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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29984 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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An Indian Abroad in Thailand

After a pretty enjoyable time in Phuket and Pattaya, I find myself on the highway heading back to Bangkok, and ended up deciding to pen some of my observations along the way.

To wit, I visited Thailand while being quite ignorant about it. As a holiday destination, it's become quite cliché as a haunt for upper middle class Indians, and my residual snobbery kept me from really looking into the place or culture.

If I had been asked about my knowledge before the journey, I'd have scratched my head and gone, "Uh, ladyboys, beaches, Buddhist temples? Weren't they once conquered by some of the more entrepreneurial South Indian kings? (🇮🇳 Jai Hind!)"

Which isn't wrong, per se, but hardly comprehensive.

Since I don't want to bore you with the travelogues of a homebody, I'll stick to simply listing things that surprised my preconceived notions:

Firstly, I was taken aback by how fair Thai people tend to be. I thought they'd be swarthier, akin to Malaysians or Indonesians, but quite a large fraction could easily pass as Caucasian if not for their facial features. The ones who are really tanned seem to be people who work out under the sun, having skin tones I expect.

I find this rather perplexing, given that Thailand is at a latitude lower than the bulk of India, and their counterparts are unapologetically brown.

Secondly, they're piss poor at speaking English. In my entire time here, I have yet to encounter one person fluent in the language, even at places catering to tourists, including at the 5 star hotels I lounged at. The majority only understand a few words or key phrases, about enough to herd tourists or figure out if you want a taxi or a handjob.

I reckon this is due to colonialism, or rather a lack of it. Thailand is practically unique in SEA in never having been conquered by a European power, which usually inculcates more interest or tradition in speaking English or other tongues. Certainly the modal Indian speaks a great deal better English than the Thai do. I'd have expected to be doing somewhat better, but I guess they're getting by with tourists, so kudos to them.

On the topic of tourists, there are loads of Indians here. I mean tens of thousands at the minimum, while Phuket was more cosmopolitan, Pattaya's beaches are 50:50 Indian to local Thai. This translates to about 20 Indian restaurants in spitting distance of my hotel, and tour guides so used to wrangling Indians that they picked up some Hindi and play Bollywood playlists on boats.

Another fixture are the hordes of Russian tourists, to the extent that most of the signage in the cities include Cyrillic. I'm given to understand that a large fraction are draft dodgers laying low in a low COL locale, while sipping cocktails and getting good head. Plenty of families too, either in toto or just vacationing. (A question to @DaseindustriesLtd, what is it with Russian men and the most unflattering buzzcuts?)

Thailand is really clean. Now, as an Indian I admittedly have low standards, but I did spend a while in the UK, so I have a fresh benchmark to judge by. The streets are spotless, the beaches largely free of rubbish, which is a surprise because Indian tourists aren't known for their civic sense, at least back in India.

The roads are in great condition, to the extent that I need reminder that I'm not in a First World country. People keep their cars in great condition, and love ricing them out out too. Traffic is quite civil, and people are quite loathe to use their horns, whereas that's the microwave background radiation of Indian cities.

But the most perplexing thing is the sheer number of pickup trucks here. Seriously, I thought I ended up catching a flight to Texas, a quarter of the cars here are pickups, and I have yet to see the majority being used as utility vehicles. It's not like they're lugging anything of note around, most of them seem to be people carriers and nothing more. (One can argue that's the case back in the States too, at least I haven't seen any truck nuts!)

When it comes to culture, well, I've never seen a more permissive society in my life! Sex work is absolutely normalized, and I find myself scratching my head as to how this state of affairs arose when the country lies so close to significantly more conservative societies to the west and east.

I managed to ditch my parents back at the hotel, and went on a walking tour of the red light district literally next door to where we were staying (an upscale place mind you). There was a street about 300 meters long jam packed with titty bars, strip clubs and miscellaneous hangouts for ladies of the night. Far from the bars being a front for prostitution, the prostitution was a front for the bars. It was like a buffet table of women beckoning you over to grab a slice of ass, they're just sitting on bar stools and trying to outdo each other, or taking turns dancing (rather shittily) on the streets. Now, my parents would probably disown me if I took a hooker back to my hotel room next to theirs, not to mention I have a girlfriend, so it was all look and don't touch for me. I did get a hoot out of seeing several pairs of Russian women scrambling to get through the street, probably on the way back to their hotel. They were blushing so hard you could grill a steak on their cheeks.

Funnier still were the morbidly obese Western sexpats trying to hire a bike to drive them back, when they got on the back behind the tiny Thai drivers, the vehicles often threatened to rear up in fright.

Weed's been legalized here since 2019, but apparently smoking it anywhere in public is a crime. Given that I can never be arsed to roll joints myself, and I could get bhaang for about a hundredth the price of edibles there, I didn't really bother.

If you check my post history, you'll find my tale of attending a cabaret show, one run by ladyboys. And I genuinely couldn't tell that they weren't real women, despite straining my eyes trying. Is there something about the Asian physiognomy that makes it easier for them to pass? The closest thing I found to a tell was the waists, but even then they were well within the range for natal women. The railway community in the West take note, that's how you pass with flying colors.

A lot of the country seems really familiar to Indians. The vegetation is largely the same, albeit we haven't been graced with durian (which doesn't smell nearly as bad as I've heard, not that I tried it). It's funny to see Westerners fawn over elephants, monkeys and sedated tigers, when I was yawning hard at the idea. It was supremely funny to have a tour guide stop our boat to show off mudskippers, as if "walking fish" were a big deal. You can get some mild deja vu from seeing the clear influence of Indian culture in Thailand, though the vocabulary has diverged so far from the old Pali and Sanskrit roots that it's not really legible. Their Buddhist and Hindu syncretic religion is recognizable at the least, but they don't really seem all that religious.

Overall, I've been quite impressed with the place, and I can only hope that Indian cities resemble their Thai cousins. That's still quite an ask, since Thailand is nowhere near as crowded as India, there's room to breathe. But they're far better positioned to appeal to tourists, and I wager that it's only the massive injections of cash into their economy that allow them to have such a higher standard of living.

I'd be tempted to live here, if there was anything to do outside cater to tourists, and it wasn't abominably hot and muggy throughout the year, not to mention that you can't really get by with English alone. Still, I see why it's so popular with Western expats, and Chang beer is certainly everything /r/5555555 hyped it up to be.

(Hi mods, if you're reading this, I'd like to say that the spoiler tags don't work on my device, namely Chrome for Android. It seems the tagging features aren't working either)

You might want to open a bug report on the github project or something. That's the best way I can think of to get attention on the issue. That or ping Zorba, but I doubt he wants that to become the normal way to report issues. 😉

Is there something about the Asian physiognomy that makes it easier for them to pass?

I mean they've had literal generations of work on the practice + generally there's less curvature to SEA girls + I'd imagine if you were Thai born you'd probably be able to pick up on a host of micro-indicators that aren't evident as a foreigner.

On the latter, I don't have any difficulty in identifying transwomen of any other race or ethnicity. Black, white, Indian, all glaringly obvious to me.

It's possible that there's selection effects at at, with the less passing ladyboys not making the cut, but I still doubt it.

because Indian tourists aren't known for their civic sense, at least back in India

I've started thinking that civic sense is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a large enough critical mass around you maintains the environment in a certain way, then even the least-cultured person starts spontaneously behaving in a "cultured" manner. It's why ghettos are so toxic to nations that seek eventual integration.

