Blinding? Overblown.

I think this is seriously overblown.

Yes, a powerful laser pointer aimed at your eye can produce temporary or permanent blindness. But in order to do so it needs to get in your eye in the first place, and matching something with a one millimeter cross with a beam that's about one millimeter across a few hundred meters away is not an easy thing to do.

Even if the jerk manages to hit the target in the pupil (an incredibly unlikely occurrence at any reasonable distance to a moving target like a flying plane) and there IS damage to the retina, the area of damage will be proportional to the proportion of the field of view covered by the laser bean, which is incredibly small. That is, only a line of receptors in your retina (a line of pixels, if you will) would be affected.

Is that bad? Yes, it is. But that’s because somebody is causing some damage to someone (just as if you throw a stone at someone from close range), not because of the safety risk to the aircraft. The pilot would probably not note the damage for years, if at all.

I'm not saying aiming lasers at people is something acceptable, only a moron could do it and such a moron should be jailed. But jailing people just for possession "to prevent a catastrophe" would only be reasonable if the catastrophe is real or even possible, which is not.

@Rogan Paneer

It is not serious because the alleged threat is not such. GO study some optics and you'll see that in order to blind someone at a distance you need something much more powerful than a laser pointer (probably you could with a green laser pointer with the filters removed, but that would still be extremely unlikely, and such a modified laser would be already illegal given its power rating).

What about Astronomers

Some large telescopes have lasers that are used in the business of correcting for atmospheric turbulence .

Probably rather more powerful than the ordinary bloke/girl would be using.