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Comment by anthonyb | Hacker News Reader

In this case, there is no overt threat - the government employee is not holding a gun to your head, so you have no right to kill him.

Most people are not very even handed when they feel that their rights have been violated, so it tends to lead to escalation, and tribal/gang style violence, tit-for-tat.

It's much better IMO for a society to deal with disputes by legal means, not by stalking, harassing and killing each other, eg. if I shoot you in self defence, then that's 1 person's worth of productivity lost to the world, similarly if I harass you and threaten you at your home address (0.5 x PP?).

And yes, if you consistently violate other people's rights, or act with poor judgement, then you should lose rights. For example, if you're in the US and threaten people with a gun, you should lose the right to carry a gun, or the right to not be searched.

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So immediate threats aren't OK but eventual ones are? I guess I can see how a person might think that way.

What if the US had a post-earning tax where the tax collector had to physically come to your house and demand the money that the government said you owed it. And he was armed. And he made the threat of violence personally rather than through a large bureaucracy? Would that change things? Why or why not? Again, not trolling but genuinely interested.

Agree 100% that people don't react well when they feel their rights are being violated. The loss of agency and personal sovereignty is a really big deal.

I'm with you on the loss of rights examples you give up to a point. I'm totally on board with situational loss of rights (I threaten you with a gun and you're in the right to shoot me) but I'm less in favor of doing that systematically. Mostly because of how safe things are these days (I think quite good) versus the potential for abuse (I think quite high).

I'm not sure why people with a libertarian bent have to keep bringing guns into arguments. The Rule of Law is one of modern societies great inventions, as long as all parties agree to abide by it. When they don't, organised opposition (eg. protests) and negotiation are usually far better at instigating change than randomly shooting back.

It's very much an i-win-you-lose mindset, I don't think it's really based much in reality and I'd rather not live anywhere near a society based on those principles.

> I'm not sure why people with a libertarian bent have to keep bringing guns into arguments.

Because if someone chooses to not obey, they will eventually face a gun which they did not bring.

Surely the libertarian model amounts to something more productive than "the state will shoot you if you aren't ready to shoot them first?"

Yeah it's more about people interacting in a voluntary manner. The first and probably last rule of libertarian philosophy is that it's not OK to initiate aggression against others. So two individuals entering into a contract is OK but one person threatening another with violence is not.

The fact that the state/government has a monopoly on violence means that your interactions with them aren't necessarily voluntary. Many people don't have a problem with paying for roads, or some semblance of a military, or schools or whatnot.

But the very nature of a state is that if you don't do what it tells you to, you have no recourse. Someone might not put a gun to your head but you have to know that there's no negotiation.

> you have no recourse ... you have to know that there's no negotiation

Bullshit.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/civil-d...

If you perform civil disobedience you can and probably will get arrested. It happens all the time.

Choosing to break an unjust law doesn't mean that a judge will understand the injustice of it and let you go free, nor is there any assurance that jury would acquit you. That's what I mean when I say "there's no negotiation"

Once a police officers decides to arrest you all negotiations have ceased and they may do whatever the law tells them to, or whatever the law lets them get away with, or perhaps a bit more.

Or legal action!

Of course, shooting people over "legal action" sounds crazy, so to make yourself sound better you'd better keep talking about guns.

Edit: Here's a good example of the alternative to shooting people, from Bob Brown, former leader of the Greens here in Australia:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/as-...

a) it works, and b) if you can't find 1000 people who are also willing to come and protest, perhaps your cause isn't that worthwhile?

Because a gun is an excellent example of force, coercion or violence. If someone points a gun at you, you know exactly what it means.

The laws, the courts, everything else is ultimately backed up by violence or the threat of violence. If you are convicted of a crime and you say you don't want to go to jail there are people whose job it is to MAKE you go to jail. If you cooperate, the threat of violence doesn't turn into actual violence but if you do not, it will materialize.

It's probably the easiest way to cut out the myriad different ways that the state will back up it's laws with actions and cut to the chase: you can choose not to comply but you will pay dearly for it.

All of which ignores that there are many different ways of interacting with the state without resorting to violence, in favour of a nice soundbite.

"Libertarian or people pointing guns at you" is a false dichotomy.

Yeah sure there's a million ways but ultimately if you don't do what you're supposed to, that threat is there.

I'm not suggesting that false dichotomy, you are. What I am suggesting is that the state exists in it's current form largely because it does hold the monopoly on violence. The very definition of government is that it's the entity with the monopoly on violence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D64KcZsD82E

How many steps removed does the guy toting the gun have to be in order for the implicit threat of violence to be OK? Zero? Two? Eight? How does the abstraction of that implicit threat make it any more palatable?

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