Can wearing masks in public be banned?

@zenvelo IMHO all hoods and face coverings need to be banned! Starting immediately. Our country is being vandalized by hoods and thugs!

So let’s suppose they pass a law. Will there be an exception for Halloween, necessarily including a definition of Halloween and stating precisely when it starts and ends? and a limit on the ages of exempt people? And how about skiers? Is a winter scarf pulled up over your mouth and nose a mask?

How about surgeons, dentists, and other medical practitioners? How about people with the flu or other contagions, or highly susceptible people (such as chemo patients) wanting to protect themselves from airborne infection?

I’m not speaking up for masked terrorists and agitators. I’m just pointing out that trying to legislate this kind of limit on people’s choices can have unintended and undesirable consequences.

And let’s not forget people who cover their faces for religious reasons. You can’t really legislate against it but I really deplore the antifa and what they are doing to our cause.

It should be the same as smoking cigarettes in public.

There goes Halloween!

Antifa is literally anti-fascists. And this shit isn’t new. See WTO in Seattle with regards to masks.

And lets think about this for a second. Antifa is against Nazis and white supremacists and the KKK. That is the right shit to be against, unless you are a bag of dicks.

As far as I know no Antifa has ever came to protests with guns and driven a MOTHERFUCKING CAR into peaceful protesters against Nazis.

“I really deplore the antifa and what they are doing to our cause”

Your cause… What the fuck have you done to protest the coddler in chief of the white-nationalists.

FACEBOOK DOESN’T COUNT.

@johnpowell You’re drinking a little too much PBR tonight. You have no idea what I’ve done or not done for my causes so don’t attack me. Especially when I’m miserable with chigger bites.

There is a precedent. It’s against the law in the State of Florida to cover your face in public and has been since 1951.

Florida State Statute 876.12

Wearing mask, hood, or other device on public way.—No person or persons over 16 years of age shall, while wearing any mask, hood, or device whereby any portion of the face is so hidden, concealed, or covered as to conceal the identity of the wearer, enter upon, or be or appear upon any lane, walk, alley, street, road, highway, or other public way in this state.

LOL. I’ll bet you’ll never guess why they made that law.

@janbb :: Then share what you have done to make it “your cause”.

And I am actually sober tonight. I am actually doing work tonight. Not happy about it but I gotta pay rent.

Do you have more than a ad hom?

What have you done to promote your (our) cause?

attended Black Lives Matter rallies, no transgender ban rally, Unity rally against racism, Charlottesville empathy vigil, protests outside my Congressman’s office against the health care bill, flash mob women’s singing protest, made phone calls, sent post cards, donated money to the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, etc….

So, nothing much, I guess. Et vous?

They will stop wearing masks and face coverings as soon as the police stop photographing peaceful protests. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to hide your face from the State apparatus. I’ve been at peaceful rallies where the pigs photographed and recorded everyone with video. It’s disgusting. They say it’s for “our own protection”.

I stand corrected jan.. Good work.

A question that could have been asked long ago. The KKK have been hiding behind anonymity for a long time.

Having the courage to represent your values, should come with the courage to be public about them. Otherwise, you’re kind of saying something is wrong with your cause…

@johnpowell Thanks.

“The KKK have been hiding behind anonymity for a long time.”

And that is exactly why the Florida legislature enacted Statute 876.12—15 back in 1951, which put a stop to public cross burnings and marches by Klan members in full hooded regalia that too often ended in burning people out of their homes as well as lynchings. The law removes the anonymity that so often emboldens the malicious.

The Florida law is not a perfect law by any means, but it can be tweaked to provide for religious customs, etc., and all the other things mentioned in this thread.

For example, by exempting all persons under 16 years of age, it allows for trick or treaters and children’s masquerade parties in parks, etc. If adults want to have a public masquerade event, it specifies that there is a simple application process for that, just like getting a permit for any public demonstration. Local authorities want to be assured that there is no malicious intent behind the anonymity provided by the mask.

Legal analysis of Florida State Statute 876.12—15

I see no reason to ban wearing masks at political rallies that have the potential of turning violent. Cowards hiding their faces are, well, cowards hiding their faces because they KNOW their behavior is unacceptable. I despise cowards, if you really believe in the bullshit you are spouting then stand up, bare faced, and take your lumps like a real man or women would.
Don’t hide behind a mask.

Banning mask wearing under these circumstances would have no effect on Halloween, Halloween related costumed events or religious factions.
Here’s a list of mask codes for the U.S. note CA.‘s Penal Code.

www.anapsid.org/cnd/mcs/maskcodes.html

Edit: I see no reason not to ban wearing masks at political rallies….

LOL. I was wondering about that. But I knew you had to have meant otherwise, so I pointed you anyway.