Funnier still were the morbidly obese Western sexpats trying to hire a bike to drive them back, when they got on the back behind the tiny Thai drivers, the vehicles often threatened to rear up in fright.

Despite being the least unexpected of all the things that surprised me on this thread, something about this is rather disgusting.

To be fair, only a few of them were ridiculously fat, the majority were otherwise unremarkable balding middle aged gents out to live their dreams now they have more money than hair.

(A question to @DaseIndustries, what is it with Russian men and the most unflattering buzzcuts?)

@DaseindustriesLtd

Inquiring minds want to know!

If you check my post history, you'll find my tale of attending a cabaret show, one run by ladyboys. And I genuinely couldn't tell that they weren't real women, despite straining my eyes trying. Is there something about the Asian physiognomy that makes it easier for them to pass? The closest thing I found to a tell was the waists, but even then they were well within the range for natal women. The railway community in the West take note, that's how you pass with flying colors.

In addition to selection effects (non-passing ladyboys wouldn't attract much clientele), you've probably been less exposed to Thai faces and so have less practice distinguishing males and females. Funnily enough, it goes both ways; I'm a trans woman and when I visited Asian countries (e.g. Malaysia, not known for its wokeness) I got called ma'am a lot more than back home in the West.

I already speculated about selection effects in a previous comment, but I still find the notion dubious.

Firstly, I'm not aware of any similar performance in the West (or India for the matter) where a large number of trans performers pass so convincingly. Even the transwomen touted as passing do so largely in posed photos, with the number that can get away with video dropping precipitously, and the number passing up close in person vanishingly low.

Certainly I wouldn't expect to be fooled if I was in boob-grabbing distance, as was the case when these performers lined up outside for photoshoots if you were willing to pay.

Also, the issue with claims that I'm simply not astute enough to spot trans people outside ethnicities I'm familiar with is that I think I can still convincingly distinguish European, African and Indian transwomen with ease. It's only the Thai that give me serious pause.

I think it's just that there are substantial numbers of Asians who are less sexually dimorphic or appear feminine, if Korean boy bands are anything to go by. Not the majority of course, but still enough that with enough pruning and picking you can get a few to pass even under scrutiny. I'm not 100% sold on that hypothesis, but it's the best I can come up with.

I grew up in a majority-Asian city so I'm not sure I'd agree with the "Asians are more naturally feminine" hypothesis, as opposed to other factors such as estrogen being available without a prescription, and Thai trans women DIY'ing from a young age (the younger you start HRT, the easier it is to pass). I think it's more to do with the fact that there's no similar visible "kathoey culture" in the West so trans women are much more dispersed; you won't find a high concentration of them in any one location as easily as you would in Thailand. But there's plenty of passing trans women, e.g. famous actresses like Indya Moore, Hunter Schafer, Valentina Sampaio (a number of Euphoria viewers didn't even cop on to the fact that she was trans, despite playing a trans character in the show), and a number of models, sex workers, and OnlyFans performers that anyone who's sufficiently terminally online can discover.

I looked up the people you specifically mentioned (I've already watched Euphoria, courtesy of my girlfriend!) and I will concede that Valentina wasn't obvious, she has that overly sharp look that's common enough in natal women that I wouldn't think twice, while the other two are clearly trans.

I honestly don't know much about the availability of estrogen etc in Thailand, but it is possible that very early starts combined with strong selection effects could explain what I've seen!

It’s also possible your “trans detector” has high sensitivity but low specificity, giving you a high false positive rate. One could correctly identify most trans women as trans due to their masculine traits, but could also identify many cis women as trans.

Nowadays with the growing trans hysteria you have many masculine cis women being harassed or even assaulted when using the women’s bathroom, due to getting “clocked” by their wide shoulders or being over 6’ or just having the wrong shape. You also have “transvestigators” who take it to an extreme and think a huge amount of celebrities or random people in the street are secretly trans - they think that Elon Musk is a trans man because of the curvature of his spine, or that some female celebrity is a trans woman because she has straight clavicles and a prominent jaw.

India doesn't really have any substantial number of trans folk, at least not in the Western sense. The closest we've got in any numbers are hijras, and they have a vested interest in being obvious, since their primary means of subsistence is being so fucking creepy and insistent that you're willing to slip them a few bucks to fuck off. They'll insult your manhood, grope you, spit on you or threaten to lay curses upon you and yours if you don't comply.

So it's hard for me to evaluate the accuracy of my trans detector when the base rate for people even attempting to pass is so low around these parts.

what is it with Russian men and the most unflattering buzzcuts?

Thailand is too hot in this season for them to make the answer obvious with the complementary garb.

I have some acquaintances in Thailand, could ask later.

My take is, basically there are two things to it. One is a rather dumb post-Soviet prison-informed culture of masculinity that is summed up in the saying «a Man must be not much prettier than an ape», and the suspicion that anyone who tries to look better is an anus-bleaching sissy faggot prison bitch. Thankfully this is a passing sentiment (passing away together with heteronormativity, some would lament) but it still holds sway over older, provincial and lower-class Russians. You don't wear bright colors you don't style your hair you double don't use cosmetics and you go for the most utilitarian, anti-aesthetic, no fucks given look possible. Perplexingly, you also don't have to work out, so this is actually the easy life.

Plus short buzzcuts can be maintained on your own with a trimmer, and feel nice. Many acquire the habit in the army, I gather.

Another is that many among us age ungracefully. Probably mostly alcohol, smoking, climate and stress, but must be some irreducible genetic contribution too. Russians, particularly men, die early, develop chronic age-associated diseases early and start to go bald early, or so it seems. Though statistics point to Caucasians being hard-hit by alopecia in general, with many of our socioeconomic betters being worse off. Not sure if this accounts for age and dynamics. Anyway, buzzcut – with the above justification – is the natural coping strategy when you see hair on your pillow and Norwood in the mirror.

Summed up and polished with some soy sausages and phytoestrogen-heavy beer, those pressures, I surmise, produce the Skuf phenotype and what I call Skufization syndrome – the rapid onset physical deterioration that hits Russian men in their late 20s. It's on us to research this malady and develop countermeasures.

Relatedly, one of the things that surprised me in Turkey was massive numbers of men with freshly done hair transplants, their scalps peppered with red dots, back of their heads clad in bandages (is it supposed to look so crude?).

@orthoxerox may have a better idea.

(self_made_human does not, in fact, have a better idea, because I'm the one who tried to invoke you before the quoting feature broke haha)

On the other hand, if you meant the hair transplants, it's not a pleasant process by any means, one of the few images that makes me squeamish is a picture of a scalp fresh after surgery.

Since transplants are usually charged by the follicle, most people get the minimum viable product, which is why they can look a bit odd until the hair grows back to a decent length and the wounds heal over. From what I understand, it's not pretty no matter where you get it done, and Turkey is quite advanced at the whole cosmetic surgery thing.

One of my stranger brainfarts. Never knew your embeddings are so similar.

A question to @DaseIndustries, what is it with Russian men and the most unflattering buzzcuts?

Not him, but the answer is simple: styling your hair is gay. It's different with urbane zoomers and younger millenials, but everyone else consider combing their hair to be the pinnacle of personal grooming.

That seems quite insightful, thank you. I did finally reach Bangkok after writing my initial post, and it's a boring normal Asian city, without any freaks and geeks I could make a point of pointing out.

