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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

> The state of Victoria announced a curfew and suspended its Parliament for key parts of the pandemic. “To put this in context, federal and state parliaments sat during both world wars and the Spanish Flu, and curfews have never been imposed,” the scholar John Lee observed in an article for the Brookings Institution.

The Spanish Flu was unquestionably more dangerous than COVID is. What changed in society that so many people are now willing to give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety?

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I would guess the practical inconvenience. There is a much larger part of the labor force now that can work remote. And with electronic entertainment and deliverable goods, the burden of a lockdown is much less on much more people than 100 years ago. Also I don’t know how the safety net compares to back then, but unemployment etc softens the blow even more.

In 1920 people would have starved if we tried to do lockdowns like we have done in 2020.

In the developing world millions are in fact being pushed into starvation as a result of the Covid lockdowns.

People did starve from lockdowns in 2020.

Where?

Lockdowns have caused a huge increase in food insecurity and chronic hunger.

https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/agriculture/brief/food-se...

Food from school lunches are a big one that got impacted.

https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/nutrition-crisis-looms...

Thats a political choice, in the first world we could make sure every homeless person gets 3,000 calories, and not spend 1% of gdp

Perhaps, people didn't fully understand how much their safety could be improved by avoiding contact?

As society becomes more wealthy and tackles the big health issues, they move down the list to the next one, and so forth.

When I was growing up seat belts weren't mandatory and oh boy did people protest that change in the law. Not long ago I visited a developing country where nobody even thinks about wearing seatbelts. And I was aghast. How can they not take such a simple precaution. And child seats? They ride on motorbikes with their kids on the front with no helmet!

The answer obviously is there are a lot more things that they worry about than getting into an accident. Things like losing their job and having to beg because there is no safety net. Things like getting sick and affording healthcare.

And as medical treatments advance even further you'll see even more resources thrown at even smaller problems. That's just how it is - we tackle health issues at the margins and as we become more wealthy we're willing to sacrifice more resources to tackle smaller problems.

They were disarmed.

There are similar restrictions being imposed without much pushback in many well armed countries around the world. I think it has more to do with everyone now getting so much of their information about the world from little handheld 24/7 psyop machines. There also wouldn't have been nearly so much acceptance of lockdowns if large swaths of people weren't able to continue earning a good living working entirely from home, something which really only became possible over the past 10 or 20 years.

On a deeper level, I think many people in our modern civilization are in the grip of a paralyzing denial and fear of death, which makes it easier to corral them in one direction or another by just gesturing at the possibility of it.

> in many well armed countries

I assume you're referring the United States - it's worth noting that the well-armed states like Texas and Florida have rejected draconian restrictions while mostly disarmed states like California and New York might as well be Australia.

Add Idaho to the well-armed-and-free list. While we didn’t do quite as well as Florida on the non-draconian front, things were normal-ish here far before many other states.

Though the correlation is heavily confounded, obviously. Red states by definition have a bunch of conservatives, who both despise lockdowns and are more likely to have guns. So it’s unclear how much firearms matter, strictly.

Are we living in the same Idaho? The governor just activated the national guard. We only have 4 ICU beds left in the entire state as of three days ago. Just today, we had more covid cases than in April, May, and June 2020 combined.

“Well-armed-and-free”? Things aren’t “normal” here. Our hospitals are barely able to function because this state is full of chucklefucks who think everything is a conspiracy.

This isn’t freedom. This is stupidity.

But hey, at least you have your guns.

I didn’t mean everything _is_ normal, I mean we (mostly) aren’t being forced by the government to alter our behavior on an individual level. Different things.

I mean, you claimed that things were normal-ish here before other states. There wasn’t much nuance there, but whatever.

A government just looking the other way and letting people die for purely ideological reasons is not something to be proud of. Altering our behavior on an individual level is exactly what needs to happen during a pandemic.

They didn't reject them with guns.

