If anyone in the future ends up going to prison or losing custody of their children because they bought them a cellphone or let them use social media, we will have officially failed as a society. That is dystopian as all hell.
It is not the government’s place to parent people’s children for them, much less the dysfunctional government we have.
So the argument boils down to it being due to bad parents rather than evil technology, yes?
That’s not the main arguments being used to ban these devices and advocate for more radical plans. Removing access to these doesn’t make someone a good parent. Kids turn to other methods.
And to an earlier point in another comment: guess which cohort has explosive growth in smoking at the moment? Not people our age. Teens and young adults of legal age. Gen Z, in particular, is a huge market for that industry now. Cigars and pipes in particular. Vapes are counted separately but are wildly popular.
Banning the sale of highly regulated goods where the state is the official and only legal seller of said good in many states is one thing. We are talking about the internet here, though. And cell phones. And computers. And tablets. May as well put TVs and connected devices on the list, and definitely console platforms.