I could shed some light on the behavior of the rich in India. In living memory, my immediate family broke through from from upper middle class to lower upper class, if that's a sensible delineation. That means that we could afford BMWs or a million dollar house if we wanted them (the housing market in India is absolutely fucked in larger cities like Mumbai, so the idea of a million dollar house isn't even that big of a deal). Hell, we're staying at 5 star hotels now, which wasn't something we really did when I grew up. While I don't quite move in the strata of the uber wealthy, I can more or less make a decent assessment:

Wealthy Indians are accustomed to tragedy of the commons in every sphere of public life. Immense wealth will buy you a lovely mansion, but nothing will get you a clean city outside.

As such, we're calibrated in a manner such that when considering our relative social standing, we simply don't put much weight on the exterior of our residence, while lavishly decking out the interiors is something we can all agree upon and enjoy.

It's so ingrained in our culture that it takes a culture shock on the order of moving out of the country, where such things are taken seriously, for us to really change.

Wealthy Indians are accustomed to tragedy of the commons in every sphere of public life. Immense wealth will buy you a lovely mansion, but nothing will get you a clean city outside.

Have y'all tried home owners associations for general upkeep, and getting a specifically funded unit of local cops to fine anyone littering or otherwise dirtying the place? (or mob to harass...)

It's a country of 1.4 billion people, I'm sure someone somewhere has tried everything under the sun!

That being said, HOAs aren't common for privately owned detached houses, they are however, a thing in apartment complexes, and such gated complexes are usually significantly cleaner.

This matches with my own experience, rich Indian friends I know will have beautiful interior designed apartments with $10,000 chairs and $200,000 kitchens and the exterior looks like project housing in Baltimore completed in 1974, crumbling concrete, chipping paint, a grotty lobby, grass growing between paving tiles outside. It’s crazy.

Feels like home. Does India have issues with blocks of flats belonging and not belonging to the owners of the flats at the same time? Russia allowed residents to privatize their Soviet-built flats, and technically this comes with the ownership of the proportional share of the common areas, but the remaining flats and common areas belong to the municipality, the land the building stands on usually belongs to the municipality too, so the final result is a far cry from a proper condominium. Most people treat the building maintenance as someone else's problem, and even if you want to change how your building is managed, it's an uphill struggle against people either indifferent to or deeply suspicious of your plans.

Your dismissal of the English abilities of Thai people in Bangkok is a surprise to me. I was there in February at the Landmark (a relatively nice hotel) and it wasn't at all difficult to find completely fluent English speakers. Later near Krabi I stopped at a pharmacy for a cough suppressant and not only was the young woman completely fluent but was able to explain to me quite clearly when and how to take the medicine and field questions about dosage. Generally I found people in Thailand who were in a position to speak to non-Thais were very competent English-speakers, though I am probably comparing to Japan.

Edit： Is there a culture war angle I am not getting?

I have no vested interest in downplaying the English speaking skills of the Thai people, so perhaps you lucked out in that regard.

I did meet a tour organizer in Bangkok who was passably fluent, but that was before I wrote my post. The majority don't speak it well from what I can still tell.

Weren't they once conquered by some of the more entrepreneurial South Indian kings? (🇮🇳 Jai Hind!)

Are you talking about the Chola campaigns in Southeast Asia? I don’t think the Cholas touched Thailand then; they even had the Khmer, who controlled the relevant parts of modern-day Thailand at the time, as allies.

I don’t think Thailand was ever conquered by an Indian kingdom. Indianized kingdoms, yeah (that describes much of Southeast Asia), but not Indian ones.

Firstly, I was taken aback by how fair Thai people tend to be. I thought they'd be swarthier, akin to Malaysians or Indonesians, but quite a large fraction could easily pass as Caucasian if not for their facial features. The ones who are really tanned seem to be people who work out under the sun, having skin tones I expect.

This shouldn’t be too surprising, given that the Tai people were driven from southern China by the Chinese only a thousand and some years ago.

Given the genetic evidence I think it's certainly possible that most of mainland Southeast Asia was ruled by South Indian kings who brought in an appreciable number of settlers in the hazy period before recorded history proper began in that part of the world, but I agree that it wasn't the Medieval Chola state that did that.

Given the well-known history of Indianization of SEA states in the early first millennium and long-standing contact between SEA and the subcontinent, I think the genetic evidence is less likely due to a conquest than just results of the above.

(A question to @DaseindustriesLtd, what is it with Russian men and the most unflattering buzzcuts?)

I'm in that large category of russians who don't give a flying fuck what's on their heads right now, as long as it's clean and not getting in a way. To be honest i always was puzzled of why a man should care about anything more. My whole life is a testament to that popular opinion that a man shouldn't be any more pretty than an ape, was working just fine for me. Now my genes gave me surprisingly non-balding hair, so my haircuts are usually longer that buzzcuts, but the reason for them i guess is exactly that - it's just practical.

Firstly, I was taken aback by how fair Thai people tend to be. I thought they'd be swarthier, akin to Malaysians or Indonesians, but quite a large fraction could easily pass as Caucasian if not for their facial features. The ones who are really tanned seem to be people who work out under the sun, having skin tones I expect.

This is due to large Chinese immigration (especially in the north) as well as fairer skin being seen as higher class especially among women who generally cover their skin and wear sunscreen to keep from tanning.

Secondly, they're piss poor at speaking English.

I found everyone to speak pretty good english when I was there. It's much easier to get around in Thailand knowing no Thai than it is to get around France knowing no French or Japan knowing no Japanese.

Thailand is really clean. [...] The roads are in great condition

...I can't agree but I've never been to India so my comparisons are mostly with first world countries

But the most perplexing thing is the sheer number of pickup trucks here.

I was surprised by this too, specifically the giant US style trucks

Is there something about the Asian physiognomy that makes it easier for them to pass?

Based on nothing but my own observations, there is less sexual divergence in the phenotypes between East and SE Asian men and women than between men and women in other groups of people.

Fairer skin is strongly fetishized in India too, which is why I wasn't considering sun avoidance to be the defining factor. It makes sense that they'd be fairer if there were large numbers of ethnic Chinese mixed in, so I presume that's it.

There is that, but the ethnic Tai (of which the Thailand-majority Thai are part) are also relatively new to the region compared to other austronesian groups in Southeast Asia, having settled in southern China in prehistory rather than in Southeast Asia directly. The Tai had a period of massive migration out of southern China in the late first millennium CE as Chinese dynasties, especially the Tang, consolidated and integrated its southern provinces into the empire.

There are still ethnic Tai in China that are still genetically and culturally very similar iirc, and they look much the same as well.

That isn’t to discount immigration from China into Thailand and southeast China in general, as is well known for the latter half of the second millennium; one of their kings and national heroes was half-Chinese!

American cultural exports | First Toil, then the Grave

(I can't embed the images in a comment, or link to them because of the character limit. Click on the link above for the full experience.)

Seen on the /r/ireland subreddit: Libraries issued with instructions for securing buildings as protesters try to remove LGTBQ+ books for young people. I don’t really have much to say about the article itself: it’s quite even-handed and avoids direct editorialising (although it isn’t hard to deduce which side of the debate the paper takes, given that the article concludes with the cover artwork and synopses of three of the books being targeted). While I have specific misgivings about LGBTQ activism in Ireland, I think that calling the guards on a library because it’s carrying a YA novel featuring a gay couple is a hysterical overreaction. I agree with pretty much everyone that, if you’re concerned about your child being exposed to content you find unseemly or distasteful, the most effective solution is to simply not buy them a smartphone.

