It's sad, really. I wish people wouldn't freak out to much about the weak laser pointers, but most people have no idea what the wattage is or why it matters, so the weak ones get lumped together in their minds with the dangerous ones.
And I fully agree with you: the general public has no business owning some of those lasers. I wish they would require that you have to prove that you have appropriate safety gear and know how to use it properly or something, because I feel like we're one stupid kid away from overburdensome restrictions that prevent even responsible folks from being able to use lasers without tons of red tape.
I moved from the UK to Canada and have realised that companies really have no clue what potential damage they can expose themselves to. I noticed Bell (phone company) is especially bad for leaving the boxes for their fibre terminals open. No one thinks its a big deal, because nothing happens to them.
One of my friends works for a cable company and occasionally has to patch a fibre connection, and whenever he does he has to run back to head office to pick up the mechanical splice and asked the guy one day "Why don't they let me keep some of these in my truck?" and got told "Because it costs over 500 bucks".
When he told me this all my mind went to was: It costs $500 plus time to repair a fibre bundle and Bell leaves boxes containing 20 or more bundles open.
If you'd have told that to a kid where I grew up, he'd be out there with bolt cutters as soon as it went dark because costing a company $10000 for their own stupidity would be awesome.
So I really don't get why companies leave these bundles unlocked and in plain view. Or why they run peoples cable overhead to a wall anchor on the house. Again, where I grew up you'd only have to piss one of your neighbours off and they'd tell their kid to go out with a branch trimmer and snip your TV.
It really doesn't make sense to me when I've worked on new construction and I see the cable and power companies come in when the house is almost done and use a machine to bury the cables and come up in the garage.
You'd be surprised but bricks don't do an awful lot to a good double-glazed window unit, plus that gets someone trying to find you and the police involved. Spring loaded pellet gun works exceptionally well against tempered glass though, found that one out accidentally.
Also TV cable in the UK isn't strung to your house, its buried. Although most people have either free-to-air in the UK or satellite.
Where I grew up on mischief night we didn't egg peoples houses. We filled water balloons with an egg-flour mix and hurled that, because 10 hours later when people went to clean it off it was impossible. It's literally drying pasta into brick and then trying to wash it off with a garden hose and you don't have any water pressure because the council hasn't had the funding to upgrade the mains, but they're still selling off land for new housing and drop the systems pressure even more.
And I fully agree with you: the general public has no business owning some of those lasers. I wish they would require that you have to prove that you have appropriate safety gear and know how to use it properly or something, because I feel like we're one stupid kid away from overburdensome restrictions that prevent even responsible folks from being able to use lasers without tons of red tape.