Also I don't believe statistics exist for which states have more guns than others. And I also don't think your comment has any kind of real basis in research as to correlation between COVID lock downs and gun ownership, other than conservative voters being anti-everything in regards to coronavirus.

> It’s worth noting that the well-armed states like Texas and Florida have rejected draconian restrictions while mostly disarmed states like California

Florida is the 40th state by gun ownership per capita, California is 43rd, Texas is 26th. Saying “well-armed states like Texas and Florida […] mostly disarmed states like California” is an example of employing partisan-leaning based stereotypes (EDIT: And, really, probably ones driven by which states of which leanings have governors prominently in the news right now for partisan reasons), and not any real criteria of “well-armed” vs. “mostly-disarmed” states.

I was thinking more of exceptions like Switzerland, which even had curfews during the winter wave.

Switzerland never had curfew. There were (soft) lockdowns only.

Yes it did: https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20201212-switzerland-intr...

Just read the article. Forcing businesses to close at a certain time is not a curfew.

If it were you could argue that most places always had curfews since most businesses aren't allowed to be open during the night regardless of covid.

New Hampshire has the second highest gun ownership per capita numbers in the nation. During the pandemic they’ve employed the standard playbook of ‘draconian’ measures such as statewide mask mandates, business closures & public venue space restrictions.

California has the second most number of privately held guns in absolute terms.

Perhaps your mental model about gun ownership & pandemic response could use a recalibration?

More damningly for the "guns preserve liberty" position, I'm pretty sure that, if anything, private arms had more of a role in resisting and suppressing the US civil rights movement, than in aiding it (and yes, I'm aware of the Black Panthers and the early history of 2nd amendment advocacy organizations). Women didn't gain the right to vote at gunpoint, nor did under-21s. Japanese-Americans went to the camps and had their property stolen, despite their guns. Guns don't seem to be doing much for liberty or justice for Native Americans. And so on.

Truly: when have private arms been indispensable in advancing the cause of liberty in the US? We have lots of examples of expanding freedoms and liberties, and even a few of successfully resisting the curtailing of same (though we actually seem pretty bad at that despite all our guns, and tend to fix those things later, if we do at all, rather than avoid them in the first place), but when have guns been what did the trick? The closest thing I can think of is the Civil War, in which some organized regiments fought with personal muskets and rifles until they were issued something (much) better, but, like, a lot of those private arms landed on the "preserve slavery" side of that conflict, which seems to be a recurring problem with the private-arms-preserve-liberty thing, which is that they seem to be at least as useful for doing the opposite. They played a role in escalating criminal violence (e.g. Bleeding Kansas) without which, maybe, the course of the war would have been significantly different, but that's getting pretty far out into "butterfly flapping its wings in Japan" in terms of tracing causality or necessity, and again, the "keep people literally in chains" side got at least as much mileage out of private arms as the "but maybe don't, though" side, in that part of the conflict.

[EDIT] Downvoters: I'm very interested in counter-examples, so please do post them, if you've got 'em.

In general, the more credible the threat is, the less likely one would have to actually act on it.

Having the ability to defend oneself makes it less likely that one will have to defend oneself.

I strongly suspect this "fleet-in-being" effect of private arms only marginally affects outcomes, and even that is outweighed by their utility as a tool of oppression.

The best I can figure as a credible argument for private arms ownership, is that it's a canary-in-a-coal-mine: states that retain private arms ownership probably aren't heading toward tyranny, but ones that lose them might—might—be. Seems pretty weak, still.

Simply, when a pro-liberty or pro-democracy position is popular enough, guns don't seem to be needed—not even the threat of them, mass resistance absent guns seems to suffice. When those positions are not popular, guns don't have have a history of helping—in fact, they tend to be used to suppress those positions, if they play a role at all.

