I’m sure this will be a popular comment, not, but when you arm citizens you arm morons too.
What won't be popular: the second amendment was crafted specifically so that functionaries of State power can't abuse their position without the risk of extrajudicial reprisal.
Not at all saying that this specific case is a matter of positional abuse ( definitely appears to be a tragic lone mental health case, which is a whole other problem in our society entirely ) - merely stating that the right to bear arms is intended to be a check against it.
Now you have a society based on mutual assured destruction at a civilian level devoid of trust and community.
I assure you, this has nothing to do with being armed. This should be pretty clear from a number of observations:
A) The most heavily armed communities in the US are highly community-oriented and trustworthy towards their respective in-groups
B) Lack of social cohesion seems to be just as prevalent in western nations with full disarmament
The actual proximate causes of social decoherence are things that HN is probably mostly in support of, on net; urbanization, multiculturalism, etc.
I worked for a large defence contractor in the US for a number of years and got to see the contrast in professional and personal relations between their European and American employees. It’s scary when you see.
100% disagree. The saying "armed society is polite society" is absolutely true, at least when it comes to the interaction between arms and western social ethics. Obviously your results may vary in the Congo or Chicago or whatever.
Even if we accept the (most likely contextually false) premise that reducing firearms access for non-criminals also meaningfully reduces firearms access for criminals, I do not have any preference (ceteris paribus) between getting shot, stabbed, or having my head bashed in. In fact, I might prefer getting shot.
In the more realistic case where criminal firearm attainability is less than perfectly correlated with non-criminal firearm attainability, it makes sense for non-criminals to be armed as well.
There's also the MAD dynamic; people are less likely to physically escalate if there is a possibility of a high-severity response.
> it’s a cheap solution
A murder charge for an unjustified shooting is hardly "cheap".
The Second Amendment absolutely protects the ability of citizens to declare their government invalid, set up their own, and defend themselves. It does so because citizens already have that right - as argued in the Declaration of Independence ("it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government"), and later codified in things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The task of the Second Amendment is not to codify that right; it is to codify a right to a mechanism by which the citizens may protect the right to self-determination of government, which is more fundamental but only theoretical if an unwanted government comes at you with guns.
There is no right to extrajudicial reprisals against individual members of the government. The Second Amendment does not recognize one, nor does anything else in the Constitution, nor does any other well-accepted document about rights. There is a right to invoke the structures of the government to redress grievances and to hold judges and other officials responsible for abuse of their office, and there is a right to oppose the government wholesale if they refuse. But that is still a defensive right. If a corrupt judge wants to take your land, and corrupt police try to make it happen, you need a means to defend yourself, sure.
But I cannot find any reason to believe that the authors of the Constitution would have said that an appropriate check on government power is the risk that members of the government would have their family members killed in reprisal - the risk that people would be deprived of life (or even liberty or property) without due process of law.
In the modern era, any effective resistance to tyranny is - UNFORTUNATELY - going to be asymmetric, guerrilla, and dirty. Which - again, UNFORTUNATELY - is going to involve morally ambiguous activity.
But, I don't think that e.g. the guerrillas of Vietnam were morally ambiguous simply because they engaged in asymmetric warfare against the US military. They were fighting against identified soldiers in a declared war; they had the right to engage by the international rules / norms of war. They killed people who had taken up arms against them. (Yes, most of their opponents were forced to take up arms; that doesn't make the opposing force morally ambiguous in its opposition.)
They're very different from various terrorists (domestic and foreign) who have attacked the US in recent years, who also reached the conclusion that only asymmetric warfare would work against the US, but chose to attack non-combatants - office workers, children, etc. And they weren't merely casualties of a morally-ambiguous operation; they were direct targets. (As it happens, these terrorists were not particularly effective, either.)
So even if we want to grant modern interpretation to the Second Amendment and read in the right to do whatever is effective against the government of the US (instead of talking about what it was crafted to do), it still seems to me like it should be about making sure you have the arms and the training to defend yourself against an illegitimate government and establish your own, perhaps through asymmetric warfare if needed - which is still very different from randomly attacking individual officials whom you have declared corrupt in an otherwise-legitimate government (let alone their family members).
But they can and sometimes do
Weapons don't stop that.
Encryption could be part of a check against that
(I think Daniels law is good and that it should be for everyone)
What makes you say that? I'm not disagreeing, necessarily, but is there any writing to support this reasoning? Who held this position?
For example, I don't think the recent decriminalization of weed in various US states probably hasn't caused very many people to start using it. But in the same way, the laws against it didn't do much to limit its use.
Don't they vote, pay taxes, run their own affairs just like everyone else?
Are morons a separate well defined class of citizens?
maybe. the article describes the crime in a way that suggests stabbing would have worked as well, and the criminal was angry/motivated enough to kill by any means.
I mean, just visit any country where ordinary citizens don't carry guns.
I wake up knowing I’m probably not going to be shot by some prick in Asda car park.
If you are able to solve the problems plaguing both East London and West Baltimore, I'm all ears, however it seems the war on murder will rage on
Seems like British criminals do have a really hard time finding guns.
US is arming the average Joe with no gun training, or psychological evaluation, the guy that is selling weed at the corner of SF, Karen that is angry at the customer service and the full of hormones schoolchildren.
Now given that all of these people have access to highly lethal guns, law enforcement has to be more pro-active than other countries, thus all of the expenses to buy war machines for neighborhood police depts.
What could possibly go wrong?
You can see when it stops working right here http://blackfridaydeathcount.com/
The idea that the US can somehow turn back the clock with hundreds of millions of legal guns already purchased is laughable. Almost every attempt at the state or city level has completely backfired. That train passed long ago. And the denial of this has only ever worsened the problem. I'd go as far as saying it's an anti-science position in 2020.
There is no substitute for privacy.
Empathy and awareness can go a long way.
Above a certain minimal level of education, demographic outcomes like crime rate seem to be 70-80% predicted by entirely heritable characteristics, with very little environmental interaction.
This is just racism in a language that's palatable to HN.