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Notes -
Turning to some good news:
Article link
This is a WSJ article about the rise in justified homicides in the US in recent years. Much of it is about "Stand Your Ground Laws." I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of the more lawyer-brained Mottizens on those kind of laws and their proliferation over the past decade or so.
On the culture war angle, this article is maybe the starkest example of "erosion of trust in society" that I've come across. A few of the anecdotes are pretty hair raising. They're cherry picked, I know, but the idea that a kid loses his father over an argument about a a fence and a property line made me sad. The "road range" incident they cover in detail seems like it was unfortunate but when one guy levels a gun at another, there's only one reasonable reaction.
Violence must be tightly controlled for a society to function. This is something that's bone deep in humans. We've developed methods of conflict resolution that fall short of violence for our entire existence as a species. Even within the context of violence, there are various ways of controlling it. Duels and so forth. Even informal ones; basic Bro code dictates that when one guy falls down in a fight, the other one backs off.
But this article hints at the idea that people are zooming past any of that to full lethality. It's impossible to compile the stats to determine if that's actually the case or not, but the larger point remains; in a society with plunging basic trust, you're going to see levels of interpersonal violence spike. How should state laws governing violence respond to this? Stand Your Ground is something I generally still support, but my mind could be changed if simple Bad Neigbor fights end up with more orphans.
This is a helpful demonstration of why I've pretty much completely soured on the idea of people carrying weapons for self-defense. Adding weapons to the mix is almost inherently escalatory, and the cases of genuine self-defense seem to be massively outnumbered by instances of simian chest-beating that got out of hand or someone pulling a gun to win an argument. I'm not sure I believe the survivor's claim, but who acted first in this instance is almost irrelevant. Both of these people decided they needed to bring lethal force as backup to the world's stupidest argument.
edit: I don't really care if you own an M1 Abrams for home defense or an M61 for plinking, but actively carrying seems to be overwhelmingly downside for just about everyone.
Are you sure this isn't just toxoplasma, where johnny the cop stabber being shot during an attempted armed robbery arouses no controversy, and only borderline cases become noted?
Am I sure? No. But I didn't start thinking this because of news reporting on individual homicides. I formed this opinion when looking into DGU statistics* and concluded that many (if not most) self-reported DGUs were really unreported assaults (the wielder having essentially threatened somebody by pulling a gun). And further observing that a large proportion of homicides were the result of arguments between two men who were either armed or had guns near to hand.
And the thing is that I don't think the problem is necessarily a matter of bad faith/lying. In most cases these people are reporting their own actions positively. Likewise, if you get two twitchy, dominance oriented idiots, it's very easy to get a feedback loop where they push each other towards a violent outcome. Whether or not this gets classified as murder or self-defense can come down to nuances of the situation and the caprices of the local justice system.
To be clear, my position is not that most self-defense homicides are actually murder (though I would posit that many are). It is that
a) many self-defense homicides would be easily avoided if neither party were armed (and would not result in a regular homicide instead)
b) the act of carrying a weapon publicly in the name of self-defense is usually a net negative for public order/safety. The genuine self-defense case is outweighed by the 'guys carrying guns for self-defense instead commit crimes or have accidents' problem.
To the second point in particular, the presence of weapons (especially firearms, although it applies to any weapon to some degree) changes the dynamic of any adversarial interaction. Weapons don't cause violence, per se, but they are lubricants to violence (and also make violence deadlier). If some guy is being loud and pushy, that's annoying. If some guy is being loud and pushy and he has a gun, that's scary. And if I have a gun in either of these situations, things can get even messier.
Tangentially, I think it also complicates the task of law enforcement, since LE has to square the circle of high potential of encountering someone armed with the fact that carrying a weapon is not illegal.
*Specifically, John Lott's numbers, which are commonly cited in defense of carrying weapons. The problem is that they rely on self-report and are literally unbelievable.
@birdcromble
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