What I want to talk about is the comments on the article on Reddit. The commenters are united in the contempt in which they hold these activists, which is hardly surprising, but cast your eye over them and you’ll notice another recurring theme:

image

The consensus seems to be that these activists have simply imported their concerns, opinions and tactics from the United States, via American social media. I mean, I don’t disagree - they have. Were it not for the influence of social media, it would never have occurred to any of these activists to set foot in a library hunting for “objectionable” YA books. But this phenomenon is not peculiar to them. One commenter comes a lot closer to the mark:

image

I have a simple question: before Facebook was introduced to Ireland (December 11, 2005), did you ever hear of an Irish teenager describing themselves as “non-binary”?

Perhaps you’ll say that there were always non-binary people in Ireland, and access to social media just succeeded in “raising awareness” of a phenomenon which has always existed since the dawn of time. I don’t buy it. When I was in secondary school, there were openly gay, lesbian and bisexual students; there was not a single one who called themselves non-binary. The Enoch Burke saga is rather farcical and something of a storm in a teacup, but amidst all the thousands of column inches expended on journalists wringing their hands about a teacher refusing to address a student by they/them pronouns, very few that I’ve seen have asked the obvious question - why does the student in question want to be addressed by they/them pronouns? How did they arrive at the idea that they would happier being addressed as such?

image

To return to some examples from an earlier post: is it just coincidence that, of all the protest-worthy events that occurred outside of Ireland in 2020, the only one which prompted protests in Dublin, Galway and Cork was one which took place in the US (the murder of George Floyd)? This isn’t a “whataboutism” thing - I’m not saying “why are people so incensed about the murder of George Floyd when the Uyghurs are literally having their organs harvested on an industrial scale in Xinjiang?” I’m just asking why, of all the objectionable things that happened around the world in 2020 (and there were no shortage), the only one to spark nationwide protests in Ireland was a murder which took place in the US (and during a nationwide lockdown which many of the protesters enthusiastically supported, no less)? Sure, you can say that support for Black Lives Matter is just “common decency” or “being a good person” - but why did so many people in Ireland happen to unite around this one specific US-centric definition of “common decency”? Aren’t you at all curious about that?

Likewise, is it just a coincidence that George Nkencho’s brother described the police officer who killed his brother as a “fed”? That someone organised a “Not My Taoiseach” protest outside Leinster House? That Trinity College conducted a “privilege walk” on campus? That Sally Rooney’s (a Trinity alumnus) novels are stuffed to the gills with self-flagellating recriminations about her characters’ “unearned cultural privilege of whiteness”?

No one talked like this when I was in primary school, or in secondary school. These concepts and the fashion in which they are discussed were imported wholesale from the US, via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Every Irish person who spends a sufficient amount of time on American social media inevitably ends up adopting the language, concerns and opinions of one or other side of the American culture war.

I’m pleased to have recently encountered hard data to back up my intuition. You may have seen charts like these before, analysing the frequency with which words like “racism”, “sexism” and “transphobia” appear in the New York Times:

image

image

About a month ago, David Rozado published a similar analysis on media outlets outside of the US, conclusively demonstrating that the so-called “Great Awokening” is not confined to the US. And wouldn’t you know it:

image

Again, I just have to ask the obvious question. Around 2013-4, American left-leaning journalists became fixated on identity politics, resulting in a massive spike in the rate at which they used words like “racism”, “white supremacy”, “transphobia” and so on. Almost immediately, journalists writing for the Times and the Independent started doing exactly the same thing. Is this a coincidence? Did the “awokening” in US news media cause Irish journalists to view their culture in a different light, making them aware of important issues like racism, sexism and transphobia to which they’d been thitherto ignorant (the interpretation of the woke themselves would presumably endorse)?

Or is it conceivable that, as I’ve repeatedly argued, Irish journalists spend so much time on American social media and consuming American journalism that they’ve subconsciously come to believe that they actually live in the US, or that the issues which are important in the US must by necessity also be important in Ireland? That they’ve simply ported this worldview wholesale from one operating system to another, and are straining mightily to ignore or explain away the bugs and glitches that inevitably result from doing so without iterating on it or conducting any QA testing?

It’s a real “fish don’t notice the water they swim in” situation. Left-leaning Irish urbanites (including journalists) are so steeped in the modern culture war that they don’t realise their progressive opinions are just as much of an American cultural export as the conservative reactions to those opinions.

And look: this isn’t to say that the woke worldview is wrong - the fact that it originated in the US and was imported into Ireland has no bearing on whether or not it’s true or ethically sound. It will come as no surprise to you that I think it’s fundamentally flawed in many aspects both descriptive and normative, but I welcome disagreement on this point. I would hope that Irish people who are themselves woke might at least grudgingly concede that the woke worldview was invented in a specific country with a specific culture and history, and hence can’t be assumed to be equally relevant or applicable in other countries with different cultures and histories.

But please: at least have the self-awareness to recognise that, while the Irish people harassing librarians about “grooming” did not arrive at their anti-woke worldview entirely independently, neither did you. You absorbed it through cultural osmosis: by spending time on social media networks which have an obvious American slant (by virtue of having been founded there); by consuming American films, TV shows and journalism; by working for US-based multinationals like Facebook, Pfizer or JP Morgan, for whom the culture and worldview of the upper management is bound to trickle down to their overseas outposts; by completing woke-influenced Arts courses in UCD or TCD (this stuff started in the academe before spreading out into the wider world). Your thoughts, beliefs, opinions, even vocabulary are not entirely your own. (Nor are mine, obviously.)

“Pfft, those right-wingers get all their opinions from Americans on Twitter!” scoffs the “aromantic genderfluid” Redditor who has their pronouns in their email signature, shares black squares on Instagram and complains about how “toxic” and “problematic” their parents are.

Physician, heal thyself!

I agree with pretty much everyone that, if you’re concerned about your child being exposed to content you find unseemly or distasteful, the most effective solution is to simply not buy them a smartphone.

We've had that debate, and the anti-platforming side lost. The principle currently in effect is that all means of disrupting your opponents speech, including violence, are ok. So I'm not going to shed tears over a bunch of people this, until we restore the previous principles.

There was a similar small to-do in Finland about a planned screening of the Drag Kids documentary. It was basically stillborn since the cultural festival that had planned the screening quickly withdrew it from lists, citing threats sent. However, while the fracas was going on, much of the discussion basically consisted of both sides flinging "You're just importing American culture wars!" accusations to each other; pro-LGBTQ types saying that this is a copy of American conservatives tactically making up mountains from molehills over LGBTQ culture and conservatives retorting that the whole "drag kids" thing is just an American folly to begin with (even though the documentary appears to be Canadian, but that's not exactly a large difference from this side of the pond anyway).

Of course they're both correct, but it's like... of course this country is going to import culture, discussions and ideologies wholesale from some other country, in this case the most powerful country in the world, the undisputed global hegemon, with never-seen-before opportunities to broadcast its ideologies at scale everywhere. What else are we supposed to do, invent all the local ideologies and policy points ourselves? There's just 5,5 million of us.

The entire Finnish history consists of people importing ideologies from elsewhere. Christianity through Sweden and Russia, later Lutheranism from Germany, then nationalism from Germany (the founding father of Finnishness, J. V. Snellman, basically based his nationalist visions on Hegelianism), socialism from Germany, environmentalism from, yes, Germany... When one reads Social Democratic magazines from the start of the century they're already bashing each over basically over whether German Socialist 1 or German Socialist 2 was correct, and adjusting their own views on the basis of such debates elsewhere.

The biggest difference to past centuries is where the importation of ideology comes from, but that it's mostly imported from somewhere says.

What else are we supposed to do, invent all the local ideologies and policy points ourselves? There's just 5,5 million of us.

