OP mentioned terrorism clearly as an after thought. The bulk of their message was focused on crime. This gives your position a sort of "knee jerk" air about it. To then be given a low effort downvote option to facilitate your low effort analysis simply enables your perpetuation of a reactive culture.
And you're not one person against the world. You don't need to correct every single misinformed opinion on the entire internet 24/7. Take the time to help one person who you feel is misinformed and bring them to truth.
But OP did their argument a huge disservice. Even considering I wasn't focused on that aspect given I specifically chose "bad guys" instead of terrorists. Or that their concept that drugs are necessarily connected with crime. Their argument with or without adding in terrorism is based upon a either a lie or a misunderstanding. One that would wrongly have additional credibility seeming to be true if it got up voted.
But I'm curious to why you're blaming me (rhetorically) for perpetuating a reactive culture when not only am I not even sure what that means, but I didn't even downvote him.
And I appreciated your reply and considered your reasoning. It was a helpful observation that has tempered my distaste for downvoting.
Being HN, this is a good place to throw up some citations and they would stand a far higher chance of being read and understood by your target audience even if they disagree with you.
And I don't feel I'm "blaming" you per se, but your response gives the impression that even if you didn't downvote this specific referenced post, you've done it before for the reasons you gave.
In any case, I must have heard the same lies or misunderstandings because I thought the connection between drugs and crime was fairly obvious. I would absolutely appreciate some citations.
And you're not one person against the world. You don't need to correct every single misinformed opinion on the entire internet 24/7. Take the time to help one person who you feel is misinformed and bring them to truth.