[1] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-where-police-d...
Every country, including democracies, have deployed surveillance against their own people. Giving your rulers, and big companies, exclusive access to this technology is just asking for an authoritarian nightmare.
Notice how one is “just asking” for a hypothetical risk while the other is an everyday fact of life.
The relationship between availability of guns and the amount of gun violence is extremely well-established. I personally am sympathetic to the view that an armed population is a meaningful deterrent against tyranny, but it’s hard to compare a hypothetical to a growing number of deaths. And the odd fact that firearms’ primary political role in our society is to intimidate people while voting doesn’t help either.
Its also hard to prove which causes which. In some capacity, violence itself necessitates guns. Both statements could also be true at the same time. or playing the devils advocate, the increase in violence causes higher gun ownership, but once the ownership is there, reducing violence might not reduce gun violence itself.
This argument will fall apart when school shooters gain access to deadlier weapons.
There are (at least, partial) solutions, we just don't like them and they are really really hard:
1) totalitarianism and top-down technology control (and knowledge proliferation control)
2) scientific (prob through genetic engineering) or cultural attempts to alter human species to be more non-violent / more peaceful / abhor conflict, or resolve social conflict / scarcity / prevent the means by which people _want_ to kill each other.
Totalitarianism won't protect from these things. They are remarkably straightforward.
What has protected us from these things is the fact that people who like biology and medicine are typically relatively nice.
This isn't some deep secret knowledge, these are things so easy and un-novel that you can't publish a paper on them.
Without getting into a whole thing about the context of killing other human beings and how that matters, I'll just say I know what you mean and say yeah, it's bad to kill people. I'm not talking about personal morality; I live by one that many people would probably find overly restrictive (I certainly do).
> I'm not talking about personal morality; I live by one that many people would probably find overly restrictive (I certainly do).
Well now I'm interested!
Reputation and law are similar in that they're imposed by a community, but differ in that law follows a formally codified code, and of course the consequences imposed tend to differ. Morality is the internal motivation not to wrong others. Security describes physical/electronic measures that cause the predatory behaviour not to be practical in the first place, or at least raise the bar.
Schneier's own summary: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/03/liars_and_out...
A review, hosted on Schneier's site: https://www.schneier.com/news/archives/2012/12/liars-and-out...
The TLDR: Every legal system is governed primarily by the “moral culture” and constructed to defend/enact/perpetuate that culture. When the moral culture changes enough, the laws will change (or the interpretation or application of the laws for the same de facto effect).
So the question for all of us is how to steer the moral culture in preferred directions, which is why I was calling out your initial comment! It’s not good for people to come to the belief that laws don’t matter — such a belief is self-fulfilling at certain scale.