Yes? Otherwise why are you even using written Finnish instead of Swedish, or Latin (or Russian, I suppose)?

A large reason of why we're writing in Finnish is that a large group of Swedish-speaking gentry got enamored with the general European trend of national awakening and decided that such an awakening in Finland could only be done using the people's language (and, in Snellman's case, in large part due to his readings of Hegel), and because the Russian Empire happened to find it useful to foster such a movement. Of course it might have happened otherwise in other conditions. At the very least it must be noted that none of this happened in a vacuum.

and decided that such an awakening in Finland could only be done using the people's language

A problem that can easily be solved by PsyOps, and forced assimilation.

According to Paul Hazard's history of european ideas intellectual began moving away from latin and greek at the end of the 1600s and therefore it is a precursor of the enlightenment rather than a consequence.

Valid point, and if Irish progressives could just be honest and admit that they've imported their politics from abroad, I wouldn't really care that much. But people get very defensive when you make that argument, and claim that to do so is "invalidating" their opinions or identities. I think it's a kind of reflexive assumption of Bulverism: even though I'm very careful to point out that, just because something is imported, doesn't make it morally or factually wrong, a lot of people seem to hear "you just got that from the US, therefore it can't be true".

What else are we supposed to do, invent all the local ideologies and policy points ourselves? There's just 5,5 million of us.

I'm sure multiple ideologies and political theories originate from polities even less populous than that.

What else are we supposed to do, invent all the local ideologies and policy points ourselves? There's just 5,5 million of us.

About the same as the number of Ashkenazi Jews in the US. That didn't stop them from having an enormously outsized influence on American culture and politics.

Finnish isn't a religion that predates the Western civilization.

Of course they're both correct, but it's like... of course this country is going to import culture, discussions and ideologies wholesale from some other country, in this case the most powerful country in the world, the undisputed global hegemon, with never-seen-before opportunities to broadcast its ideologies at scale everywhere. What else are we supposed to do, invent all the local ideologies and policy points ourselves? There's just 5,5 million of us.

Drag queens aren't a political ideology. They're a cultural particularity tied to an ideology. Like how afros can be associated with "woke" people (in the original sense of "progressive black person"). Would be odd if progressive Germans were sporting it.

Importing the basic idea of socialism and adapting it to local conditions is one thing. This is the equivalent of importing Chinese classical music and having culture wars over it.

The two can go together (Islam and Arabism overlap to say the least) but there are reasons to be suspicious of how certain ideologies manifest in different countries. There's nothing wrong with an anti-racism movement in the UK in theory, but why does it involve things like kneeling down which are tied to anti-black racism and police violence which should be lesser factors in the UK? Blacks aren't - or shouldn't be - the totemic minority in the UK. So it's suspicious.

I would, of course as someone who leans more progressive, argue that however cringe importing social fads from USA is, importing the reaction to said social fads from USA is even more cringe. You're just demonstrating that your own culture really isn't enough for those damn kids.

How do you tell whether "no wait, don't bring that crap here!" is importing a reaction from America, or whether it's a local product?

When one uses specifically American right wing shibboleths, I dare say you are importing the reaction and not just saying "none of that here".

To be clear, the animosity may well be local, but the words they use to express it isn't always so.

I disagree. I'd buy it's importing the reaction if suddenly the Irish started talking about something actually specifically American, that has no bearing on what's happening to them at the moment, the same way progressives imported BLM to Europe wholesale.

Yeah, I'll buy that as an example of conservatives importing culture war. The depressing conclusion seems to be that whoever does it the most, wins.

I had that thought while writing the post. Did Irish progressives import wokeness, then the conservatives followed suit? Or did Irish progressives import wokeness, then conservatives reacted against it, and it just happens to look very similar to the American conservative backlash against wokeness because of convergent evolution?

I don't really know one way or the other, but I'm leaning towards the former.

You have to start earlier than that, after all wokeness is a reaction itself.

Did the US have that "conservatism" imported from Europe, assimilated it, had elements react against and create wokeness, then re-export that AND the "conservative" reaction to wokeness again.

Much of the US's cultural information was imported to them. Its why the US is largely aligned with the Anglo world in the first place. Plus Ireland due to high immigration. If not for large amounts of Irish people bringing their cultural exports with them the Presidents wouldn't be touring Ireland so regularly and they wouldn't dye the rivers green (and the beer).

They are re-exporting to us as we once exported to them. Partly because thats what the global hegemon does and partly because of the close relationship.

Lots of funding came from the US for the IRA for example. The US was also a big part of the Good Friday Agreement happening at all.

You have US immigration in Dublin airport so you can fly into a domestic terminal when you reach the US!

The US has a big finger in the Irish pie so to speak (and vice versa) if you believe that nearly everyone i meet in the US after learning i am from Ireland tells me some story about their grandmother being from Meath or similar. Progressivism (or the reaction to it) is hardly only the most recent.

FYI, your (inteneded) image links seem to be broken.

I'm not able to link the images as I've nearly exceeded the character limit, but you can view them in the Substack article itself.

The consensus seems to be that these activists have simply imported their concerns, opinions and tactics from the United States, via American social media.

Which opinions are we talking about, exactly?:

The Roman historian Tacitus reports that the Germanic tribes execute homosexuals (corpores infames, “those who disgracefully abuse their bodies”) and sink them into swamps. Remains of several such corpses have been found in the peat bogs of Denmark and northern Germany and are now exhibited in museums. Some had been strangled to death prior to being sunk in the bogs, while others were apparently drowned alive.

Condemnation of homosexuality has arisen spontaneously in multiple societies; it doesn't have to be imported from elsewhere.

There have always been Irish people who were morally opposed to homosexuality, there's nothing in itself new about that.

What's new is the fact that most of this current generation of conservative activists are not allied with the Catholic Church in any way, and they've incorporated a great deal of the specific concerns, terminology and tactics from American activists (panic about "groomers", going into libraries looking for books to root out). Ireland had a referendum on gay marriage 8 years ago, and I don't remember a single person who was opposed to gay marriage expressing concerns about "groomers". This specific strain of anti-LGBTQ activism is very new and seems to have been imported from the US.

Both sides of the debate spread via the internet - we all part of the information commons now and the epistemic challenges.

Unfortunately that means we have to work harder to understand the issues. Anti-LGBTQ activism is undoubtedly a thing (people who object against any and all of those) but the phrase betrays a lack of understanding of the actual issue-it is the wrong 'frame'.

In reality the T is in conflict with LGB because the definitional space that LGB exists in (biological sex) is being challenged by gender identity (self-asserted subjective sense of gender). This leads to the idea that a MtF who likes woman, is a lesbian and because the reality of biological sex is thrown out, this actually undermines the real identity of the original lesbian (a biological woman attracted to biological woman). It has got to the point where lesbians who do not want to have sex with biological males are called bigots and in some cases coerced into sex with these biological men.

Not to mention that the sociogenic idea of trans encourages gender non-conforming gay people (eg feminine boys and masculine girls) to think they might be the wrong sex. We know that many people who suffer from gender dysphoria and do not transition ultimately resolve their dysphoria, and that many of these people turn out to be gay.

So assuming that anyone speaking up against trans is Anti-LGBTQ is false.

Try this podcast - it's politically neutral and broadcasts a wide variety of guests and views.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://gender-a-wider-lens.captivate.fm/&ved=2ahUKEwjZr_3ThOf-AhVs8TgGHV5XDFEQFnoECBgQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1kmGb8mmfcBTPZA3ccinmH

I totally get what you're saying, and I don't think being opposed to certain components of trans activism (as I am) means that you're for instance opposed to gay marriage.

