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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?
Forgetting the optimal ratio, what is the actual ratio? Like what fraction of individuals killed in what was ultimately judged to be self defense fall into the bucket of "basically OK guy, got in a fight with his neighbor over a dumb thing" vs "hot-headed asshole who nevertheless mostly had his shit together and contributed somewhat to society" vs "degenerate/parasite/criminal that never held down a decent job or did anything for anyone else"?
I'm not sure whether if these three categories are really the right dividing point, but they seem like at least a good start at "lifetime felon" vs "bad neighbor".
My assumption is that most of them were lifelong lowlives and petty criminals who never committed a particularly serious crime(statistically the vast majority of lowlives). You can be a bad person and not deserve to die; we don't have the death penalty for shoplifting.
Serious criminals mostly don't get particularly close to normie gun owners. They kill each other at high rates, sure, but that's not generally counted as self defense.
Yeah. I do wonder how many were productive auto mechanics or bartender or whatnot vs being non-productive.
We used to have jobs for those people that didn’t require reforming them wholesale to let them contribute to society.
Crappy jobs still exist. You can go work in a warehouse or a commercial kitchen or changing oil or doing construction(and approximately 100% of white roofers, concrete guys, drywallers, etc have been to jail more than once). These are productive employments. Society is a lot more expensive than it used to be, but an underdiscussed story of the 2020s is how crappy jobs can never get enough people now.
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