I agree with that problem statement, but it arises I suspect from the desire to do something rather than nothing. After all, if your a politician and someone you care about comes to you with a problem, the last thing you want to say is "Well there really isn't anything I can do about that."

Often banishment by mandate is conceptually easier to grasp than actually fixing the problem. Take any complex problem, for example hand guns and gun violence, you can try to fix the inanimate thing "guns" or the actual thing "gun violence" but often "gun violence" is really just "violence", rooted in a lifetime of hurts and little access to support, but "gun" is something you can ban from the market. Easy to walk up to someone and say "you have a gun, that is banned." into the jailhouse you go, it is much harder to walk up to say "you have unresolved anger management issues with an inability to control those impulses with respect to your fellow humans, into the sanitarium you go."

The latter case fixes the problem and the former case fixes one of the symptoms. We all know that angry people without regard for human life don't need a gun to kill people, they can do that with cars, or baseball bats, or rocks for that matter. But it is easier as a politician to try to patch over the symptom because sometimes you can make that happen.