, natural disasters, full scale nation-state warfare without becoming post-apocalyptic wastelands. If it is on the scale of one super-fight a day in some city in the world doing damage on the scale of a few buildings destroyed, that's a blip compared to all the accidental death, conventional murders, buildings catching fire, and other challenges we already deal with. The UK lost a million buildings and 50,000 civillians to bombing in 1940 and civilisation continued just fine. It was awful but not the apocalypse. Most metahuman settings do not have destruction on that scale.

Now if you do have warring factions of demigod level individuals levelling or mind-controlling entire cities on a regular basis, yes that certainly would be apocalyptic, but at that point any kind of legal effort would be pissing in the wind. Entire branches of government would literally evaporate if you tried it.

I suppose my fear is more of unregulated 'supers' starting to form, for lack of a better term, private 'militias' whose battles and conflicts escalate out of control, possibly causing stronger metahumans to become involved when metahuman friends or loved ones are threatened, until things do get messy enough to be a serious problem in the sense that the London Blitz was a problem.

This doesn't happen in comics very often because of the bright, wide line between 'good' and 'bad' metahumans. The 'good guys' generally don't fight without provocation or launch an attack on those they deem 'evil,' and the 'bad' ones are generally disorganized, crazy, and too interested in random acts of personal terrorism and crime to be a long term strategic threat.

In the real world, it seems a more plausible threat, at least to me. Once you take for granted that metahuman-on-metahuman conflict is common, and that metahumans "policing" cities and 'fighting crime' of the mundane sort is also common, it seems fairly predictable that the scale of such ongoing violence would escalate unless steps were taken to suppress it.

You wouldn't be able to do anything about the acts of the demigods, of course- but you can take steps to impose order on the conflicts of the "street level" metahumans, in ways that will hopefully NOT cause anomie and alienation among their ranks the way the ham-handed 'registration' in Marvel comics did.

You act as if 'government sovereignty' is sacred. It's not; you need to think outside (or at least, be able to think outside) of the territorial nation state box. It's a model that's mostly worked (in the sense of only killing a few hundred million in national wars and purges) for the last few centuries but it is far from the only possible model, not with modern technology combined with radically more diversity in the population, many of whom can trivially ignore border control.

Not something you just shrug and accept without trying to limit the problem.

I am saying that you must not fixate on 'how can I preserve the status quo of the current system of law and government' over the actual problem of 'how can harm be minimised, using cultural consensus and conventions'. Sometimes the later resolves to the former and sometimes it doesn't.

This is a fair point I admit.

I guess my problem is that I identify the nation-state with at least the hope of government in the name of the general public governed by the state.

Whereas the alternative I perceive as most likely boils down to de facto government by who can kiss the most superhero butt the most effectively. I'm not sure that would minimize overall harm in the long run.

[Starglider]

Part of the problem is that there are a number of examples of metahuman abilities where just the mere act of going out in public becomes the equivalent of operating dangerous machinery or handling dangerous materials. Rogue of the X-men, who could seriously harm someone with an accidental touch, is an example of this.

Well in that case the analogy to mandatory quarantine for dangerously contagious individuals is appropriate. I would note this is only a tiny fraction of typical metahuman characters fall into this category. The US federal law authorising isolation of individuals would probably be expanded to include such individuals 'when not complying with reasonable measures to mitigate the chance of public harm'. But even here, it is only necessary to register the unintentionally dangerous, always-on abilities as medical conditions to be managed. We don't have national registries of HIV infected people; in fact in the US this is specifically illegal; even though HIV infected people are at risk of infecting others, because it can be controlled by the individual and it would be a gross invasion of privacy.

And registration is mainly in play so that: 1) We know who to call if for some reason metahuman assistance is urgently needed,

Why would voluntary responder networks be insufficient? What emergency are you imagining that cannot be handled by mundane means or the fraction of metahumans who do voluntarily enter government service? If a genuine national emergency then you draft everyone and assign people to roles based on what you find out in the initial screening. Selectively drafting metahumans at a higher rate than the general population would be discrimination, particularly if you're constantly doing it outside of wartime (i.e. not a matter of national survival) to make them fight individual criminals.

