This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Gun Rights are Civilization Rights
I believe, if you don't trust an independent adult to have a firearm you ultimately don't trust them enough to be in the same civilization or society as you.
There are three categories of people that nearly everyone agrees should not be allowed to own a firearm:
And you'll notice we generally don't trust these categories of people with much of anything. The first two categories of people we insist on them having guardians, or being wards of the state. The third category of people we imprison.
There are two major arguments against gun rights that I think hold the most salience for people.
Argument One: Guns are Dangerous and Unnecessary
They are undoubtedly dangerous. Their purpose is to be a weapon. But there are other things that are dangerous that we don't ban. Cars can be used to achieve mass casualty events. Bombs can be made with some commonly available materials. These other things are rarely labelled as "unnecessary" though. There are also plenty of "unnecessary" things that we don't ban. Plenty of purely recreational items and services exist. Jet skis, theme parks, cruises, large houses, etc (some of these things are even dangerous). Only the most hardcore socialists and communists want to take away all the fun toys.
There is an argument that gun advocates make that gun rights are necessary to keep the government in check. I generally like this argument, and think it is demonstrated by the level of free speech rights in places like Great Britain where guns have been successfully banned for most private "citizens".
But I'll grant for the sake of argument that guns are totally "unnecessary". And that it is the special combination of Dangerous+Unnecessary that leads people to want to ban it. Since other categories of things like Safe+Unnecessary or Dangerous+Necessary go largely unbanned and untouched.
I think the widespread existence of many "Dangerous+Necessary" demonstrates that we can trust most adults to handle dangerous things in a responsible way. We can't trust them 100% of the time. And we can't trust that there won't sometimes be negligence.
The "unnecessary" component of the argument is also a scary slippery slope to be on. People have different desires and wants. There are I think two steady states of being in regards to "unnecessary" things. Either you let everyone decide for themselves on every topic. Or you have a central authority that decides on everything for everyone. If you are willing to bite that bullet, keep in mind that it will not necessarily be you deciding what is necessary and what is not. I believe it is fully possible for such a bureaucracy to mercilessly strip every single joy out of life, and they'll fully believe they are making your life better. You'll eventually be sad enough that you'll come to the second main argument against gun rights:
Argument Two: Guns enable easier suicide
I don't have the data on hand, and I don't really want to get into an argument about said data. But it is my understanding that there is a noticeable and undeniable effect of guns on male suicide rates. This makes intuitive sense to me. Many methods of suicide require you to actively torture yourself for a short time period, drowning, hanging, cutting yourself, jumping from a very tall building etc. Or they present a chance of a failed suicide attempt that leaves you heavily injured, like jumping from not high enough, or getting in front of a moving vehicle, or pills. Guns make the attempt a more sure thing, and present an option that does not involve torturing yourself.
Something about this whole approach to suicide prevention feels very wrong. On an individual basis I think you should not commit suicide, and if someone can be talked out of suicide they generally should be talked out of it. But there are also some cases where I believe it is very cruel to prevent suicide. Medical cases for sure. But there are also people who have drawn a shit straw in life in too many ways. A bit too dumb, constant low level bad health, unable to figure out how to love or be loved, etc. A life of quiet misery. They should have an exit option, and they should have one that doesn't require them to torture themselves on the way out.
Civilization is one big nebulous agreement we have that helps us get along. But I think saying "you can't leave this agreement without being tortured", is just evil.
Forbidding gun ownership means forbidding exit, and it means you lack trust in others to such a degree that it breaks down many of the assumptions we already have about the rights and responsibilities of adults in society.
Some of the implications of my argument that I am already aware of and fine with:
Some areas that I left unaddressed to save space:
Edit: lots of good responses. I've read all of them but I'm unlikely to respond. Most of the responses were better thought out than my original post. I sometimes just have ideas or arguments kicking around in my head that need to be spilled onto paper. And I think better in response to what others say so this has helped me refine my thoughts on the subject a great deal. That synthesis of thought might end up in a future thread.
I do not think that UK libel laws have much if anything to do with their restrictions on gun ownership.