Or do they? Again, I'd love some examples. I'm a big fan of argument-from-what's-actually-happened, when it comes to politics (and economics, for that matter) and my inability to find much of that sort of evidence in favor of widespread private firearms ownership, specifically when it's justified as being necessary to preserve liberty (there may remain other reasons to keep them around, but that's the usual argument for why we must not touch the 2nd Amendment, in the US), is why I'm at where I'm at on that issue.

>I strongly suspect this "fleet-in-being" effect of private arms only marginally affects outcomes,

Damn near everything we quibble about in politics is about marginal outcomes.

Sure, but the degree of the effect matters a lot when the other position is "of course they're countries X and Y are turning into tyrannies—people don't own enough guns to stop it"—as if that's a major, or even decisive, factor.

However, what I can tell, they're surely not that important, and any effect they do have is weak enough that even small effects that make them a liability to liberal democracy—which effects I believe are in evidence, given the clear role they've played as a tool for enforcing popular but illiberal positions—could easily nullify the benefits.

> states that retain private arms ownership probably aren't heading toward tyranny, but ones that lose them might—might—be. Seems pretty weak, still.

It is weak. For instance, Nazi were cool with private guns and made it easier to own them. They liked themselves the guns and violence. And they were heading toward tyranny full speed.

> made it easier to own them. citation? The penalty for gun ownership in occupied france was death penalty.

Most scholarly work shows that Nazi government used gun registration to disarm the populations they wanted to oppress.

Easier by Germans of German blood in Germany. Prior gaining monopoly on power, they were the armed opposition on the streets.

By the time Nazi occupied France, the Germany was dictatorship for a long time. There was no moving anywhere on that topic. And it is absurd to use occupied territory as argument on this point.

> when have private arms been indispensable in advancing the cause of liberty in the US?

I guess John Brown triggering massive paranoia and escalation toward civil war should count.

California and New York are nowhere near asking people to prove they're in the right place with a 15 minute window to comply.

> our modern civilization are in the grip of a paralyzing denial and fear of death

I don't believe the US version of "Modern Society", for lack of a better term, is in denial of death.

There is an overblown expectation of informed consent. If I cross the street, I have been informed I might be hit by a vehicle. Look both ways, minimize the danger. It's still there though.

If I have a child, they have to be educated, which generally means they have to go to a public school, where I have been informed they will get a minimal education. I was NOT informed that someone might come in and shoot my kid. Now we have drills and I have been informed, so it's all ok again.

COVID was sensationalized and (in the US) people felt like they had no information, so there was no informed consent as to when and where to go out safely. This is the reason COVID has been blown out of proportion. The information was initially unavailable, then it has been changing. This fails the basic tenet of Modern Civilization. We are informed about dangers to make our own behavioral linear optimizations.

Next up, vaccines and informed consent. Then people are still getting sick. There are news outlets playing it up as if the information was possibly bad and might change again. What constitutes informed consent is not uniform and people argue about it and politicize it.

The problem is that the news about the virus was as direct as the WHO (it's endemic, everyone will get it eventually) a bunch of messaging gets amplified or contradicted and the political ramifications are too high now. Note, even though the messaging shifted similarly in the relatively small area of Israel, there was uniform behavior.

They also don't pull punches when it comes to informing the population about dangers, which the US tends to do. This is because the media runs wild with anything they are given (how could it be worse?! is it overblown!? et al)

This. They were politically or philosophically unwilling to push back against these measures. They were spineless and didn't use the tools of voting, discourse, or protest that are how change is brought in modern society. Instead, they accepted these measures as necessary myopically without thinking about how they could be abused. They were far too trusting and completely disarmed of healthy skepticism.

So, I agree. Disarmed. Guns (which I assume you were talking about) would not have changed anything in a mentally-permissive environment in which these laws were not protested. You need a spine first, and a tool second, and a gun last.

By and large, they disarmed themselves. To say "they were disarmed" glosses over the overwhelmingly voluntary nature of the reduction in gun rights.

