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Comment by alpha_squared | Hacker News Reader

Because it's the sort of mentality America was founded on. Not trying to be political, though I'm sure this can be an unpleasant topic. A couple hundred years of, "you're responsible for defending your land and it's your right to defend it," has fascinating and, often, disastrous outcomes.

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I would disagree with that pretty strongly.

Big difference between an individual defending his property/family with his own property vs funneling that defense through a corporate crowd-sourced surveillance system.

I agree there is a difference, though I'm not sure it's big. It's a natural evolution of individual efforts to coalesce into a group effort. That's the history of humanity.

Right, but banding together in mobs tends to precede the establishment of a state with laws, due process etc. Hence why we tend to be appalled by vigilantes (even the professionals do a pretty uneven job when it comes to enforcing our laws, letting everyone do it as a hobby is not likely to produce a better result?)

The _existing police_ is a banded together mob.

Citizen and all other private security firms operate under the same laws as any other individual or company. It’s not like these guys went out and started committing violent felonies...

The existing local police is a coalesced group effort. In some regions (like SF) the existing institutions are no longer effective. There is nothing surprising or particularly heinous about an attempt to create alternatives.

The idea of property being defended by an individual is the myth. The reality was that, on the frontier, property was defended by the community. It wasn't just you, standing there with your musket, fending off the hordes of "injuns" and "rustlers" all by your lonesome. It was you and your posse.

I think the vigilantism implicitly endorsed by Citizen is entirely typical of the historical American attitude towards how one should defend their property. Moreover, it speaks to the breakdown of law and order in California that an app that organizes a modernized form of "frontier justus" can find enough traction to get off the ground.

I don't think this speaks much of California given that it was founded in New York years ago. It just so happens that this incident took place in one of the most populous places in the US, but I wouldn't rush to imply causation.

Add to that a conservatism that treats the constitution like a religious text designed to curtail any kind of societal evolution or transformation as circumstances change.

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