But they did get engaged! They banned all subreddits related to the trading/purchasing of firearms and alcohol. /r/beertrade, a subreddit for trading beer, had a strict policy that users were not allowed to sell beer for money (something that's actually illegal) and only allowed people to post about trading beer. Even someone like me, who doesn't ship beer and only trades in-person, is no longer allowed to talk about trading.
They did after realizing they would be facing lots of regulatory problems.
Organizationally, it should be very obvious to anyone who thinks that things like facilitating anonymous gun and alcohol sales, etc is probably not a good idea.
They actually went back and corrected some of those subs which were link aggregators essentially. r/gundeals was reinstated and they have a stickied post describing what needed to be done to be brought back to life. The main takeaway is that there is no p2p transactions allowed, only links from stores/manufacturers.
Thinkpads for sale admin here. I think all of the above markets really worried about this rule, but I've already checked to make sure that Reddit is OK with us and they have stated that they plan on taking no actions with our subreddit at the moment.
And that's the fundamental problem with "getting engaged". As soon as you do, everybody's going to criticize not just where you did poke your nose, but also where you _didn't_.