“Voluntary” can also mean compulsory. Unless you’re willing to risk going to prison or having your livelihood destroyed by not turning in your weapons.

Australia and Venezuela are the 2 best most recent examples of why the 2nd Amendment is so unique and important.

I'm on the look-out for examples of private firearms preserving liberty and democratic government. Have any? Post-WWI strongly preferred.

(serious question)

Both of those countries disarmed their citizens relatively recently -- and now, neither is an example of liberty.

Negative examples don't work too well, since I can point at, say, the US at many points and say "doesn't look like a great example of liberty"—meanwhile, progress toward such doesn't seem to have had much to do with our having lots and lots of private firearms. Meanwhile, there are plenty of relatively "disarmed" countries that remain quite free. So what factor, if any, do private arms play in the preservation of liberty and democracy? That's what I'm trying to get at. We take it as true that the 2nd amendment is absolutely vital to maintaining freedom, but... is there any reason to think that's true? I'm genuinely trying to figure that out.

Afghanistan.

Um.

> examples of private firearms preserving liberty and democratic government.

How many times do you have to fight off a foreign power seeking to impose its will on your society before you get a pass for not setting up a democracy when you're done?

OK, so they can be handy, in the hands of a government-in-exile looking to replace a foreign-imposed kleptocracy with a restoration of their own religious authoritarian state. That's granting that we can call enough of what they've got "private arms" for them to be a significant factor in the first place (I truly don't know how that would break down—maybe most of their soldiers really do go out and buy their own guns, before joining the cause). Even so, none of that seems to have much to do with keeping one's own government liberal and democratic, though, which is what I'm interested in.

The taliban are now removing those in the ANA who kept 12-year old boys as unwilling catamites. Perhaps they need US State Dept. functionaries to educate them about the liberal necessity of this practice. Do you think that the late, plausibly democratic, US Gov't supported regime there for the last 20 years was somehow unaware of this problem?

What the fuck? No, I just don't think an exiled authoritarian government overthrowing a foreign-imposed kleptocracy is a great example of private firearms playing a vital role in preserving liberty & democracy, which is what I asked for. Do you?

At worst, it's a wash. At best... I'd have to have a better idea about what you mean by "liberty & democracy". For starters, it's not clear that the Taliban have less popular support than the ruling coalitions in many western governments.

I mean the usual things that are meant by both those words, no special meaning. To address the simpler of the two directly: it's not necessary that an authoritarian state be unpopular—often they're not, especially at first—but that doesn't make them democratic, obviously. As for where the new Afghan government is likely to fall on the liberal-to-illiberal spectrum, I think most folks agree it's likely to, at best, lean toward the latter. That this may, nonetheless, in some ways, still be an improvement over the regime they're replacing, is irrelevant for my purposes.

The reason all this matters is that the question I'm concerned with is whether the standard argument for why private gun ownership is vital to a liberal democracy—that is, that they're indispensable tools for preserving both the "liberal" and the "democracy" parts of that term—is actually true. My suspicion, from what I have turned up so far, is that they're more often used (when effective, that is—they're used ineffectively too, sometimes) as a tool for imposing popular but illiberal positions, than for preserving liberty & democracy, but it's possible I've just not looked at the right evidence yet.

Without a sufficiently precise definition for liberal, the most that I can say is that private ownership of firearms has been a feature of Anglo-American political practice since Charles Stuart. This, for the purpose of having a decentralized fighting force to oppose a centralized standing army that served the government.

You might say that the Stuarts were an unpopular but (in the modern sense ) more liberal...absolutist monarchy than the populist, puritan Protectorate was an illiberal theocracy, but I'd be wary of going too far retconning modern sensibilities to 17th century England.

And, it isn't necessary.

