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Comment by AndrewBissell | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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)

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