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Since I haven’t seen any comments on this, I want to note how far it goes. It is a fully general argument against liberal democracy in those places. You may or may not be willing to see Los Angeles as a colony ruled by an appointed, authoritarian governor, but the principle points there.
I am extremely sympathetic here. Reintegration of former prisoners into society should involve the restoration of as many rights as possible as soon as possible, rather than keeping them second- or third-class citizens forever. I am ignorant of a lot of details, so I wouldn’t want to present an uncompromising principle. My casual take is that if you trust him to vote, you should trust him to have guns, and if you don’t trust him to have guns, you shouldn’t trust him to vote.
The common thread is one of respect and trust. Gun control is intended to be, in a very literal sense, disempowering: If you are armed you have the power to do these things; we do not trust you with that power, and so we will disarm you. I think that living in a bureaucratic society has desensitized us to this, because respect is inefficient and illegible to the bureaucracy.
Always has been:
https://media.gettyimages.com/id/748400/photo/lapd-chief-parks-talks-about-rampart-scandal.jpg?s=2048x2048&w=gi&k=20&c=EZuaK2p3GFY7PM046xYeAa9ohN2BirI0T0O0ZCQhZM0=
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I mean the fact that so many (in fact I’d argue most) urban cores have become anarchic places where the law doesn’t matter is a general argument against liberal democracy. One of the hallmarks of a good system is that life where the system has control is better than places where it doesn’t have control. When the places nearest our form of government are places that people are paying as much as they can afford to either protect themselves from or escape, the system sucks. And on that score I’d urge anyone who suggests that modern liberal democracy is the absolute best system of government to walk through the urban core of your nearest city unarmed and alone. It’s genuinely scary in many places where crime and criminal gangs are common and not pissing off the gangs is more important to survival than obeying the law.
Now if you’d go to the “bad old days” of whichever autocratic government you choose, chances are you could walk down the street at least in daylight, didn’t worry so much about crime because that government would not tolerate the kind of store-looting in broad daylight that happens today, or mugging or rape or home robbery. Try any of that in China or North Korea, you’re going to be caught and imprisoned rather quickly.
What city do you live near? One can walk through the core of New York or Philadelphia without running into any criminal gangs. Homeless people, yes. One can even walk through the core of Newark, NJ without problems. All these cities have places you wouldn't want to be, but they aren't the core. This is in contrast to the late 1960s to early 1990s, when the cores of the major cities were indeed no-go zones or something like it.
Obviously there are cities where there's almost nowhere you want to be. Detroit. Camden, NJ. Baltimore (except the touristy waterfront area, and maybe an island around Johns Hopkins if that's been maintained). But those are still the exceptions.
Yeah, downtowns are not my cup of tea, but they’re not very dangerous- and theres no shortage of city neighborhoods you don’t want to go to for crime and danger reasons.
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Yeah I'm totally lost when people talk about inner cities as anarchic wastelands... They're mostly just poor and dirty at worst.
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