It seems to me (and I would hope most people would agree) that laws banning masks infringe upon several human rights:

* freedom of expression
* freedom in general
* pursuit of happiness
* right to exist in public without being tracked, photographed, monitored, identified, recorded
* Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches” – with ever-growing ubiquitous video records of many places, ever-growing ability to store and search them with computer face recognition combined with other means of tracking people, requiring people be identifiable on videos from the past means that a search can be conducted of people’s past locations, which seems to me a very intrusive and unreasonable violation of expectations of and right to privacy.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/15/liberty-fist-nose/
I don’t know the site though.

@Zaku well…in certain instances like violent political rallies or walking into a bank with your Nixon mask..well….

…“Your Liberty To Swing Your Fist Ends Just Where My Nose Begins” re. freedom, and privacy.

This topic also goes well with the topic of the ability to fake video evidence.

Your liberty also ends when you give it away in a vain attempt to win a little more security.

@Zaku
If a masked protester injures you, a innocent passserby, or kills your son/daughter or sets fire to your car, etc. you would just say to yourself Their liberty is more important….

…By the way, @Zaku, the reason for the violence is let’s say some image on your car or what you’re wearing indicates to him/her/them that you, your son/daughter, or someone you don’t know is against the masked protesters’ position.

@flo It’s not a one-dimensional argument nor a question of the right to wear a mask versus the right to not be attacked. Banning everyone from wearing masks all the time is not going to prevent an attack, even if in one circumstance that happened. It’s also not going to prevent someone wanting to remain anonymous while doing an attack from wearing a mask while they do it.

“you would just say to yourself Their liberty is more important….”
– No, I would not say that to myself because that’s not a logical correlation. I don’t know why I would be thinking of the idea of a law against all public mask-wearing, but if someone asked me about the idea of such a law after all the smoke had cleared from such an attack, I would reply something like, “If they were willing to risk the consequences of such an attack, I don’t think adding a fine for wearing a mask in public would weigh much into their considerations, so no, that’s a really bad idea for a law.”

@Zaku agreed, banning all people from wearing all masks at all times…not going to happen, nor should it, but… wearing masks to conceal ones identity and avoid consequences is a cowardly action. let me go balls out and be totally un-PC and sexist, if someone wants to play that card.
IF you wear a mask to hide from the consequences of your violent and stupid actions you are a pussy! Male or female.

Back to the original question, I don’t think that lack of a law against wearing masks could account for police failing to arrest those people. More like they were doing something else, for whatever reason. Masks, especially if there really is one group that keeps doing this in the same place, would tend to make it clear who to go after once it’s clear what’s going on, and making an attack (or having made an attack and/or looking just like someone who made attacks in the past) is plenty of reason to target people for arrest.

Meanwhile, given the talking points around recent protests, I tend to suspect that some people may be inciting or even organizing people to be violent at protests in order to make the protests less clear and effective. I can totally see a corporate-funded deniable PR unit getting some people to show up at peaceful protests and be violent in order to strengthen anti-protest conversations and laws. They may be in favor of anti-mask laws, too, and creating an excuse to create more noise about that issue, too. Anything to distract and create attention in other places while the Trump/Republican administration passes as many corporate giveaways as they can get away with.

Legislating against masks in public is a knee-jerk reaction, designed to avoid actually naming the miscreants. It is an effort to treat all people the same. In other words it is silly. By that thought, wearing a ski mask in a blizzard would be illegal. What they need to do is just allow police to “detain” anyone that shows up to a protest wearing a mask. Yes, even in the midst of winter. Face it, if you pull out the thugs that identify themselves by wearing these masks at the start of a protest, the protests become more civil. And if they erupt into violence you can then identify the specific people causing the problems and pick them up later. All the police would have to do is pick the masked marvels up for “questioning” and hold them for a day. After that, the protest would be over and they could go free.

Can the police make an arrest without a liegislation?
And by the way, it wouldn’t apply to blizzard, because a lot of people’s faces are covered up, but only temporarily, till they get to a building most likely.

Police cannot make an arrest without legislation, but they can detain as necessary. Especially if it is announced ahead of time that persons wearing masks will be detained for questioning. There has been enough violence done by these thugs that the police could pull them all in just to ask if they had anything to do with it. All they have to do is detain them for a few hours and the whole protest is over.

Ok. @Zaku Try and apply that logic to any law. You can’t.

@Zaku While I tend to agree with you on many of your points, when you get to the Trump/Republican part, you lost me. Antifa and BLM in particular formed up and were causing violence at protests or rallies before Trump was elected. They are lefties and Obama did nothing to stop them, and in fact supported them by taking their side in things. Ferguson MO was a fine example. BLM shows up and riots are going strong. Obama could not bring himself to say that the cop that shot Michael Brown was right for doing it. Instead he tells the rioters that he understands how they feel for being targeted by police. Many of those protesters weren’t even from that area. So someone was indeed footing the bill, but it had nothing to do with Trump or the Repubs.