2) We know who to suspect and who NOT to suspect in case metahuman crimes are committed by an unknown suspect with known powers.

This is a variation of the standard police cry for unlimited surveillance powers; anything that makes enforcement easier must be good. In reality there are many kinds of crime that require specialised skills and/or equipment to pull off, and we do not create a registry of everyone who ever attended a lockpicking course, or everyone who ever worked in software intrusion analysis. We make the police do actual police work instead of being spoon fed information, not just to protect privacy but also to reduce the incidence of them jumping to easy conclusions. Frequently it will not be a clear cut case of 'suspect must have had exactly this ability set', particularly given the ample opportunities for framing others that diverse metahuman powers provide. Give the police the hammer of 'list of scary metahumans who might be criminals' and they will use it to constantly charge the 'obvious' scary-sounding suspects.

3) So that the federal government can be involved in an orderly way, rather than leaving the question "how do we deal with local superheroes" up to every local jurisdiction and having half of them get it wrong in an exciting spray of random directions.

That is a state vs federal issue that does not require a registry, just some laws and an extra branch of the FBI (or national equivalent).

As I mentioned earlier, if local police are the ones to decide how much police pressure it is proper to apply to metahumans suspected of being the Invisible Jewel Thief or the Masked Bank Snatcher, most of them will probably err on the side of "witch hunt."

Which registration fuels! It doesn't even skip the 'interrogate random citizens and try and force them to reveal powers' step, because some people will be unregistered and now the police have instant conviction and/or leverage against the suspect if they can find an unregistered power.

Honestly, many of the people I'd be trying to reject are those who would be borderline between hero and villain; in comics this isn't very common but in a semi-realistic setting I suspect this would be a common issue.

Getting back to 'in a realistic setting' and 'I suspect that' makes this discussion largely moot considering that it hinges on percentages of population willing to do X or tempted to do Y. We don't have an actual examples of how humans react to having 'superpowers', and many of these abilities (e.g. telepathy) are likely to change someone's entire perception of the world and basic psychology in a fairly significant way. Science Related Memetic Disorder from a Miracle of Science is another example; 'supervillain' behaviour is a specific psychological complex that is quite different from typical criminal behaviour.

Those who seem inclined to use powers in unrestrained and harmful ways against mundane suspects. We don't need the Masked Discombobulator running around vaporizing people's skulls on suspicion of being petty criminals. Maybe he'd be useful if aliens invade, but he's a liability rather than an asset in the meantime. Quietly discouraging him from pursuing his dream of Fighting Crime is better than having to publicly declare him a villain after he kills too many innocent people.

Murdering dozens of people, in peacetime, who aren't attacking you, is a pretty clear crime regardless of the details of your metahuman laws. Ok perhaps slightly less clear in the US given the rate of police killing the population, but still. Very few people have the psychological make-up to do this, and most of those that do will be superpowered serial killers no matter what you do. In comic books nearly all the heroes try to use nonlethal means on everything short of alien invasion, and of course it makes perfect sense that if they're going to bother with non-powered criminals at all, the people with super strength and bullet immunity (or super speed) take that on. With that power set you can simply citizens arrest any obvious troublemakers without fear of injury. As I said, the majority of metahumans concentrate on stopping bad behaviour from other metahumans; which makes perfect sense from the positions of general harm minimisation, preventing the public view of metahumans as a whole from getting too negative, and the tribal sense of self-policing one's own peer group.

Those whose behavior indicates that they are seriously mentally ill. This one should be fairly obvious.

Existing anti-vigilantee law still applies. Power registration won't help here. The questions of how to enforce still apply. You just can't seem to shake this notion that if you declare 'all wannabe superheroes must go to booth 3A at the Federal Beurea of Metahumans building at 11:30 on Tuesday, fill out a 156 page form and undergo 4 hours of standardised testing', then everyone will magically comply. In reality only a few of the most government-friendly individuals will bother with this. Mentally ill people are if anything much more likely to think 'this is an evil conspiracy to abduct me to area 51 and dissect me so that the government Reptillians can...' etc

Those whose powers by nature will cause more collateral damage than their participation merits, except in emergencies.