But that distinction doesn't apply in this case. These right-wing protesters were going into libraries trying to root young adult novels with gay characters. They appear to be firmly opposed to LGBT as a whole, not just the T.

Gotcha, yeah it's frustrating because they make it so easy for the arguments to get smeared as right-wing religious or whatever to the centre-left. It's also unfortunate because it seems homosexual acceptance has actually improved over the last decades.

But I do have some sympathy for the fears, in addition to gay books they were presumably also getting rid of the 'I am Jazz' stuff, which I do consider grooming. Because of the head start this ideology has, it's quite possible that your children are exposed at an early age to it without you even being aware. And libraries aren't neutral on this topic. A friend of mine tried to get some adult books telling the trans story from the critical side (ie books by Helen Joyce, Abigail Shrier etc) and all were turned down - of course you can't expect the library to accept a book request just because you send it, but it's notable how captured the public library is by gender ideology - there was a quick link to various books on how you can choose your gender etc, over all age groups on the website, yet you won't find any of the books critical of it. Indeed there is a prominent trans flag in the library, which, try as I might to not to 'morally panic' about, feels like living under an authoritarian regime.

That's enough to create a sense of urgency and rage for some people to take matters into their own hands. I don't agree with it personally, particularly when perfectly suitable books about being gay are included, or even trans stories which deserve to be told as any other for the right ages (though I think trans stories are prone to reinforcing misunderstandings about the nature of gender, identity and the self, overstate the empirical weight of their first person experience, and are contributing to the social contagion in the current environment, presenting it as a positive or transcendent lifestyle choice and glossing over the medical realities).

So I'm torn, I don't agree with censorship but I also welcome some active resistance to the authoritarian environment we're in and I'm clear on what's starting the whole chain-people are actually trying to influence young children with these ideas that don't make any sense, and may contribute non-negligibly to the risk of them getting medical treatment through contagious ideas (though obviously not without other factors in play).

I used to dislike the liberal media and the left wing journalists in Europe. Now I really miss them. The news in Scandinavia is increasingly becoming press-releases from American NGOs and google translated Washington post articles. The media used to reasonably critical of power, now they are basically reporting their press releases. Scandinavian journalists have barely any knowledge of foreign affairs, they report what the US military industrial complex reports. The perspective is becoming the perspective of Robert Kagan, often with perspectives that don't even make sense for a non-American. Even our public service media is increasingly ending its articles with "according to the Institute for the Study of War".

There seems to be a link between having values on foreign policy similar to John Bolton and being woke in Europe. I strongly believe the consumption of translated materials from Washington elites are behind both trends.

The people who threw rocks at cops during negotiations over free trade agreements 20 years ago and demonstrated against the war in Iraq are turning into major war hawks wanting to defend American liberal hegemony.

There seems to be a link between having values on foreign policy similar to John Bolton and being woke in Europe.

If there is, it's not a strong one. At least here, being anti-US and anti-NATO still correlates mostly to being far-left, though there's a smallish far-right section with that view, too. Of course, one could argue that the anti-US far-left is not generally the wokest part of the left, but I know both anti-American woke and non-woke leftists with equivalent views on NATO/US/Ukraine.

However, at the moment, being pro-NATO, pro-Ukraine and concurrently pro-American is the view shared by the vast majority of the population, with NATO support being something like 80 % at the moment. Within this section, the most fervent nuke-Moscow crowd tends to be politically of centre-to-centre-right variety and not really particularly concerned with things like wokeness and non-wokeness.

being anti-US and anti-NATO still correlates mostly to being far-left,

This tends to more old left rather than the super woke left.

the most fervent nuke-Moscow crowd tends to be politically of centre-to-centre-right variety and not really particularly concerned with things like wokeness and non-wokeness.

The center right tends to support liberal interventionism consistently. The center right was the most pro war in Iraq, Libya and Syria to then start complaining about the millions of migrants these wars yielded. In Israel-Palestine the conflict is between those who want Arabs to live where they have lived for generations and those who want them to move. The center right strongly supports large numbers of Arabs having to move. That the same people who wanted to spend trillions defending feminism in Afghanistan are pro war isn't surprising. That the center right supports the next military venture isn't surprising. The surprising part is that the people who used to be opposed to the foreign wars largely falling in line this time around.

This tends to more old left rather than the super woke left.

One part of this might just be that the super woke left just isn't particularly interested in geopolitics, or only interested in a perfunctory way. However, I, at least, myself know people who could probably be put on the "super woke left" and are pacifists, or anti-interventionists

The surprising part is that the people who used to be opposed to the foreign wars largely falling in line this time around.

At least here (and I don't think that there are any countries where the switch has happened as hard and fast as here), this is mainly just an effect of the fact that in Feb 2022 (not literally on that month, but in and around the months before and after the invasion), the entire society fell in line around a new foreign policy consensus that is pro-Ukraine, pro-NATO and pro-American. Basically the only people that didn't were the ones who had a really firm anti-NATO line before that month, and even many of them (like me) were affected.

However, even after that switch, the super-woke types don't tend to be the most eager NATO supporters; that, as said, is mostly the avenue of he center-to-center-right types who, with some expections, tended to already be pro-NATO before the invasion.

This tends to more old left rather than the super woke left.

This is all very much at the margins of political discourse here but at least in Britain anti-NATO sentiment, which there isn't really that much of anymore, seems to come as much from Sultana-esque young left-wingers as it does from older Galloway-esque ones.

The media used to reasonably critical of power, now they are basically reporting their press releases. Scandinavian journalists have barely any knowledge of foreign affairs, they report what the US military industrial complex reports. The perspective is becoming the perspective of Robert Kagan, often with perspectives that don't even make sense for a non-American. Even our public service media is increasingly ending its articles with "according to the Institute for the Study of War".

You ever seen an explanation of what's the reason for it ?

Internet killing press media, collapsing budgets, leading to talent leaving the profession?

Generational change, with spooks being better positioned now to groom younger generations of journalists properly ?

The "trusting the experts" narrative might have a role to play here. ISW succeeded in becoming "the experts" in many circles in the early months of the war. A more critical appraisal might go against the consensus of the "experts".

Probably the internet killing their budget. Just rewriting a press release is cheap.

Race to the bottom. It’s faster and cheaper to copy a press release than to write an editorial. And once someone does that, switching costs are so low that they will snag all the viewers. So everyone else has to compete on similar terms.

Here's a somewhat phenomenological idea which I'm just going to throw out there: these people don't recognise anything American about their discourse because it's genuinely not quite the same until there are domestic right-wing American views to contrast with.

The experience of an Irish left-winger is of a civilised country which has shed itself of its own brand of backwards conservatism pointing and laughing at the most recent thing the insane Yanks have gotten up to. No one entertains the idea that there will be any disagreement about this so they voice it freely at work and the like. It's not until a domestic voice gives opposition that the re-enactment of America is complete, the conception of the normal Irish citizen just being a nice person is shifted into Americanised Irish left-winger vs Americanised Irish right-winger, a faithful re-enactment of America involves hating each other after all. It's no surprise that they accuse the right-winger of bringing American politics into it, until the right-winger started to play his role the fact that we were all just re-enacting America hadn't yet become clear.

The real original Irish discourse takes place between old school leftists and a newly minted radical right arguing over which side holds claim to the nationalist cause. This is the stuff that doesn't make any sense in an American context, Americans themselves aren't interested in it, and there is enough substantive thought (a benefit of having a revolution instigated by poets and playwrights educated in the Victorian style) that original debate can be had. It's where everything interesting in Irish political thought happens.

