How would the government act differently if citizens owned fewer or different or no guns? Where does the fantasy that the everyone is out to get you and you had better be armed and ready come from? Cowboy movies? The whole idea of the cowboy is myth[0].
If you want to see real power hungry government in action, don’t think SWAT coming for you, look at the Missouri State Health director keeping a spreadsheet of women’s menstrual cycles, in order to make sure that if any became pregnant the state could intercede [1].
If you’re reading HN, you’re probably some kind of engineer. So tell me, how is a problem which is itself generated by the accumulation of brute power solved by a countervailing accumulation of brute power? Which then just becomes an arms race. Which is objectively insane. It is an infinite loop. How do you break it?
[0] See "This Land" pg 61-66 by Christopher Ketcham (https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018042), citing Lynn Jacobs "The Waste of The West" (https://lccn.loc.gov/92121736)
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/missouri-health-directo...
It raises the stakes for oppression. How would Hong Kong look right now if the population were lightly armed? Instead of a civilian police force repressing millions the Chinese military would have had to occupy its own territory. That has political and international consequences.
I believe in gun regulation. But I recognise the civic core of the opposition’s argument.
Let’s be honest, if they were armed and gun ownership weren’t already against the law, the Chinese government would sweep in and pass a law that day and start going door to door, seizing weapons, take the people from their families and send then to reeducation camps. It wouldn’t forward their cause at all.
The word “civic” is odd here too (I recognize that your comment is about the intent of the parent comment’s argument), because the opposite pole to political violence is… civil discourse. There is an unavoidable incoherence to the idea that gun ownership is about civic responsibility.
What the GP said about "upping the stakes" is very true.
Great idea, let's apply it in other contexts. Next time I get a parking ticket, I'll follow around the traffic cop with an assault rifle until they lower the fee.
You may think that waiting to vote at the ballots or having your phone calls dumped to a voicemail and never returned is an appropriate response to being locked up in your own house against your will with the threat of state action if you leave; however, a few people in Minnesota did not think that it was appropriate. So they showed up and they showed up armed.
That’s their right and it’s the right the second amendment protects. You may not like it, but that’s just because you haven't disagreed with the government hard enough yet.
Sure, if by "checked" you mean "threatened with violence." My comment is intended to question whether or not that's a good idea, by attempting to applying the same principle to other walks of life.
> being locked up in your own house against your will with the threat of state action if you leave
You mean the usual way of dealing with the outbreak of a deadly contagious disease?
> That’s their right and it’s the right the second amendment protects.
Threats are not protected.
It often doesn’t even give local police enough pause to make sure they are invading the correct home in the middle of the night.
Never mind that gun owners in America don't have the organization, training, resources, or equipment to effectively combat a police department, much less the US army quelling an armed insurrection, even if their rights ever were legitimately threatened. Never mind that private gun ownership as it currently exists would never be a realistic check on any government. The macho fantasy endures, and colors so much of our discussion on gun rights.
The other missing datum from the macho fantasy is under what conditions is armed revolt justified. The sibling post mentions Hong Kong as an example. So what if, on the other hand, the government wants to compel citizens to vaccinations? Are the citizens justified in murdering cops and healthcare workers in order to avoid mandatory vaccination? What if the citizens believe that an election was fraudulent? Are the citiens (legally, ethically) justified in raiding the Capitol to forcibly overthrow the government?
There are no good answers to these questions because the justification for gun ownership is not based in any real-world conditions: it's purely a fantasy.
This is a common argument, but completely ignores what the Taliban/Iraqis/ISIS did to the best and most well funded military for 20 years. What the Vietnamese did 40 years before that; completely ignoring 60 years of actual events.
Do you think ordinary Americans have the skill or appetite to take up arms against other Americans? Especially better trained and equipped Americans?
How far do you think the Jan 6 insurrectionists would have gotten had the capitol police taken the threat at all seriously?
The argument that "America's armed forces have lost wars" does not support your conclusion that "ordinary Americans are capable of defeating America's armed forces."
And you also conveniently ignore the rest of argument, pointing out that a democratic government doesn't need armed insurrections.
IDK. Ask the Irish.
The Taliban, VC, etc, had basically ZERO ability to mess with the invading army's supply lines or the political process keeping those supply lines open. Furthermore, the martial law steps taken in places like Iraq to stem the violence would be much more politically costly domestically. I can crap out plenty of non-US examples of this kind of thing if that helps.
This shit is all basic stuff covered in Armchair General 101. Educate yourself.
Based on the snide tone of condescension, this response sounds like it was written by precisely the kind of delusional macho wannabe who fetishizes firearms and dreams of one day murdering someone.
Or maybe I've read just a little bit of history and think you're the delusional one.
Civil wars don't go down like foreign occupations. If this nation breaks down into widespread violence (I don't personally think it would, I think it would balkanize before we ever got to that point) I hope that you live long enough to be subject to is so that you may learn an important lesson and that some future generation may be spared the task of mopping up the mess.
