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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.
The furor over "stand your ground" remains silly, as it's not really implicated in most of these situations. Bashing SYG is a way of introducing a presumption of flight to every civilian interaction, which is ludicrous.
The fundamental question being asked seems to be if self defense is worth some single-digit number of edge cases per year in a country with more guns than people.
The answer is yes.
The better question is how much better or worse off the country would be with several thousand more "justified homicides" per year. Is not having to uselessly prosecute a lifetime felon for the umpteenth time worth some fractional enabling of a more tragic scenario? What's the optimal ratio?
We need something different and more proactive. When a guy has been picked up by the cops for random violence and felonies and given the catch and release run-around for the umpteenth time, maybe the state should give him a shit test. Ask him point blank if he's released if he will punch/stab/shoot some one for dissing him or stepping on his new sneakers. If he answers yes throw him in the slammer for a minimum of 2 years and then ask him again before he gets out.
Same for racialized(I hate that word) violence. Is whitey the devil who should be killed, quick and easy yes/no question. Is the solution to not getting your EBT on time a justified looting? Congrats, you just bought yourself a trip to prison.
Two years divided by democratic prosecutors and judges is immediate release. There's no point in multiplying laws that won't be enforced and sentences that won't be carried out. We cannot change the laws nor the enforcement, but we can carry a gun.
Not in blue states we can't. (Though technically NJ has Castle Doctrine, I wouldn't bet on it in court. And the word it uses is "premises", which practically speaking isn't going to include curtilage even though it normally does)
Do not quote laws to those with Glocks.
The cops have Glocks too. And once you've been shipped to state prison for violating firearms laws (or homicide laws), you won't have a Glock and you'll be wishing you took your chances with the criminals on the outside. Sometimes your choice is taking a beating (or stabbing or shooting) from a single criminal on the outside, or being sent inside and taking beating after beating (and worse) from as many criminals as care to. Even if you're dead, you're better off than that.
We all have choices to make in life. One can, with a bit of effort, be either above or below the law. The law is for those who cannot make their own.
One can be below the law with not too much effort, on the anarcho- side of anarcho-tyranny. It's a mean, impoverished, but quite possibly freer existence, at least if you have no internal moral constraints on theft and violence. If you do have such constraints you're stuck following the rules but not benefiting from them, which just leads to an unlamented death in short order.
To be above the law requires considerably more. Great work if you can get it, though.
In between, you're on the tyranny side of anarcho-tyranny. Step out of line even once on one of the things those with power care about, and you're headed for the unlamented death. This is enforced in all sorts of ways -- New Jersey's draconian penalties for a law-abiding citizen carrying a gun is only one of them. Drunk driving law is another -- doing that gets a lot of people into a cycle where they drive illegally (because they live and work somewhere you have to drive), get busted, go to jail, lose their job, have their license revocation extended, get out, get another job, repeat, for a very long time.
Others are less obvious; over on another board someone said they once managed to find an employee by sifting through the recruiter's discards, and found one where the employee had been rejected because he'd been previously fired. That employee didn't realize what everyone knows but most will deny: in most of the white collar world, below executive level, to be fired is to be unhireable, so you'd better learn to conceal it.
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If you only break one law at a time, carrying a gun everywhere is unlikely to result in legal trouble, because cops are sympathetic and don't want to do paperwork. Obviously won't work if you insist on driving with no license plates while high.
I believe you underestimate the anti-gun fervor of the state of NJ. They'd rather imprison 100 otherwise-law-abiding gun carriers than put one murderer in jail.
You could be right. It's possible. But what are the odds that the cops admit to noticing an otherwise-law-abiding concealed carrier?
I have been told that the trad caths of LA and Baltimore made local anarcho-tyranny work in their favor, and this was an open secret among the nearby ghetto dwellers- related to me by members of these churches. NJ might be worse than those places. It's certainly a theoretical possibility. But 'don't break the law when you're breaking the law' is generally a good enough kludge for avoiding legal trouble.
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