I find this pretty convincing.

  1. Americans export awareness of our CW battle lines.

  2. Some domestic occurrence looks vaguely like an American one

  3. Domestic activists realize they can tap this giant well of cultural awareness

  4. American hashtags on domestic media

The important bit is 3, where some journalist realizes the potential of appealing to an American export. It’s potent because it seeped into the domestic public before anyone was really defending against, as you said, those wacky Yanks. Tie it to the hashtag or slogan and even your enemies will know what you’re talking about. That’s a seductive feeling—and one that rewards the wielded with clicks and clout.

I'm sceptical of this hypothesis because there were large scale nationwide BLM protests in Ireland long before anything BLM-related actually happened here. After George Nkencho was shot dead by police officers in December 2020, I could almost detect a palpable sense of relief among Irish progressives - finally we have something that looks like a legitimate grievance, the accusations of tilting at windmills won't land quite as easily as they did before.

simply not buy them a smartphone.

There is absolutely nothing simple about this. Would you require that your child be shunned an outcast when all of their friends are communicating through Snapchat or Whatsapp or any other application that you need a smartphone for? Would you deny them a camera, or require them to carry both flip phone and digital camera separately?

Nothing simple at all.

Also, none of your images are embedded or linked.

Also, none of your images are embedded or linked.

I wasn't able to fit them in with the character limit on comments. If you click on the link at the top of the comment you can see the article in full, including the images.

I know there are large downsides that come with not buying your children a smartphone. My point is, if you already have, your child already has access to more pro-LGBTQ content, woke propaganda, creepy pornography etc. than they could consume in ten lifetimes. Complaining about a few books in a library when you've already bought them a smartphone is trying to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Would you deny them a camera, or require them to carry both flip phone and digital camera separately?

I'm not a parent, but if I was, I think I'd actively prefer my children not to have access to a digital camera until they're of age. It greatly reduces the risk of their disseminating pornographic images of themselves without understanding the ramifications thereof.

Complaining about a few books in a library when you've already bought them a smartphone is trying to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted.

The internet is a bit like the Wild West - partly because a lot of it is actually distant in terms of producers, even if it feels close. We expect actual physical locations near us managed by supposedly accountable adults (allegedly) of our culture paid for that task to behave differently.

Obviously what an "Instathot" can do on Tiktok is different from what we want to see at a McDonald's or in a classroom.

Part of the problem is precisely that those lines are ever blurrier.

Counterpoint, as a child I happily consumed plenty of "age-inappropriate" material with absolutely no negative ramifications, and I consider the whole thing to be an overblown moral panic, even leaving aside my anecdata.

I'm within 2-5 years of having a kid of my own (Jesus time flies), and I fully intend to let them do whatever the fuck they like on the internet, as long as it isn't spending my money on gacha games and lootboxes.

They'll get smartphones, tablets, PCs and VR as soon as they can use them, assuming I can wrangle their potential mother into agreement. The only reason I'd ever withhold access to any of them is because they've demonstrated that they can't help but abuse them.

Also, the odds of any child born after today ever having to worry about leaked nudes is minuscule verging on nonexistent, given the existence of deepfakes as plausible deniability, let alone panopticon surveillance for child porn if they're young enough. That's completely leaving aside that I expect the world to be nigh unrecognizable in 10 years or so, if we're even alive to see it.

as a child I happily consumed plenty of "age-inappropriate" material with absolutely no negative ramifications,

Well, count yourself lucky. (that is, if you know you can count yourself lucky. Do you wake up with morning erections regularly, like you should at your age ? No problems having sex ? No problems with anhedonia, lack of motivation, flat emotions ?)

Tens of millions of people aren't.

The question is how much of that is attributable to the consumption of "age-inappropriate media". It's not that hard to find tens of millions of people suffering from most things that vague, in a population of 8 billion after all.

I am clinically depressed, but that was only an issue after high school, and if I go a few days without jerking off, I'm as randy as a goat.

The question is how much of that is attributable to the consumption of "age-inappropriate media".

You didn't answer the question.

It's very likely related as there are no other good explanations for why people with these symptoms suffer withdrawal symptoms associated with psychological dependence.

Or, you know, lack morning erections entirely, which means either severe depression or serious lack of testosterone.

You asked plenty of questions, to answer them.

Yes I have morning wood, thanks for asking.

No to the latter.

I already said I'm clinically depressed, but that the circumstances behind it have no bearing to your hypothesis.

Who exactly are "these people"? I do not deny that porn addiction with concomitant problems is real, my assertion is that it's not meaningfully linked to Western prudishness about what is and isn't appropriate for kids.

it's not meaningfully linked to Western prudishness about what is and isn't appropriate for kids.

Western prudishness about what is and isn't acceptable to kids is based on quite old concerns about compulsive masturbation, which was probably far less crippling and prevalent than pornography addiction.

I'd not be surprised if at some point knowingly giving access to pornography to minors was made a criminal offense within the next 20 years in some western country.

This seems like an anti-American take dressed up in anti-woke trenchcoat. "Don't like modern wokism? Well guess what! It's all America's fault!!!"

This piece does a lot of finger-pointing showing how European leftists occasionally say stuff that only makes sense in America, but a lot less thorough of an examination of how wokism is a uniquely American product... because it isn't. The source theory of modern identity politics is European. A lot of the left-leaning economic critiques of the US come directly from Europe as well, comparing the country unfavorably to places like Denmark.

America takes up a huge amount of the mindshare of the collective West since it has the biggest population of any Western country by a significant amount. Americans mix their opinions with Europeans over the Internet constantly so there's going to be a ton of cross-contamination no matter what topic is looked at. American might be the first place you notice particular trends manifesting since America is inherently signal-boosted, but calling those trends themselves "American cultural exports" is disingenuous. Only BLM stuff is uniquely American since no European countries have >10% of their populations being black like the US does, but other things like idpol feminism (which crested before BLM happened, mind you) was sourced from both sides of the Atlantic, as was LGBT stuff, and stuff like Islamophobia has more of a European tint to it.

I have a simple question: before Facebook was introduced to Ireland (December 11, 2005), did you ever hear of an Irish teenager describing themselves as “non-binary”?

Counterargument: Before Spotify was introduced to the USA, did you ever hear of an American teenager describe themselves as "non-binary"?

You could make some objections to this comparison, but I would contend that both arguments are nonsense. Europe has fewer multinational companies (especially tech ones) because Europe is a free-rider continent that has lower rates of business innovation than America. But in any case, companies don't take on left-leaning culture out of nowhere; it happens as a bottom-up process as motivated employees push their agenda with nobody willing enough to stop them for fear of reprisal. Those employees got their opinions from broader society, forged from both American and European arguments interchangeably.

This seems like an anti-American take dressed up in anti-woke trenchcoat. "Don't like modern wokism? Well guess what! It's all America's fault!!!"

As I explicitly stated in the article, the fact that I believe wokeness originated in the US (and perhaps some components originated elsewhere) has nothing to do with the object-level question of whether wokeness is factually or normatively true. In the counterfactual universe where wokeness was indigenous to Ireland, I would find it exactly as distasteful as I do in this universe.

That being said, I do think many components of wokeness did originate in the US rather than Europe. The term "intersectionality" was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw, an American academic. Modern queer theory draws hugely on the writings of Judith Butler, an American academic (last semester my girlfriend did a "gender justice" module in an Irish university and had to read Butler). Radical feminism draws heavily on Andrea Dworkin. The whole concept of the "progressive stack" came from the Occupy Wall St protests.