Again, role models are going to be more effective than the Booth 3A, form 49B treatment. Either people care about not hurting civillians or they don't. If they don't, it's a moot point, you're back to 'how do I get enough enforcement'. If they do, what matters is what the senior successful 'superheroes' say about how to conduct yourself. This is reflected in comic books with the assorted junior heroes training programs. The exact wording of the laws which make various forms of vigilanteeism illegal is nearly irrelevant; certainly to teens with newly developed powers. The thread premise was about 'do you bother to enforce' rather than 'do we spend years rewording laws to accomodate powers' for this reason.

To make sure there's a carrot here as well as a stick, I would advocate the Department of Metahuman Affairs making funds available to run professional development for vigilante metahumans who want to improve their skills or learn ways to take down the bad guys without unnecessary destruction or loss of life. Also insurance programs and benefits for those injured in the line of duty, et cetera. Maybe we could organize it as a sort of loosely structured and irregular militia?

Well good but this is more about how does the stick even work. We saw with the war on drugs how futile it can be to enforce government proclemations that are out of sync with human psychology, in that case addictive behaviour that has no direct harm to others. How are you going to enforce registration requirements and even anti-vigilanteeism, if supervillain psychology is common, superhero complexes are common, and superheroes are manifestly necessary to prevent further grevious harm. If Paramagnetism Girl saves the Golden Gate Bridge from Magneto, and incidentally 3000 commuters stranded on the deck when it was ripped free of its mountings, are you really going to start a criminal prosecution for unregistered abilities and/or the vigilanteeism of impaling Magneto's leg with a piece of rebar? Is your party still going to be in government after you do that a dozen times, half the superheroes quit, and then Starglider really does manage to turn all of Pittsburg's population into anthromorphic ducks with his hypermutafowlic serum, because even with a 30 minute gloating victory speech no one turned up to stop him contaminating the water supply?

Most of the 'real' comic book heroes I can think of would probably pass muster under my idea of how SUPAA would work. My concern is mainly that in real life there wouldn't be so much of a black-and-white divide of ethics in real life. And 'gray' metahumans operating under the sincere conviction that they're on the side of the angels could cause a LOT of harm.

And prevent it. Although obviously the population of Pittsburg would be better off, as the hypermutafowlic serum also cures all cancers, prevents heart attacks, halfs the rate of aging and gives babies a pleasant floral odour. Ignorant meddling superheroes...

Sorry, the point was that in the kind of dramatic cliffhangar plotlines superhero comics have, there is no time for detailed legal debate about exactly what is and isn't illegal and exatly what means and punnishments are applicable. Try to bog people down in that too much and you are just going to cripple the defenders in the face of a very clear supervillain threat that pays no heed to your efforts. Educate, sure. Role models, certainly. But you are still going to need a pragmatic strategy for dealing with the aftermath of events that does not end up taking 'heroes' out of the game at a faster rate than 'villains'.

Although I confess, having a supervillain jail that actually worked better than the typical containment facilities in comic books would help. On the flip side, you will have to hope that metahuman supremacists don't team up more than they do in comic books, because if you manage to provoke an actual armed insurgency of hundreds (or more) of Magneto/Hulk class individuals then your apocalyptic chaos fears suddenly become quite relevant.

Another note is that if I ran the US or another major country in a superhero world, I'd advocate the death penalty for chronically recidivist metahuman criminals whose crimes cause death or serious risk of mass death. If you've arrested the same guy three or four times for committing destructive and harmful crimes, and/or for nearly getting everyone in the city killed, and he's somehow escaped jail each time... I'd think the citizens of the city would be calling for the death penalty in self defense. It's always amazed me there aren't more Gothamites demanding that the Joker go to the electric chair.

Really? Trend seems to be away from death penalty across the world no matter what the crime. Norway would give the Joker a private cell with throw pillows and an Internet connection. Are you crediting supervillainy with the ability to set back the cause of humanist-socialist-liberalism worldwide? Maybe I should be looking into that hypermutafowlic serum...

But regardless, when you were talking about grey areas earlier, it applies here as well. If you are executing people who are not absolutely clearly irredeemably evil, and to some extent even then, you are saying 'it's ok to execute metahumans but not normal humans'. Progression from there to separatist psychology is obvious.