Simply liberal as in "liberal democracy", which I'm using in the normal way, since the argument goes that that's the system and the general state of things that the 2nd amendment is vital to preserving.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

Again, I'm actually open to other forms of argument for gun ownership, and despite how my posts here have probably looked I consider measures to limit private firearms ownership unimportant, at best—I just don't find the particular position that they're extremely important to the preservation of liberal democracy such that one might reason "of course Australia is turning authoritarian—if more people there could legally own guns, that wouldn't be happening", compelling.

I'd look to the Black Panther Party in the 1960s, and ask whether Americans have the same rights today as they did then. Couple of points I find interesting here.

(1) As I understand it, open carry is illegal in California and Washington as a direct response to armed BPP demonstrations on capitol buildings.

(2) Private enforcement like was carried out by the BPP was echoed in CHAZ/CHOP, and to put it mildly, I've never seen that celebrated by gun rights activists.

(3) The BPP and police forces of the time were fairly well matched in their armament. Since then, the police are now paramilitary forces replete with military arms and armor. Are American gun rights activists deluding themselves, that they'd stand a chance if the police and military decided they were gonna run shit? Or are they merely comfortable in the knowledge that the police and military are politically aligned with them?

I do think the history of the Black Panthers is one of the more likely veins to yield gold, in my search, and intend to do some reading there. I'm entirely serious that I could turn around on this position completely, if I found compelling evidence.

> (3) Are American gun rights activists deluding themselves, that they'd stand a chance if the police and military decided they were gonna run shit? Or are they merely comfortable in the knowledge that the police and military are politically aligned with them?

It's largely the latter, I think, which brings me to:

Ultimately, I think the fatal flaw in the argument that private gun ownership is necessary to protect democracy, is in the fact that authoritarian turns by democracies tend to be fairly popular, when they happen, and that the pro-authoritarian citizens, whose position is likely, if not the majority, at least quite popular, will have guns, too... plus the police, and the army (if they don't have those, what's the problem? No private arms needed, authoritarian take-over is done before it can start if the police and the military aren't on its side, or at least damn close to being on its side). It's not just a lack of history of private firearms being an important pro-liberty and pro-democracy force in democratic states (so far as I can see! Again, I'd love examples)—it's that I have trouble imagining scenarios in which they likely would be, while remaining within the realm of the plausible.

It's got to be some movement that's unpopular among the military and police, so they don't support it, but popular among enough of the rest of the populace that significant numbers would take up arms, and that almost none of them would be taking up arms in against liberty and democracy, rather than for them... and is that a remotely likely situation? I don't think it is. I think for practically the whole likely problem-space, if you will, private arms are one of 1) superfluous, 2) laughably insufficient, or 3) actively harmful to the very things they're allegedly there to preserve & protect.

the smart people who talk about guns as a way to resist a tyranny talk about asymetric warfare, the larger crowd of warrior lifestyle people just talk about rising up.

I don't think very many Western people will throw away a comfortable life for any given set of principals, but I know many people who would fight if they were in a bad situation and felt like there wasn't much to lose. this is why a slow erosion of rights is very effective, by the time you get to the point you are willing to resist, you have given up enough rights that it becomes difficult or impossible.

This is a very unpopular example, but Timothy McV*gh is probably the most well known example of someone who fought for a cause that in his mind was liberty from government in the united states using asymmetric warfare (he was very troubled by Waco and Ruby Ridge.) Of course, even those who are troubled by those events typically believe it was wrong that innocents such as children died in his acts.

But if you really want to know what asymmetric warfare looks like, unfortunately it looks very ugly. The populace doesn't appear to give any indication they endorse the results. I honestly think most people would be very much worried about the legacy their reputation would have; even if they fought for a cause they believed in and avoided collateral damage. The combination of nearly universal social shaming for taking violent action (except when police do it, then it is "valorous"), consolidation of federal power, and the complete ineffectiveness of voting in slowing erosion of rights has been a deadly trifecta for individual rights such as the erosion of fourth and second amendment protections.

