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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.
As somebody from a country where civilian firearm ownership is barely a thing I broadly agree. The vanishingly small likelihood I or somebody I know having a firearm available for self defense in a time of need seems to not outweigh the additional risk that comes with firearms being way more likely to be present in random aggressive interactions.
You can keep your beliefs about the relative prevalence of these things, and I have no interest in challenging your perspective there. But there's something interesting to notice, which I hope you'll take an interest in exploring.
Obviously one could say the opposite of your statement, with "The vanishingly small likelihood that I or somebody I know gets themselves justifiably shot seems to not outweigh the additional risk that comes with not having a firearm available for self defense in time of need."
The interesting part is about what this choice of what to minimize and what to focus on says about our implicit worldviews.
What experiences have you had, or not had, which leads you to the opposite? Is it easy to imagine losing your cool "randomly", and ending up shot? Easy to imagine people you care about doing the same? Hard to imagine anyone being genuinely above that? Have you had any experiences where you or someone you care about were threatened by a predator of either the two or four legged variety? If so, is it hard to imagine the situation being safe if the "good guys" were armed?
In spirit of going first, I have a hard time imagining myself or anyone I care about getting shot by someone who can then pull off a self defense claim. I have had experiences, and known people to have experiences, where there's serious threat of harm in the ways that firearms can stop. Given how these events played out it's easy to imagine having firearms making things worse too, but there's still a clear possibility that not having that option could prove disastrous. Naturally, this leads to me being sympathetic to the idea that we should allow firearms for self defense, and if someone gets themselves shot by being "randomly aggressive" in ways that puts an innocent person in reasonable fear of serious injury or death... so be it?
What about you?
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