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Comment by nsajko | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your comment (it reminded me of the times the Pinkertons or the deputized sheriffs shot at strikers long ago), but I think that every citizen being armed would be a good guard for the society's freedom, and thus that it would be worth it.

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More than guns (or in addition to guns), it is important that people know how their government works and make their support indispensable if a ruler wants to stay in power. In other words, increase the number of "keys" like this YouTuber explains

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

What I struggle with is how does one make the leap from being a democracy to being a democracy which protects the rights of minorities? This doesn't have to be a gender or race thing. For example, here in the US we clearly don't do enough to protect incarcerated people from {sexual, physical, mental} abuse (by staff or by other inmates).

That was part of the idea of the Constitution; the founding fathers knew that uninhibited democracies were a bad idea (even the Greeks experienced some bad things with mob rule) and specifically tried to create a democratic republic restrained by a written set of rules protecting citizens from arbitrary exercise of power by a majority to avoid some of the worst. They lived through quite a few things we are seeing now, but I think a large part of preventing it depends squarely on culture. Having a culture that fundamentally believes in justice and equality will stave off tyranny and oppression, but it doesn't matter what laws you have in a society that doesn't value those. When I took Chinese philosophy there was a philosopher (can't remember which one) who basically said that it is good men who make the laws, but laws without good men will not be enforced.

> specifically tried to create a democratic republic restrained by a written set of rules protecting citizens from arbitrary exercise of power by a majority to avoid some of the worst

They tried to create one with no power for anyone but white male landowners and with provisions that made changing that extremely difficult.

> What I struggle with is how does one make the leap from being a democracy to being a democracy which protects the rights of minorities?

The Federalist Papers deal with both the Tyranny of the Majority, as well as the Tyranny of the Minority.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers

The US is a Constitutional Republic... why everyone continues to conflate this with democracy I do not understand. The states election process does not define the Federal govt.

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.

ARTICLE IV, SECTION 4

A constitutional republic is a form of representative democracy. You do not understand because you misunderstand.

A constitutional republic is where the people delegate certain powers, enumerated in a constitution, to the government. The Constitution of the United States defines three branches of government, the Legislative, Judicial and Executive. Ideally each branch serves to check the unrestrained power of the other branches (or two branches check the unrestrained power of the third.) That's what makes the revelations about mass logging of emails by the NSA, part of the Executive branch, so important.

> A constitutional republic is a form of representative democracy.

This is not generally true in the abstract, but the specific form of most Constitutional republics, including the US, is basically representative democracy, though sometimes (as in the US) with skewed voting power, and democratic values (coupled with fear of the volatility and excesses of direct or unconstrained democracy) was fairly central to the founding ideology of the United States.

No part of the US federal government is representative at this point. The Senate isn't by design, the house isn't because it's been capped, the presidency isn't by design.

" A constitutional republic is a form of representative democracy. "

Read this over and over until you believe you can simply change the meaning of words

I've found that people who attempt to make this argument have an agenda. Here is an article that references several founders using both terms.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

The difference I see.

All democratic governments today allow decisions to be made even over the dissent of a minority of voters.

Whereas the (Republic) Constitution and the Bill of Rights protect (or are supposed to protect) the individual rights.

The individual being the smallest minority.

This is the difference I see. It is a small difference with a huge impact.

John Locke

[Civic power] can have no right except as this is derived from the individual right of each man to protect himself and his property. The legislative and executive power used by government to protect property is nothing except the natural power of each man resigned into the hands of the community…and it is justified merely because it is a better way of protecting natural right than the self-help to which each man is naturally entitled.[1]:532

Because a democracy and a republic are not mutually exclusive, unless you are talking about direct democracy specifically.

China is a republic but not a democracy. Canada is a democracy and not a republic.

This isn't going to earn us any friends, but I agree with the contention, at least, that there is something to the theory that we'd be far less likely to suffer endless criminal war (as is the case now) on the part of the military-industrial complex, if we were indeed all armed of our own accord and thus responsible for our own defence at an individual level.

It does, at least, put a citizen on equal footing when it comes to understanding the responsibility of using a weapon, at all, to defend something or someone. There are many who say that responsibility is too heavy, or too hard, or should not be born by the individual .. but in this day and age there are too many well-armed warriors with the ability to destroy the very weak, and destroy they do. Daily.

One of the key means by which war-fighters get away with atrocity is when the weaker, non-armed civilians from which they must recruit and supply themselves, allow them to do so without oversight.

An armed citizenry defuses the source of military-industrial corruption: the secrecy by which the effects of war are kept from a weak-willed, easily manipulated, public.

If we knew what it was to fight a war, we'd be doing less of it. As it stands now though, the people of the nations of the western coalition are living in a putrid fantasy as to what their military are doing, in their name. And seem to be fine with it.

I wonder if it were so easily placed on the board, as it were, if we had a means of reigning in our military masters that was truly effective. In place of technological war-fighting might, it seems the only thing we have left is the light of truth on their secrets.

So, while the notion of 'arming all the citizens' is an extreme, there may be something less extreme in the idea of 'uncover all military-industrial secrets at all costs', which is .. after all .. kind of a similar basis by which one might defuse the complex.

> I think that every citizen being armed would be a good guard for the society's freedom, and thus that it would be worth it.

That would be a pretty big change from them dynamiting and firebombing Greenwood, or taking over and thrashing Malheur.

Somehow I'm doubtful. That's just not how America has used guns ever. And that's not how it uses guns to this day.

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