Also, "committing metahuman crime while unregistered" would be an additional offense you could charge people with in federal court, and "person knew they had metahuman powers but did not seek registration" would be a strike against them in determining liability and recklessness in case they're being charged with crimes related to accident, negligence, or property damage.

In the case of an actual supervillain, the response to that would be perhaps one extra manical laugh. Let me check... yes, still great stress relief.

Yes- and that plus similar issues is causing considerable political unrest in the US. With super-'heroes' who are quite capable of operating without any reference to or participation in organized activities, even on the 'neighborhood watch' level, I suspect it would be worse.

The intersectionality, dare I say it, of metahuman ability and existing racially oppressed groups can get quite ugly. AFAIK comic books tend to back away from this political hot potato, but to consider the range of possible outcomes from say BLM protestors getting superpowers, certainly 'fight back against the corrupt existing police' and 'switch to self-policing of our own community' are in there. And of course with even global distribution of abilities you will get plenty of examples of Superpowered Sharia Enforcer (Squad), Putin Patriot Strike Force and other unfortunate outcomes. Many of whom can still ignore national borders at a whim.

I suppose my fear is more of unregulated 'supers' starting to form, for lack of a better term, private 'militias' whose battles and conflicts escalate out of control, possibly causing stronger metahumans to become involved when metahuman friends or loved ones are threatened, until things do get messy enough to be a serious problem in the sense that the London Blitz was a problem.

So we have a complex system here and you are concerned about the relative strength of positive (escalatory) and negative (de-escalatory) feedback mechanisms. Given limited conventional government resource, how are you going to deploy it to achieve maximum de-escalation. This will be at least several years into effect (counting from metahuman abilities appearing) before you can even think about getting legislation passed and national initiatives started; and that is just one nation, international co-ordination is even harder. Now do you really think mandatory registration of all powers is a de-escalatory measure in this environment? Or is it going to turn out the way it did in the Marvel universe?

This doesn't happen in comics very often because of the bright, wide line between 'good' and 'bad' metahumans.

Well, depends on the comic. Some smaller imprints have explored whole worlds where this is not true (The Authority etc) and there are characters like the Punnisher in popular universes.

Once you take for granted that metahuman-on-metahuman conflict is common

I believe that was stated in the OP...

and that metahumans "policing" cities and 'fighting crime' of the mundane sort is also common

...but that was not. Are you prepared to relax your anti-vigilanteeism position specifically for the case of metahuman-on-metahuman violence? Leaving the judgement of 'was it justified to use a antinuclear force beam to shatter Hadron Man's gluon barrier thus giving him terrible migraines for the rest of his natural life, to prevent him stealing the spire from the Chrysler Building' to the East Coast Metahuman Justice Council? It is a step towards 'two tribes in the same territory' but it may well be the pragmatic choice, depending on setting variables previously noted.

it seems fairly predictable that the scale of such ongoing violence would escalate unless steps were taken to suppress it.

Predictable? How are supervillains going to escalate their violence and why? Why would they not start using any violence that could help with their objectives? Why would they stop being restrained? Why would the heroes abandon restraint? Escalation happens in conflicts between communities, e.g. Protestant vs Catholic groups in late 20th century Northern Ireland, Shia vs Sunni groups in contemporary Iraq, where attrocities are commited which must be answered by greater attrocities in a tit-for-tat progression to full scale warfare (or as close as the dominant local government allows).

Superheroes vs supervillains is not normally a community vs community fight, it is normally an individual or small vigilantee team vs an individual or small criminal 'crew'. Any escalation that happens is just a vendetta between two individuals. You very much want it to stay that way because as noted warring metahuman tribes genuinely is apocalyptic for everyone in the crossfire.

I guess my problem is that I identify the nation-state with at least the hope of government in the name of the general public governed by the state. Whereas the alternative I perceive as most likely boils down to de facto government by who can kiss the most superhero butt the most effectively. I'm not sure that would minimize overall harm in the long run.

