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Notes -
Epistemic status: cherry-picked predictions for ego stroking.
We are now nearly four years past the beginning of the George Floyd era of BLM activism, so I wanted to check my initial impressions and positions, to see how I'd done in retrospect. This is from the old site, in the immediate aftermath of the Minneapolis riots, and it was interesting to see how people's concerns and predictions played out. Must have been in a cautious mood that day.....
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/gq50mo/comment/fsbmtje/?context=3
Core here:
On the other hand, some people Bought Large Mansions, and I imagine otherwise benefitted from millions poured into the myriad of BLM-affiliated NGOs. So it's not a total waste, a lot of people got worse off, but a small number of people got much better. That's called "politics". Or "community organizing"? Not sure about the proper terminology here.
I've spent a lot of time bashing BLM over the years. I think it's because it was such a waste. A great moment for change and reform was wasted, turned racial and political, for division instead of unity. All that energy was spun by the political, corporate and media machines into bizarre ideological idiocy. rather than sober analysis and practical reform efforts. "Defund the police" my ass. Just like Trumpism, just like Occupy, just like Code Pink. By signal boosting the crazies and granting them legitimacy, any chance for reform was pissed away in a fury of "Black Trans Lives Matter" and "Showing up to work on time is white supremacy".
A little prodding and they all promptly delegitimize themselves (at least in the media/popular imagination).
I'll echo @JarJarJedi here. What is the problem BLM might have reasonably addressed with reasonable methods? That two digits of unarmed people are killed per year by US police? That blacks have worse social outcomes than whites?
Those issue are unsolvable without ripping up the basic social constitution. And to be fair to progressives, that's what they've been trying. They've been trying to gut the 2nd and disarm the populace, decreasing violent crime and making police-civilian interactions safer. They've been trying to decrease the number and funding of the militarized police. They've been try to enact DEI to give status and wealth to blacks regardless of meritocratic outcome. They've been trying keep blacks out of jail by non-prosecution.
Of course, the costs they'd inflict on society to achieve their ends is unconscionable, and their methods wildly contradict my personal values. But what is the approach you'd recommend that's not "bizarre" or "crazy" but would actually put a dent in these problems?
I disagree with that. The problem of warrior police is addressable by other means (and it is obvious that people suffering the most from the warrior police are the poor people, both justifiably - violent crime usually happens around poor people - and not justifiably, as it's safer to victimize poor people, they wouldn't hire an expensive lawyer and the chance of them playing golf with your boss is none). There are many approaches, some (like not prosecuting minor crimes) more stupid than others, but I think there are ways to approach it without destroying the whole society.
The problem of worse social outcomes is harder to solve - but I think there are fruitful ideas how to approach it too. The thing is if black people start to have the same social outcomes as white people, they also start exhibiting same voting patterns as white people. And that's something that would be very bad for some of the current politicians. Granted, not all of them - some very white places are happy to elect very woke politicians - but overall the shift will be pretty noticeable, I think.
Oh no, they've been trying to do only the first part - the disarming. It doesn't decrease violent crime any (as it is obvious from the fact the places with the strictest gun laws still feature a ton of violent crime) and it doesn't make interaction with the police any safer as the police still has guns.
Which, of course, directly contradicts the previous sentence - if you get less police, you get more crime. Also, for each specific policeman, each interaction would be more dangerous - both because of more crime and because they can't rely on suppressing the criminals by sheer mass anymore, thus laying the burden on the shoulders of the individual policeman - who would, as expected, by more likely to feel threatened, and thus more likely to respond violently to the perceived threat.
Except of course DIE does not work this way - you can't make a drug-infested ghetto into a middle-class suburb by adding two more VP DIEs to Goldman Sachs roster. You can make those two black persons that are appointed VP DIEs at Goldman Sachs to move out of the ghetto - but there are many many more people in ghetto than VPs in Goldman Sachs, so that approach is obviously not scalable. Also, the opposite of meritocracy is dependence - and I don't think there's any example of hand-outing a populace into prosperity.
Which, again, contradicts the first sentence - and on the other side, makes the lives of non-criminal blacks so much more hell. While subtly suggesting to them that they shouldn't be bothering doing anything socially useful - since meritocracy is dead anyway - but instead should try their hand in something that brings easy money and not prosecuted anymore. Thus completing the circle of societal destruction.
The worst part is not even that, but that the bulk of these costs is borne by the same people they are supposedly "helping". As I noted at the start - they are promoting a tiny minority well beyond what they deserve (those VP DIEs) at the cost of further demoting and destroying the society for all the rest.
It’s funny that this is obvious to you. I think it makes total sense the increasing the likelihood that someone has a gun makes police more jumpy. You might be interested in this graph I made in 2021
/images/1681087903738361.webp
Edit: found the other version of my graph with slightly different axes if it's interesting to anyone: link
In most interactions with the police, they happen in circumstances where a knife is as deadly (or more deadly) than a gun. So if the police are trained to shoot you for twitching wrong, they'd shoot you in any case (also they can't rely on laws to ensure the absence of guns, since they are already dealing with a person that they suspect is a criminal). Of course, there are marginal cases but in the general picture you can't gun control you way out of it unless you disarm the whole nation (good luck doing it to Red states) and Mexico too (because we don't have the Southern border anymore, so guess what would happen if the price of a gun on internal US market shoots up?). You can compare US to Japan as long as you want, but US is not Japan, and never will be.
Obviously every policy only acts on the margins. I'm not arguing it will make police shootings go to zero, or even that it's a good policy. Only that I think your original claim
is wrong.
To be honest I don't like focusing on police shootings. The fact that people whose job is to apprehend dangerous criminals shoot people 20 times more than the national average doesn't strike me as obviously reprehensible, especially since 89% of the time they (the police) were being threatened, attacked, or having a gun pointed at them.
But I absolutely believe reducing gun ownership would reduce fatal police shootings.
You're welcome to make conjectures like
I don't really have an RCT to solidly refute you, but so long as the only data I've seen supports the idea that greater gun accessibility correlates strongly with more fatal police shootings, I'm going to go with the data over your personal beliefs on how policies affect police interactions.
If you mean "reducing it to the levels of Japan" - yes, it probably would. Except that's not happening. As I said, US is not Japan, and no amount of magic thinking will turn US into Japan. You just can't do that. What you can do however, is to make gun ownership much more expensive and cumbersome - they'd been trying in California for years - so that for the lawful citizen, it would be almost un-attainable, while for a criminal, whose very life frequently depends on it, it still would be worth it, despite the costs. Which would still require the police to carry guns, since the criminals still have them. Thus, you would keep the problem around, while hurting the very people you have set out to protect - the lawful citizens (since the criminals, being the only people carrying guns, would seek to recover the costs of having them by imposing those costs on the lawful citizens with impunity). You see, you can't just wave a magic wand and transform the society wholesale. It moves in certain ways responding to the certain incentives, and has to move gradually. And any move directed at reducing gun ownership per se, now in US, would make the lawful citizens strictly worse without improving anything. It won't turn US into Japan.
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