> Are American gun rights activists deluding themselves, that they'd stand a chance if the police and military decided they were gonna run shit?

In WACO a few "lunatics" took up the time of well over 1000 officers + a lot of hardware and well over a month. And this was just a few people with guns.

The goal isn't necessarily to be able to stand up to the military, but rather to make a tyranny as unappealing and arduous as possible. I have a writeup somewhere, but can't find it atm, so I'll get back to you with it later.

Branch Davidians weren't that different from the Taliban, were they? Not exactly a shining example of guns preserving democracy...

I don't think they were nearly as bad as they were made out to be.

Also: It was meant more as an example that the 2nd provides a way to make it infeasable to practice tyranny over the US population through the military.

Sure, child brides are totally chill in the Taliban too, if that's what you mean by not bad.

Edit: My point here is that this is another example where private gun ownership allows upstart tyrannies to defend themselves. This is a negative example, not what handrous was seeking.

That's absolutely not what I meant by not bad. I specifically meant the that they were accused of having a stash of illegal weapons, which got the ATF involved. Where it is unclear who shot first, but a firefight broke out that killed a agent. Which then got the FBI involved and it spiraled from there. And you obviously can't forget the incendiary grenades later found in a evidence locker, labelled as benign, where the ID's indicated them belonging to the FBI.

I am not defending child brides. But to me, it seemed like a VAST governmental overreach to be there in the first place. Where after the fact they tried to make the davidians look less sympathetic through the allegations. I came to this conclusion because those allegations never, not once, showed up before the siege.

My point was that a few dozen people tied up over 1000 agents for over a month + lots of other resources. If just a few dozen such cases happen at or near the same time, it'd basically paralyze the whole governmental military apparatus.

Also: I found the post again that puts my thoughts into good wording: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/483595139562995722/88...

I'm not going to defend the government's action, but when it's the actual Taliban, they skip straight to drone strikes, nevermind the collateral. That the Davidians held an army off with a few peashooters is a question of military restraint much more than effectiveness of the militia

> that they'd stand a chance if the police and military decided they were gonna run shit?

See Afghanistan. Full might of US military couldn't permanently suppress the will of the people. And afghans were significantly less wealthy, armed and organized than gun owners in america.

There is no way the police and military could occupy the US without the support of the people. They would win every battle and lose the war, like Vietnam and Afghanistan. The modern military is very dependant on supply chains, and would collapse after 6 months if US workers revolted.

Not to mention the massive defections if ordered to fire on their own people (why we swear an oath to the constitution and not an oath of allegiance to military commanders).

1) Northern Syria (Rojava), during the latest Syrian Civil war. Local militias comprised of inhabitants of Kurdish northern Syria fought ISIS and other splintered forces to maintain the loose democratic confederacy that is Rojava.

2) Slightly worse example: Nationalistic unorganized militia in the Ukraine during the latest war in Crimea and Donbas.

3) US example? Battle of Athens (post WW-II) [1].

When I really start thinking about it, there are almost too many to name; especially if you count the times where there was an attempt but it failed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)

Antibiotics hadn’t been invented in the 1910s, so there were quite a few untreatable potentially deadly diseases in circulation. In the modern era, rightly or wrongly, a lot of people see it as a good and achievable goal that they shouldn’t ever get an infectious disease more serious than the flu.

I assume it's the difference in what one felt like they had to lose from the perspective of any random person in 1918 and any random person in 2021?

What liberty are you talking about? You don't have the liberty to drive drunk; is this unacceptable for you as well?

Driving kills people even when the driver isn't drunk, but we do have the liberty to drive in general.

If cars and planes were invented today, they would be banned.

What Australia purchased was human lives, and not temporarily if the vaccines hold.

What do you mean “not temporarily”?

Hopefully vaccines will prevent people from ever dying of COVID, not just delay it. For unvaccinated people, lockdowns just delay when they get infected to a later wave.

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