It would be a negotiation. But we already have this with nation states having to negotiate with each other, and the playing field for that is certainly not level. Small nations have to 'kiss the butt' of superpowers. If we ended up in a 'parallel colocated nations' situation - a situation I'd note has been advocated by some political theorists for the real non-metahuman world - then it's not clear whether the metahumans would be the stronger or weaker party; it depends on numbers, abilities and cultural cohesion. But it is a frame of reference that some metahuman (separatists) will be operating under regardless, and which you need to take into account regardless of how desireable it ends up being.

[Purple]

But that's a function of her good will. And our point is that when your body is a weapon society needs methods which inspire more confidence than the honor system.

Like "Purple should submit to routine 72-hour mental health evaluations because it often ascribes to hold anti-social and psychotic beliefs. Just to keep us all safe. We really don't know what it might just do!"?
Or illegal extra-terrestrials! (oh, wait, that's the premise for Batman Vs Superman....)
How about we just hold up the rule of Law and those who cross it, face it?

Than we agree.

I have already proven to you that Rogue could if she wanted to "accidentally" kill a lot of people just by doing what everyone in society does every single day without thinking about it. And the only reason she doesn't is because she is a decent human being. But what if instead of her it was me who got those powers? Not having a law that says I have to go above and beyond what regular people do to cover my flesh up would be handing me a license to kill.

[MKSheppard]

Let's say we lived in a universe where superheroes/supervillains, and superpowers are a reality.

General Francis Castligone says Hi.

You're either with the program, or you get...Punished.

[Simon_Jester]

Part of the problem is that there are a number of examples of metahuman abilities where just the mere act of going out in public becomes the equivalent of operating dangerous machinery or handling dangerous materials. Rogue of the X-men, who could seriously harm someone with an accidental touch, is an example of this.

Well in that case the analogy to mandatory quarantine for dangerously contagious individuals is appropriate. I would note this is only a tiny fraction of typical metahuman characters fall into this category. The US federal law authorising isolation of individuals would probably be expanded to include such individuals 'when not complying with reasonable measures to mitigate the chance of public harm'. But even here, it is only necessary to register the unintentionally dangerous, always-on abilities as medical conditions to be managed. We don't have national registries of HIV infected people; in fact in the US this is specifically illegal; even though HIV infected people are at risk of infecting others, because it can be controlled by the individual and it would be a gross invasion of privacy.

I suppose a big part of the problem is maintaining privacy; I don't really have a satisfactory answer to that, because to be useful the databases have to be electronic. And if anything trying to keep electronic data secure would be harder in a comic book world than it already is, what with actual real live robots running around, plus characters like Oracle (or her hypothetical evil twin).

And registration is mainly in play so that: 1) We know who to call if for some reason metahuman assistance is urgently needed,

Why would voluntary responder networks be insufficient? What emergency are you imagining that cannot be handled by mundane means or the fraction of metahumans who do voluntarily enter government service? If a genuine national emergency then you draft everyone and assign people to roles based on what you find out in the initial screening. Selectively drafting metahumans at a higher rate than the general population would be discrimination, particularly if you're constantly doing it outside of wartime (i.e. not a matter of national survival) to make them fight individual criminals.

Under the kind of legal regime I would actually aim for (I'm calling it SUPAA, but it'd realistically be a complex of laws and policies), you wouldn't do (or need) metahuman conscription except in times of dire emergency. A declared state of war would generally be involved- or something that is obviously a state of war, such as a bunch of aliens invading.

2) We know who to suspect and who NOT to suspect in case metahuman crimes are committed by an unknown suspect with known powers.

This is a variation of the standard police cry for unlimited surveillance powers; anything that makes enforcement easier must be good. In reality there are many kinds of crime that require specialised skills and/or equipment to pull off, and we do not create a registry of everyone who ever attended a lockpicking course, or everyone who ever worked in software intrusion analysis. We make the police do actual police work instead of being spoon fed information, not just to protect privacy but also to reduce the incidence of them jumping to easy conclusions. Frequently it will not be a clear cut case of 'suspect must have had exactly this ability set', particularly given the ample opportunities for framing others that diverse metahuman powers provide. Give the police the hammer of 'list of scary metahumans who might be criminals' and they will use it to constantly charge the 'obvious' scary-sounding suspects.

I'm starting to come around on this, frankly.

