Justice & Law Quote by L. Neil Smith

“Violent crime is a solved problem” is bait: a deliberately overconfident opener that frames a sprawling social crisis as a quick engineering fix. L. Neil Smith, writing from a libertarian, gun-rights-saturated corner of American sci-fi and polemic, isn’t diagnosing crime so much as staging a morality play about the state. The villain isn’t the criminal; it’s the law that disarms the “intelligent, capable, and responsible” - a flattering constituency-by-definition that quietly excludes the people the argument doesn’t want to picture with weapons.

The line works by smuggling a worldview into its adjectives. “Those” men and women are imagined as natural sovereigns, pre-political adults whose competence would assert itself the moment government gets out of the way. Crime, in this telling, isn’t rooted in poverty, social fracture, addiction, or masculinity scripts; it’s a market imbalance. Restore the “right” supply of guns to the “right” people and the system self-corrects.

That’s why the dry ice image matters. Dry ice doesn’t melt; it sublimates - it disappears without leaving a puddle. Smith isn’t promising reduction, deterrence, or tradeoffs. He’s promising vanishing, a clean exit from complexity. The metaphor also signals spectacle: the foggy, dramatic effect of something “evaporating” suggests a magician’s reveal, not a criminologist’s model.

Contextually, this is late-20th-century American gun discourse at its most utopian: the armed citizen as civic antivirus, government as the bug. Its intent is less to persuade skeptics than to reassure insiders that the world could be simple again - if only the laws would stop getting in the way.