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This weekend, I visited my friendly local gun store, idly browsing for shotguns and learning about interstate purchases. Then I drove to my parents and spent the evening playing board games. It was a nice night with good food, drink and company.
Meanwhile, five minutes up the highway, some lunatic was murdering random strangers at a local shopping mall.
No one I know was killed. No one I know personally was present—though a friend of a friend was. I didn’t hear about it until the next morning. Big nothingburger, right? And yet I’ve been to that mall. I’ve been to the bar across the street with my coworkers. If I’d had an errand or three to run, instead of visiting my family, I might have been cowering in a storeroom or staring at a splatter of brains on the sidewalk.
I’m not linking to any articles. Partly for the thinnest veneer of opsec, partly because media coverage is predictably terrible. All sympathetic pictures and, as we’d say here, recruiting for a cause. Nothing good will come of this. Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
It’s not like I can do anything about it. I don’t know what I would actually expect to work, and if I did, how could it be brought about? State, even local politics is as tribal as it gets. Enjoy your a la carte selection of two options, and one of them is out of stock.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
If you had a free hand, what WOULD you do about it? Other than police state stuff (in which I include effective gun control), I don't see what you can do. Having the FBI pay special attention to Hispanic neo-Nazis probably won't work.
If we posit the world where the guns are removed, you've just made it so that physical prowess is solely determinant of success in violent encounters.
Which is to say, you're making females less able to resist male attackers, or allowing organized groups to terrorize individuals more freely, or make it harder for the old and infirm to defend themselves.
This leaves aside the generally observed tendency towards government tyranny become gradually (or suddenly) more harsh against disarmed populations.
And of course probably going to see a rise in Cars as tool of mass homicide
Japan has virtually no violence to speak of at any rate, so I don't know what you'd even expect to measure, there.
But suffice it to say, there is a reason The Yakuza can function so easily. They have the capacity for coordinated violence, and your average citizen has no means to resist them even if they wanted to.
Of course, in Mexico the Cartels also function pretty easily but engage in far, FAR more violence than the Yakuza do... despite guns also being nominally banned there.
So perhaps the problem is more that Mexican culture and Japanese Culture have different norms around the use of violence.
This gets to the REAL point at issue: the driving force of violence in any given nation is NOT the availability of weapons.
I'm going to resist my first instinct to accuse you of bad faith and just ask:
How is a nation actively choosing to separate itself from a government that it no longer wishes to participate in, and to thus secede from participation in said government "pro-tyranny?"
By this literal, exact logic the original American revolution was also 'pro-tyranny.'
Seems like a good reason to allow pro-democracy forces to keep weapons? I dunno what examples you're thinking of in particular.
North Korea, 2009:
"N. Korea enacts rules on regulating firearms"
Venezuela, 2012:
"Venezuela bans private gun ownership"
Afghanistan, 2021:
"Taliban in Afghan capital Kabul start collecting weapons from civilians"
Saudi Arabia, 2023 (timely!)
"Saudi Arabia announces new gun laws, restrictions on ownership"
Even if we don't assume that banning guns = slide into tyranny... the actual tyrants seem to think that banning guns is helpful to their ends.
Here's a fun exercise for you, can you point out any country that is heavily tyrannical and has very little democracy or protection of basic civil rights... and yet allows broad gun ownership?
Seems almost facially obvious to me that banning civilian-held guns is a DEFINING FEATURE of tyrannical nations, and that ONLY places with functional democracies (e.g. Switzerland) end up having permissive guns laws.
So? It would be absurd to suggest never taking any action on one cause of an ill just because it happened not to be the most important cause. As long as it's a significant factor it's worth doing something about.
I don't think he was saying the action of secession was pro-tyranny, merely that rebellions can incidentally also be 'pro-tyranny', which is hard to dispute in the case of the U.S. Civil War, given what was being fought over.
If it's not the most significant factor, then almost by definition you shouldn't be prioritizing it.
My position is that there are at least a couple more significant factors that are studiously ignored when it comes to this issue.
I don't think there was any stated intention for the Confederate States to extend their authority over any other nations, so hard to claim they were 'tyrannical' with regards to the North, nor that they were somehow flouting the actual laws of the country at the time.
And to the extent they were tyrannizing their own people, well you're hardly going to suggest that slaves enjoyed expansive gun rights, are you?
i.e., my point, that tyrannical powers generally prefer disarmed populaces.
This circles back to our comments above on tractability.
No but the point is that an armed population, if they are ever able to resist the state, will not always be doing so to benefit of the population. As another commentor has observed, the latter and post-Reconstruction era South would have been a much freer place were the entire population disarmed.
Maybe true, but I don't think it holds any lessons for modern day America.
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