That's exactly the problem: you've read some history and now you think you're an expert in civil war.
Are you? What are you basing your opinion on?
What camps? At some points, some international arrivals were quarantined in "camps" and, interstate or international travellers were variously required to isolate in hotels. The US had a range of at-home and government supervised quarantine too.
TO say they "set up camps" is disingenuous.
Having armed citizen is terrible for freedom. It means that the kind of person willing to use violent force against another person has power.
The idea that the person your forcing to do something (anything) may be armed makes the government less likely to force people to do things.
Sometimes we all need to heed the rules of the society in which we live.
If an elected government cannot make rules because "someone might get shot" then the government needs to control the guns. Otherwise we're all at the mercy of those willing to kill so they don't have to abide by the rules.
Government officials already need to worry about the political implications of their actions, they shouldn't need to worry about being murdered by a loon with a gun who disagrees.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." Australia was violating human rights every time they made it illegal for one of their citizens to enter the country. Don't lump these "illegal border crossing"s in with foreigners trying to illegally immigrate.
Which is a shame, really. I quite like it.
In other words, just because guns aren't being used to keep the government in check right now doesn't mean there aren't valid situations where they could be. I'm not entirely sure if your comment is insinuating that. If it's not, sorry for misinterpreting it.
In other words, can we have some concrete example when, in your opinion, it is appropriate to shoot a cop?
The government wants to maintain a monopoly in the use of force and violence. I don’t think they should have that option. Call me a libertarian.
This does not clarify the issue. When is violence justified against an ordinary person in your opinion? If you're proposing a legal principle, there should be a clear line.
Moreover, who gets to decide when violence is justified? Are we leaving that up to each person's own sense of justice? Or does everyone have to use your standard? How do we resolve post-facto disagreements about the justification of use of violence?
What punishment would you support for someone who uses unjustified violence that they feel is justified? What if they disagree with that punishment?
"Defense" is not a simple idea. Proving self-defense in court is quite difficult. Self-defense has not ever been in the US a legal defense against the charge of resisting arrest. We currently discourage violence against cops by giving them the benefit of the doubt that they are acting in the best interests of the law; we may in fact give them too much credit, but to give them no credit at all would turn any arrest procedure into a brawl.
Allow me demonstrate: if a cop A wants to arrest person B, rightly or wrongly, A is using physical coercion, which is violence. By your argument, under ther principle of self-defense, any citizen has the legal/ethical right to oppose use of violence. So now we have a situation where two people simply have differing opinions: A thinks that B should be arrested, and B thinks that B should not be arrested. In your argument, the way to resolve this dispute is not in courts, but immediately, with violence. Either way, someone will get hurt or killed.
Another aspect: if a person's legal justification for resisting arrest depends on their guilt or innocence, why would anyone voluntarily submit to arrest, since doing so would be interpreted as a sign of guilt? If only guilty people can be arrested, then what is the point of courts?
I fail to see how this legal framework would not lead to massively escalating violence everywhere in society. Your worldview is juvenile.
This is possible and I accept this end point. My worldview is consistent, yours is bound up in perverse gotchas and outs for when force that is otherwise unjustified has to be justified or else "bad things" will happen to society. You assume that my framework ends with "massively escalating violence everywhere in society" but you haven't proven that and, more importantly, your worldview (assuming it's the current one) has resulted in the same problem. Or are we to take George Floyd's death and the related national civil unrest as not a massive escalation of violence everywhere in society?
I'd rather be juvenile than a hypocrite.
Come on man. You're arguing like a 12 year old here. "You can't prove that!" is not an argument. Try to at least form a cohesive logical defense of your position.
> Or are we to take George Floyd's death and the related national civil unrest as not a massive escalation of violence everywhere in society?
Overall, violent crime is massively down since the 1990s. George Floyd's death and the resulting civil unrest highlights important problems in our society nonetheless, and should result in reforms. The fact that those reforms have been weak or non-existent is a result of regulatory capture by the police, the unjustified strength of police unions, a judiciary that gives too much credit to police, the police culture of protecting each other, and other issues. Hopefully, we will, through legislatively-enacted reforms, reach a position where the actions of those police officers are sufficiently disincentivized that they will become rare. I don't think that an appropriate resolution of the George Floyd incident would be for by-standers to execute the cops.
> bound up in perverse gotchas and outs for when force that is otherwise unjustified has to be justified or else "bad things" will happen to society.
Yeah. What you call "perverse gotchas" is what I call "necessary complexity," because human society is complex and the rules regulating is are complex. I understand the allure of using simple rules at all costs, but thousands of years of jurisprudence suggest that humans are too complex for that; that's why we have thousands and thousands of laws. Understanding that a complex system requires complex rules is not hyprocricy, it's just good engineering.