This seemed obvious to me at the time. It was hard to understand why people in the cultural mainstream let themselves get swept up in it. I felt like I lost my country, back then, as they pretty much all went off into crazyland together.
My reason for asking is because I believe that "that's unconstitutional!" has been a failed protest message for more like 100 years than 25 years (and there's threads of state violence at the local and state levels that go back far longer). And IMO that is even stronger evidence that words on an ~240-year-old-doc—and the way some interpret the second amendment in relation to those words—is a completely powerless measure against state violence. The United States is not exceptional in that regard. We'll only have a better country if we constantly, actively, choose to vote it that way.
Your sentiment starts out fierce: "constantly, actively..." and is immediately cut short "... choose to (only?) vote it that way."
You point out that voicing one's interpretations of the 2nd amendment is powerless - but voting, reduced to such a miniscule gesture, is also. The choice between a galloping right wing and a stagnant center-right is no choice at all. American elections are a facade for decisions already made on top. You can't vote it out.
If you nevertheless are certain that that was or is the goal of one of the US's two major political parties, then you've reached a perplexing conclusion based on, I can only guess, no evidence, evidence imagined, evidence misunderstood, or evidence contained in a source that should be tossed into the garbage can.
Let's say in the main election 45% of the population will vote for whatever candidate represents side X, 45% of the population will vote for whatever candidate represents side Y, and 10% is more-or-less in the middle.
If, during the primaries, side X votes for a far-X candidate, they will definitely lose the middle 10% to a moderate-Y candidate, leading to a strong Y victory. But if side X votes for a moderate-X candidate during the primaries, the main election will be moderate-X vs moderate-Y, and they have a pretty good chance of securing the slightly-more-than-half of the middle they need for an X victory.
Of course you now end up with a lukewarm moderate X victor who isn't going to represent your far-X views, but at least you're not dealing with an even worse Y-side victor.
The real solution is to get rid of the winner-takes-all system inherently resulting in a two-party election, but Good Luck doing that kind of overhaul!
For example, ranked-choice voting would reduce the spoiler effect and allow you vote for your real choice, however it would not (on its own) change that races have a single winner, who eventually "takes all."
This matters because even if it's preferable to have both, ranked-choice is easier to introduce incrementally and with fewer amendments to various constitutions.
The UK has winner takes all parliamentary elections but still has multiple parties represented in it. There seem to be a lot of other barriers to other parties in the US doing the same.
This critique had its heyday in the 2000 election. I can't fathom still holding fast to it. The last 26 years have been a continuing, relentless stream of evidence to the contrary.
State capacity. USA prior to the internet and the surveillance state was too big, too populous and too sparse to be effectively administered.
Trump is doing what every other president since WWII wanted to do ... but they didn't have the technology. Just for a moment imagine what USA will look like if you didn't get someone incompetent like Trump right now but Nixon or Johnson. With the modern security state - it would be their dream.
There were real excesses, and I ultimately agree with you that many of them were predictable in advance, but there was no feasible version of a response that did not go at least a little into crazyland. It was a crazy time.
> The Middle East should not be the punching bag for America to take out its "crazy" feelings (where "craziness" appears to be a polite way of saying "bloodlust").
Yes, this I agree with. The Iraq War in particular was clearly not justified.
How many plane hijackings have occurred in other countries, which don't have the TSA?
9/11 itself was. The general view before 9/11 was that a hijacking is an inconvenience: you get an unexpected detour via Cuba and have a nice story to tell at the next holiday party, but that's about it.
The second it became clear that the plane itself was the weapon and that there was a very real possibility you wouldn't walk away from it, hijacking became virtually impossible as every. single. passenger. would now be very much motivated to fight in order to prevent a certain death. United 93 already made this clear: they found out about what happened to the other planes, so they tried taking back the airplane. They didn't get it back, but the terrorist attack itself definitely failed.
Even without any kind of TSA future hijackings would almost certainly be closer to United 93, as American Airlines Flight 63 showed in practice.
In the aftermath of Vietnam, the US was reluctant to get involved militarily (at least overtly.) That seemed to last until Kuwait. The success there seemed to embolden US hawks, and there were a couple long-term excursions after that.
The current dude apparently fell for the ever-present hawks, without the savy to ask the right questions. His total capitulation, after demonstrating the ineffectiveness of the military, while at the same time proving the effectiveness of asymmetric warfare, will (perhaps, hopefully) be an educational moment for future presidents.
Certainly it is a valuable educational moment to other defendents. You don't need to fight back. You just need to affect something else the world cares about. And, it turns out, global shipping is especially vulnerable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings
(I can not say how comprehensive that wikipedia list is).
There's more in the 70s and 80s than I was expecting (having lived through the 80s), but given how many flights there are, hijackings have been and are exceedingly rare; and most of these are not even US flights. These are "driving is orders of magnitude more dangerous than flying" and "10x a very small number is still a very small number" numbers.
https://businesstats.com/global-air-traffic-number-of-flight...
https://easbcn.com/en/how-many-planes-fly-per-day-around-the...
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/world-air-pas...
These numbers only serve to re-enforce that the response of giving up liberty for (the feeling of) security due to terrorist action in the US was probably outsized. General population awareness in general was probably more of a deterrent after 9/11 than any of the first order 9/11 response actions, especially considering that the US gave countries in the middle east further reason to hate Americans and US foreign policy after 9/11. Obviously, terrorist attacks get a lot of air time and column inches, which feeds the perception of the risk.
The Entebbe raid was the canonical example, playing out as it did over a full week: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entebbe_raid
And there had been another hijacking just the week before that one.
You can quote statistics at people all you want, but when something like a plane hijacking is happening nearly two out of every three months on average (throughout the entire 1970s), and sometimes on a weekly basis, and making a big splash in the media every time, people are going to want something to change.
Even Trump's CDC admits it was 1.2 million deaths FROM covid.
Make it make sense.
It's the state policy part that I find the worst. Individual acts of senseless violence you can blame on the individual; state acts that in retrospect are senseless violence you can - in some cases - blame on what was known at the time.
To purposefully do that when you now it's useless is a rare evil; to declare it's useful when you know it's useless is an Orwellian, totalitarian turn.
And it was torture, not 'labelled' 'torture'. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, high-volume constant music, others I'm glad I don't know about. It was torture.
The US still more or less remembers how to improve and that book is an example of how such improvement could start, what changed in the last decades is that more and more Americans don't want to. The word "Again" is crucial, MAGA don't want to make America great, they want the America from their nostalgia. It's hollow, that's not what they wanted but it could never have been otherwise.