More broadly, I think that the idea to use guns to keep the government in check was fine in 1800 but today is just laughable. Since world war one, the wartime capabilities of states and what US citizens are allowed to own have greatly diverged. How is your semi AR15 with a ten rounds mag going to fare against a predator drone or a tank? In the very best case, you would be fighting a protracted war against the federal government. If you win, it looks like Mao winning his civil war, if you lose, it looks like Hamas in Gaza.
Of course, on the basis of "things should not be illegal if they are fun, even if they are not necessary", we can legalize further things.
For example, I imagine that hand grenades are much fun. Or landmines. Watch the stupid coyotes explode when they trespass on your property. Contact poisons are fun. Radioactive substances are fun. So is building your own nuclear reactor. And if we really want to counterbalance the federal military advantage, why not allow citizens to start their own nuclear weapons program? Provided they are not minors, mentally retarded or have demonstrated poor impulse control, of course.
In a country where most people hunt their dinner, guns are a necessity. But this is not sustainable in any but the most sparsely settled areas.
Different people naturally have different ideas about the tradeoffs between usefulness (which includes being fun) and danger. Some want to ban any knives with blades longer than 3cm. Some would be fine if you could just buy hand grenades at the hardware store.
For the most part, people agree with the level of regulation around cars, which are immensely practical in most areas but also account for a huge fraction of accidental manslaughters. So you need a driver's license, your vehicle has to be designed according to certain standards and get regular safety inspections, and you need to obey all lot of different rules while on a public road. This is all very bothersome and expensive, but it also keeps these manslaughter cases on a manageable level, compared to a counterfactual level where everyone could build their own vehicle and try to learn to drive it unsupervised.
My estimate is that in most of Europe (e.g. Germany), getting a hunting license (including the rights to own rifles and a pistol, but not the right to bear them outside your home except when on hunting trips), plus the costs of a gun safe is still somewhat cheaper than the costs of a driver's license. The costs to get licensed to own a gun for sports shooting are lower (no need to demonstrate knowledge of tracking down an injured paper target), but also might require a few years of membership in a shooting club. Few people get the license to carry loaded weapons in public, typically this is restricted to on-duty employees of security companies.
You're making me break out the old /k/ copypasta (how do I make the quote one continuous block I don't know how to internet):
will yield
On the topic
I think that your model of tyranny is very different from my model of tyranny. Your model seems to be that the government will be replaced by some entity universally loathed by the civilian population. I think that this exceedingly unlikely to happen -- the ayatollah will not become the US president through some legal loophole and a bad SCOTUS ruling.
Any tyranny which will happen will have buy-in from one of the big political tribes. Probably they will have at least 10% enthusiastic supporters, 20% who still prefer it to whatever the previous status quo was, 40% who are indifferent to uncomfortable and 20-30% who are very opposed. Of course, they also need enough legitimacy so that the military will not oppose them, so all three branches of the federal government will have to back whatever tyrannical actions they are taking.
Possibly tyrannical actions could include violating freedom of speech by making all the arguments of the opposing side illegal hate speech ("mentioning Epstein/migrant crime is illegal"), de-naturalizing and deporting 5% of citizens, effectively abolishing democracy (i.e. an amendment to the effect of "like the pope appointing cardinals, the president can appoint any number of congressmen for life, who will vote alongside their elected colleagues") and so forth.
The 10% strongly in favor of whatever tyrannical acts the feds are committing can probably be recruited as brown- or rainbow-shirts -- earning a nice federal paycheck and fighting with state of the art weapons and sleeping in guarded camps while fighting for your beliefs seems appealing enough.
For the anti-tyranny side (which will still mostly be fighting for tribal object level goals rather than against tyranny per se), things look different. Neither tribe has much of a culture of shooting federal officers or servicemen. The rebels will not make much money, they will fight with civilian weapons and sleep either in the woods (and hope that they are not spotted by thermal drones) or in the houses of sympathizers (who are risking their lives for them).
Also, fighting a guerrilla / protracted war is extremely stomach-churning. Basically, it is a competition of who is better at terrorizing the civilian population into compliance. The government will have an advantage here because they can rely on the trappings of legitimate power. Their goons can afford to have nice show trials where people who provided material aid to the rebels are convicted and then executed -- or just disappear people. It is a lot easier to make a non-psychopathic man arrest a random civilian countryman and put them on a truck than it is to make them shoot them on the spot. To out-terrorize the tyrant, the outgunned rebels would have to murder civilian collaborators without any of these trappings of legitimacy.
