Comment by AnthonyMouse

> Make it required by law, and they won't be able to go somewhere else.

So then you inconvenience the legitimate businesses but not the ones who don't follow the law.

> Catalytic converter thefts have been decimated by similar policies.

Correlation is not causation. When you get a lot of a particular problem, people try 50 different things at once to try to make it happen less, and then it happens less. Sometimes because one of them works (but not necessarily your thing) and even more often because of reversion to the mean.

This is how we get the accumulation of bad laws. People pass something ineffective but at the same time as an unrelated reduction in the problem, and now if you want to get rid of it you have people pointing to the chance correlation.

> Street dealers are trying to run a drug business, not a goddamn copper clearinghouse.

They're empirically willing to operate a car wash or similar to launder their money, why not a scrap yard?

And they don't even have to own the business, just be willing to wait the 30 days.