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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

This is a justification for any kind of vigilanteism. Is this also what you will tell armed righties who decide to round up illegal immigrants and shuttle them across the border to Mexico because the government is ignoring their concerns or is breaking the law because the government ignores you only reserved for your pet causes?

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That is not inconsistent with a belief that violence against a person is worse than violence against property. It is odd to compare kidnapping a person with destroying their home security cameras.

Democracy operates at multiple levels. You’ll notice that armed right wingers kidnapping people suspected of being undocumented is a problem confined to the government itself. There’s a reason for that. No-one really cares about immigrants, outside of performative politics, enough to take that personal risk. If they did, we’d find out what society’s reaction is. People are unlikely to look on that as favorably as they do on petty vandalism against an undemocratic rollout of a surveillance network.

There are definitely armed right wingers participating in vigilante immigration enforcement:

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

> Three Percenters have joined vigilante patrols along the U.S.–Mexico border

https://azmirror.com/2024/05/23/border-vigilantes-are-blurri...

> On Jan. 20, just three days after Cade’s aid camp visit near Sasabe, another group assembled on a ridge overlooking the Rio Grande in Texas and stood over five seated migrants. Some of those standing were armed with long guns or pistols and one wore tactical gear; they questioned the migrants, all young men or boys, while filming them.

But structurally, doing vigilante immigration enforcement is more difficult than doing vigilante destruction of property. Destroying a security camera takes one person doing one action one time; physically restraining a human being who doesn't want to be restrained and physically transporting them to the US border is a complex logistical operation that you really need the resources of a state-run bureaucracy in order to do. A vigilante group can't replicate it, unless it's so large and well-organized itself that it's a de-facto rival state to the legitimate US government, and this simply doesn't exist in the United States at this time.

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