(Then you have the problem that tyranny typically comes in thin salami slices, and there is no good Schelling point where most potential rebels would agree that shooting at feds is indicated. Especially since every dictatorship aims to make it hard to create a common knowledge that a certain fraction of the population is willing to violently oppose the government. One might argue that this kind of coordination problem has been solved with the internet, but the internet will be the first thing to go when things heat up. I do not think that most of the population being addicted to their smartphones and social media is going to be helpful for an uprising against a tech-savvy government which can turn the former into bugs and the latter into a database of political leanings. And then coordination of uprisings would have to byzantine fault tolerant, because it is in the interest of the state to lure the most gung ho rebels to start early because they are mistaken about the level of support they have and take them out.)
The US won their independence war and the Taliban won against the US because the loser was in a position where they could afford to lose. If the fall of Kabul had meant that the top 1k people in the US government were beheaded, the US would have paid whatever price required in money or brutality to keep that from happening.
A domestic rebellion is such an existential threat to the people in charge. A federal government could not decide to pull out of California or Texas the way the US pulled out of Afghanistan, especially not due to irregular warfare -- once they have established that states can get rid of them by being a pain in the ass for a few years, people in other states might try to emulate that. Better to set a precedent where they glass the cities and turn the rest of the state into Gaza before retreating.
So while I agree that small arms are ultimately essential to control a country, I also think that any likely tyranny could also field enough goons to outcompete the very small fraction of citizens who are willing to give up their creature comforts to fight ruthlessly in an uphill battle.
--
A different argument can be made that uprisings can also serve to deter unpopular measures even if they are ultimately crushed simply by imposing costs. This might be a steelman of BLM: property destruction, unlike peaceful demonstrations hit the government where it hurts them (a bit, at least -- it is not like the US would declare bankruptcy over one or two billion dollars). The convictions of the four cops involved in the Floyd killing (whatever you think of their culpability) certainly was helped along by the fact that any verdict other than guilty would have resulted in another billion dollars going down the drain.
Still, I would argue that gun ownership was not central to the George Floyd protests or their prevention. 19 people killed is an extremely small number when compared to a billion of property damage. The state was not interested in escalation because they (correctly, IMO) feared a snowball effect: shooting looters would have fanned the flames. BLM, for their part was also happy to stick looting. Mostly unopposed looting is much more lucrative than deciding to murder cops or whites and bleeding to death after a shootout.
Also active guerrilla warfare success tends to rely on pre-existing networks of ethnicity, religion, family or whatever else. Plus significant foreign support. You can red/blue tribe all you want but these are ideological causes and not literal tribes.
Americans are not for the most part built like that. Red Dawn arguments are generally a spurious circlejerk.
I don't know about that. First, there are the literal ethnic tribes in America that, while not all on the same page ideologically (to say the least), would all form independent loci of insurrection. See, e.g., roof Koreans, Sikh convenience store owners, etc.
Then you have the thousands of gun clubs, thousands of veterans groups, thousands of local police departments, and hundreds of tight-knit, rural red-kneck communities, all armed to the teeth. And that's before we get to any of the actual, honest-to-god militias and private military contractors around the country, or the sizeable proportion of the US military and national guards (or state guards like Texas's, which literally just won a standoff against the federal government over border policy just recently) that would surely defect against a tyrannical central government. Or the many thousands of veterans with first-hand experience in how to conduct an insurgency.
These may not be ethnic tribal groups, but the US has no shortage of well-armed men with deep fraternal ties to each other, often formed on literal battlefields.
Of course, many of these guys are weekend warriors who would melt into mush at the first sign of real oppression, but don't forget that America has spent most of the past 25 years at war, and it doesn't take that many people to actively resist before a territory becomes ungovernable. Look at the results when less than 1% of the Iraqi population actively participated in the insurgency against the US. Or the infamous statistic of how supposedly only 3% of Americans took up arms against the British during the American Revolution.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link