There still needs to be regulation, and it would be desirable to create an incentive for metahumans to 'register' in some form (in the sense that there is a government agency that is aware of them). However, privacy and civil rights concerns make it unwise to rely heavily on this list for crime-fighting.

Honestly, many of the people I'd be trying to reject are those who would be borderline between hero and villain; in comics this isn't very common but in a semi-realistic setting I suspect this would be a common issue.

Getting back to 'in a realistic setting' and 'I suspect that' makes this discussion largely moot considering that it hinges on percentages of population willing to do X or tempted to do Y. We don't have an actual examples of how humans react to having 'superpowers', and many of these abilities (e.g. telepathy) are likely to change someone's entire perception of the world and basic psychology in a fairly significant way. Science Related Memetic Disorder from a Miracle of Science is another example; 'supervillain' behaviour is a specific psychological complex that is quite different from typical criminal behaviour.

This is legitimately true.

I guess my point is that my mental model of the potential consequences of metahumans appearing in large numbers is informed by this concern*. As long as everything boils down to a nice binary conflict between the Superfriends and the Legion of Doom, there isn't really much need for the government to become involved, except to support the Superfriends when possible, and to opportunistically strike at the Legion whenever they can do so in reasonable safety.

If you're worried about large numbers of metahumans of widely varying power levels scattered all across the country forming a diverse array of singletons, small groups, and large associations, some of which may have political agendas or troublesome modus operandi, some of which are borderline criminal but not over the line into full-blown Legion of Doom territory... things are more problematic.

Bipolar conflicts are simple and you don't always need nuanced policies to deal with them. Multipolar conflicts where friends, rivals, and enemies are all mixed up together on a spectrum... you need more tools to cope with the situation.

And I can't help but plan for the second.
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*And this is mirrored by quite a few people in universe including some AU scenarios like Kingdom Come, which bring up the spectre of superhumans becoming increasingly brutal and destructive and forming de facto gangs which keep oscillating back and forth between 'good' and 'bad' actions, causing increasing levels of chaos and collateral damage.

Those whose powers by nature will cause more collateral damage than their participation merits, except in emergencies.

Again, role models are going to be more effective than the Booth 3A, form 49B treatment. Either people care about not hurting civillians or they don't. If they don't, it's a moot point, you're back to 'how do I get enough enforcement'. If they do, what matters is what the senior successful 'superheroes' say about how to conduct yourself. This is reflected in comic books with the assorted junior heroes training programs. The exact wording of the laws which make various forms of vigilanteeism illegal is nearly irrelevant; certainly to teens with newly developed powers. The thread premise was about 'do you bother to enforce' rather than 'do we spend years rewording laws to accomodate powers' for this reason.

Any laws that were on the books would have to be fairly broad.

Also, and this is where what I'm picturing diverges greatly from comic books, a sane-ish government would have been doing this for a long time, trying to build up a 'culture' in which having some degree of interaction with the government for a young metahuman is taken for granted the way we take for granted that in the process of learning to drive, you go and get a license.

Sorry, the point was that in the kind of dramatic cliffhangar plotlines superhero comics have, there is no time for detailed legal debate about exactly what is and isn't illegal and exatly what means and punnishments are applicable. Try to bog people down in that too much and you are just going to cripple the defenders in the face of a very clear supervillain threat that pays no heed to your efforts. Educate, sure. Role models, certainly. But you are still going to need a pragmatic strategy for dealing with the aftermath of events that does not end up taking 'heroes' out of the game at a faster rate than 'villains'.

Although I confess, having a supervillain jail that actually worked better than the typical containment facilities in comic books would help. On the flip side, you will have to hope that metahuman supremacists don't team up more than they do in comic books, because if you manage to provoke an actual armed insurgency of hundreds (or more) of Magneto/Hulk class individuals then your apocalyptic chaos fears suddenly become quite relevant.

Well, I'd really work on that jail. Meanwhile, the only people I'm prosecuting are the ones who are clearly negligent to the point where having them out there fighting the good fight is actively resulting in them scoring own-goals on a regular basis. I.e. if Paramagnetism Girl starts throwing cars with people in them at Magneto while he's hovering over the Golden Gate.

