alt Hacker Newsif you cause no harm, how could it be a crime? an infraction, sure. a rule violation, sure. but calling a small rule violation which never causes any harm to anyone the same thing as rape, murder, assault, carjacking, etc, is just pure degeneracy of language.
The crime is increasing the risk to other people. Why does that not make it a crime in your opinion?
If I try to shoot someone but miss and they never even notice, is that fine because there’s no actual victim?
Edit:
To be more precise, the crime doesn’t even need you to increase the risk to anyone. Just thinking that you’ll increase the risk is already a crime, even if you’re wrong. If you buy a prop gun but think it’s real and try to shoot someone, that would still be attempted murder, even if it couldn’t even have worked. But you’re punished for trying to kill someone, it doesn’t matter wether you’re incompetent at it (well you get a bit less for the attempt compared to the actual successful act but it’s still a crime).
And another edit because coming up with weird hypotheticals is fun:
Imagine planting a bomb with a one hour timer on a marketplace and when it goes off, the marketplace was empty of people by chance.
Does that mean that the worst punishment you should expect should be for property damage because someone needs to clean up the ground? Obviously you committed a crime, even if there’s no specific victim this time.