And yeah, honestly at some point the metahuman supremacists would manage to provoke World War III, I figure; their powers are too extreme for anything else to happen. More or less exactly this happens or nearly happens in comic book settings now and again.

Another note is that if I ran the US or another major country in a superhero world, I'd advocate the death penalty for chronically recidivist metahuman criminals whose crimes cause death or serious risk of mass death. If you've arrested the same guy three or four times for committing destructive and harmful crimes, and/or for nearly getting everyone in the city killed, and he's somehow escaped jail each time... I'd think the citizens of the city would be calling for the death penalty in self defense. It's always amazed me there aren't more Gothamites demanding that the Joker go to the electric chair.

Really? Trend seems to be away from death penalty across the world no matter what the crime. Norway would give the Joker a private cell with throw pillows and an Internet connection. Are you crediting supervillainy with the ability to set back the cause of humanist-socialist-liberalism worldwide? Maybe I should be looking into that hypermutafowlic serum...

On this specific issue, I think it would. The closest analogy to the Joker is someone like Anders Breivik, only more like if Breivik had already done this several times, escaping from the most secure prisons Norway had to offer on each occasion.

At some point I think even the Norwegians' patience would be exhausted.

We just don't have that many serial mass murderers with proven track records of recidivism in real life. In comic books they're frighteningly common.

Moreover, in a world where this has been going on since the 1940s or '50s when the death penalty was more common, I suspect there would be a lot of comparisons along the lines of "In the Silver Age this guy would have been sent to the chair and four hundred people would still be alive."

But regardless, when you were talking about grey areas earlier, it applies here as well. If you are executing people who are not absolutely clearly irredeemably evil, and to some extent even then, you are saying 'it's ok to execute metahumans but not normal humans'. Progression from there to separatist psychology is obvious.

Death penalty would apply to, at the very broadest, mass murderers or serial murderers.

Also, "committing metahuman crime while unregistered" would be an additional offense you could charge people with in federal court, and "person knew they had metahuman powers but did not seek registration" would be a strike against them in determining liability and recklessness in case they're being charged with crimes related to accident, negligence, or property damage.

In the case of an actual supervillain, the response to that would be perhaps one extra manical laugh. Let me check... yes, still great stress relief.

Well, they're still going to jail, they just have more years in prison and/or more stuff to explain away to a parole board. It won't make any difference except to keep them off the street longer.

Plus there's going to be cases of people being picked up on a fine or a short jail sentence for petty-crime uses of powers (i.e. Super Voyeur hovering over someone's backyard at 300 feet wearing sky-blue clothes to blend in)... in which case they're probably fine, as long as they can hand over registration. Sort of like how getting pulled over for speeding isn't a big deal IF you remember to keep your registration and driver's license current.

Yes- and that plus similar issues is causing considerable political unrest in the US. With super-'heroes' who are quite capable of operating without any reference to or participation in organized activities, even on the 'neighborhood watch' level, I suspect it would be worse.

The intersectionality, dare I say it, of metahuman ability and existing racially oppressed groups can get quite ugly. AFAIK comic books tend to back away from this political hot potato, but to consider the range of possible outcomes from say BLM protestors getting superpowers, certainly 'fight back against the corrupt existing police' and 'switch to self-policing of our own community' are in there. And of course with even global distribution of abilities you will get plenty of examples of Superpowered Sharia Enforcer (Squad), Putin Patriot Strike Force and other unfortunate outcomes. Many of whom can still ignore national borders at a whim.

Agreed- although at least in cases like that you can recognize them as hostile foreigners, and consider their actions to be an act of war; if their actions become serious enough you start justifying conscription (assuming that volunteer militia superheroes can't handle the problem).

Basically, an invading army is less of a problem politically than a domestic crime/insurgent force of comparable fighting strength.

I suppose my fear is more of unregulated 'supers' starting to form, for lack of a better term, private 'militias' whose battles and conflicts escalate out of control, possibly causing stronger metahumans to become involved when metahuman friends or loved ones are threatened, until things do get messy enough to be a serious problem in the sense that the London Blitz was a problem.

So we have a complex system here and you are concerned about the relative strength of positive (escalatory) and negative (de-escalatory) feedback mechanisms. Given limited conventional government resource, how are you going to deploy it to achieve maximum de-escalation. This will be at least several years into effect (counting from metahuman abilities appearing) before you can even think about getting legislation passed and national initiatives started; and that is just one nation, international co-ordination is even harder. Now do you really think mandatory registration of all powers is a de-escalatory measure in this environment? Or is it going to turn out the way it did in the Marvel universe?

Handled the way Marvel's US government handled it, it's a bad idea and will escalate things.

Not handled at all, escalation is nearly inevitable.

The challenge is to find a way to handle the issue while causing de-escalation.

Once you take for granted that metahuman-on-metahuman conflict is common

I believe that was stated in the OP...

and that metahumans "policing" cities and 'fighting crime' of the mundane sort is also common

...but that was not. Are you prepared to relax your anti-vigilanteeism position specifically for the case of metahuman-on-metahuman violence? Leaving the judgement of 'was it justified to use a antinuclear force beam to shatter Hadron Man's gluon barrier thus giving him terrible migraines for the rest of his natural life, to prevent him stealing the spire from the Chrysler Building' to the East Coast Metahuman Justice Council? It is a step towards 'two tribes in the same territory' but it may well be the pragmatic choice, depending on setting variables previously noted.

I'm not anti-vigilantism, I'm anti-vigilantes-tearing-innocent-people's-heads-off. The only reason for having any degree of registration involving vigilantes is to ensure that we don't end up having to hunt them down because they weren't briefed or trained on what the law allows them to do in routine, relatively non-emergency situations.

it seems fairly predictable that the scale of such ongoing violence would escalate unless steps were taken to suppress it.

Predictable? How are supervillains going to escalate their violence and why? Why would they not start using any violence that could help with their objectives? Why would they stop being restrained? Why would the heroes abandon restraint? Escalation happens in conflicts between communities, e.g. Protestant vs Catholic groups in late 20th century Northern Ireland, Shia vs Sunni groups in contemporary Iraq, where attrocities are commited which must be answered by greater attrocities in a tit-for-tat progression to full scale warfare (or as close as the dominant local government allows).

I'd honestly expect super-groups to emerge that would form such communities, or represent existing communities, and begin acting this way, even though that does NOT happen in comic books, for the reasons discussed above. Comic book worlds have a grossly oversimplified version of politics and sociology.

So metahuman tribal conflicts "apocalyptic for everyone in the crossfire" strike me as inevitable if "the dominant local government allows" ongoing feuds. I feel like this is a predictable consequence of exactly what you've been saying in these paragraphs (including the one below, which I didn't quote).

Basically, from the point of view of a government, the status quo for characters like Spider-Man who find themselves in regular conflict with a superpowered 'rogues' gallery' that lives within the national borders and keeps trying to commit crimes that the hero has to stop... that is a bad thing. Because the longer such things go on, the greater the risk of them escalating in some way.

Things like the X-Men versus the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants would be even worse, because that's a conflict on the edge of blowing up into a war all the time, with more individuals on each side.

So I'd be looking to shut such things down wherever possible, by promoting organized and coordinated responses (bring in metahumans reinforcement to help clean up the town), and by ensuring that the metahuman offenders are jailed more rigorously and kept out of circulation. Or, in the case of recidivist serial mass murderers, simply put to death- which I hope illustrates the difference between my approach and the approach of the US government in Civil War, which makes them a job offer instead.

[Gaidin]

You are explicitly using the dumber things about the US's legal system as arguments that the US in a superhero setting shouldn't have laws regulating superpowers?

Or are you using them as arguments that it wouldn't?

I'm not sensing much thematic coherence in your objections here.

I'm not fully understanding what his arguments are, but I'm pretty sure wouldn't use the Comics legal history as an arguments given they tend to make a really stupid law and enforce it in a really stupid way to use it as a MacGuffin to start a really stupid story. Civil War anyone? Reality does seem to be a better baseline for how law, policy, and guidance would actually work. Not comic literature.

[Simon_Jester]

Right.

Basically, you can't make any kind of coherent sense about law in comics because law in comics is used entirely as a plot justification for maximum dramatic effect.