And more than ideology, the language Irish people use betrays its origins, like George Nkencho's brother demanding that the "fed" that shot George be "terminated". If it was Europe that dominated the cultural hegemony, he could have demanded that the "gendarme" or "bobby" be terminated, either of which would have been just as inaccurate as calling him a "fed" - but he didn't.

In any case you concede the point that, whatever the origins of wokeness, it isn't indigenous to Ireland, so it is hypocritical for Irish progressives to mock Irish conservatives for importing their values and tactics from overseas.

Counterargument: Before Spotify was introduced to the USA, did you ever hear of an American teenager describe themselves as "non-binary"?

The analogy doesn't work. Facebook was founded by Americans and was first made available in elite American universities; it retained remnants of the culture of elite American universities long after expanding into the wider world. In December 2020, about one-third of their staff were still based in the US. While Spotify was founded in Sweden, it's not like they started off exclusively hosting Swedish artists and podcasters before expanding into international artists - Anglophone music and podcasts have been their bread and butter since day one. Look at their most-streamed artists by year (and streaming stats follow a power law distribution, so the most popular artists actually accrue a huge majority of total streams): there's exactly one Swedish artist in the top 5 of any given year (Avicii, and his lyrics are exclusively in English) and only five artists from non-Anglophone nations (Avicii [lyrics in English], Daft Punk [lyrics in English], J Balvin, Bad Bunny, BTS). The rest are artists from Anglophone nations, chiefly the US. I can't find comparable stats for podcasting, but their most popular podcast is The Joe Rogan Experience. I also can't remember a single instance in which Spotify waded into a Sweden-specific culture war (though I'm open to correction), but they loudly and conspicuously waded into several American ones. Hell, most of their employees are based in the US, more than twice as many as are based in Sweden.

To the extent that Spotify influences the broader political and social climate at all, it's just a really efficient delivery mechanism for Anglophone (chiefly the US, Canada and the UK to a lesser extent) culture, which incidentally happened to have been founded in Sweden. It is not chiefly (and never has been) a delivery mechanism for Swedish culture, or non-Anglo European culture.

That being said, I do think many components of wokeness did originate in the US rather than Europe.

This is a classic Motte and Bailey. In the original post, wokeness was described as an "American cultural export", or that it was "imported wholesale". Now it's drawn down to "many components of wokeness originated in the US", which I wouldn't disagree with. Looking at the wiki pages for many woke topics like radical feminism will indeed show many Americans, but it will also show people like Julie Bindel, Monique Wittig, and Germaine Greer. Again, almost all of critical theory traces its roots to the Frankfurt School and people like Foucalt. I'm not countering by saying that wokeness is uniquely European, rather I'm saying its a joint venture between both sides of the Atlantic. For a more nuanced take, I'd say that the general groundwork skews German, while the modern implementation of wokeness skews to the Anglosphere. Fundamentally, it's just wrong to describe wokeness as uniquely American, or even disproportionately American when accounting for population levels and scholarly output.

While Spotify was founded in Sweden, it's not like they started off exclusively hosting Swedish artists

I wasn't using Spotify as a genuine example, I was using it to show "correlation doesn't imply causation", specific to examples you used like Pfizer somehow being a critical component of wokeness advancing in Europe.

wokeness was described as an "American cultural export", or that it was "imported wholesale"

Well, you absolutely agreed with me that BLM is as American as apple pie, and has no European antecedents. Likewise the term "intersectionality", coined by an American academic. I do think most of modern gender ideology can be traced directly to Judith Butler. When I talk about wokeness in Ireland, I'm primarily talking about BLM, the concept of white privilege, gender ideology, and the nomenclature associated with the ideology. I think it's reasonable to say that, to the extent that wokeness has caught on in Ireland, concepts and paradigms which were invented in the US have had an outsized influence. Maybe it was hyperbolic to say that wokeness was "imported wholesale" from the US, but not extremely so.

Again, almost all of critical theory traces its roots to the Frankfurt School and people like Foucalt.

Sure, but wokeness didn't actually catch on in Ireland during the lifetime of Foucault or members of the Frankfurt school - it caught on in 2013-4. Maybe American critical theorists were just rephrasing concepts which originated with the Frankfurt school, but I still think they deserve a significant amount of credit for translating it in a way that made it palatable to a young and international audience. Elvis Presley may have been heavily inspired by Chuck Berry, but that doesn't change the fact that it was Elvis who became the King of rock n roll.

That is to say, non-Americans may have significantly contributed to woke ideology, but I think the specific flavour of woke ideology which caught on in Ireland retains a specifically American flavour, even in cases where this makes no obvious sense. Woke people are pretty good at adapting the overarching tenets of the ideology to local parochial concerns (e.g. land acknowledgements for aboriginals in Oz and NZ) but that really hasn't happened here: Irish progressives get far more bent out of shape about alleged racist incidents against Ireland's vanishingly small black population than they do about discrimination against Irish Travellers.

I think Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer are uniquely bad examples to illustrate how non-Americans contributed to the rise of wokeness, given that woke people despise these two women for their TERF opinions. In fact, Greer was enormously popular with the second wave of feminists in Ireland and the UK in the 1980s: the rise of wokeness caused a steep decline in her popularity to the point that she's effectively persona non grata in many British universities. Bindel writes for Unherd, for Christ's sake.

I wasn't using Spotify as a genuine example, I was using it to show "correlation doesn't imply causation"

True, I can only prove that the cultural dominance of wokeness coincided with the rise of social media, I can't prove a causation. But I do think that social media played a significant role in disseminating and popularizing woke paradigms and concepts. I don't think it's a coincidence that Facebook was originally only accessible on American college campuses, quickly became the biggest social media platform in the world, and shortly afterwards an ideology which was invented (or refined, or perfected, whatever) on American college campuses became culturally dominant in the Anglophone world.

All official NY criminal history record sites (as in ones run by the state directly) seem to charge fees for any records requests, as far as I can tell.

Is it healthy to dwell so much over it everytime some city degenerate dies and the media decides to make it a “thing”? What would you or anyone else gain from this knowledge?

On one hand, 95% of topics here have no material benefit. The Question and Wellness threads do a little better, but really, Internet commenting is a spectator sport.

On the other, examples like the OP really do emphasize that pointlessness. Mr. Penny’s use of force may have been justified, but it’s not going to hinge on a rap sheet which he couldn’t have seen. No, this is useful only for scoring points in the larger Conversation, where everyone is trying to weaponize the halo effect to make their team look saintly. Just because the media is doing it doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for this community.

On the gripping hand…I think this is truth-seeking. It’s trivia at best, and manufacturing culture war ammunition at worst, but in the end, someone will know more true things. I don’t want to discourage that.

The complete and utter vanity of the news when seen from the longterm is why I can’t help being drawn to the good news of religion. At the very least my quibbles are echos through the ages, beginning with the first quibblings of the Christians 2000 years ago. At the most, maybe I learn something that increases my happiness, who knows?

Mr. Penny’s use of force may have been justified, but it’s not going to hinge on a rap sheet which he couldn’t have seen.

Minor nitpick and only tangential to your comment. Yes, the rap sheet can’t possibly have informed the judgment of those that were on the train. For the rest of the world that wasn’t on the train, it should adjust our priors regarding the likelihood that Neely was acting erratically and threateningly enough to warrant being subdued by three grown men.

It's probably not healthy but I am going to hear about the event a lot in the next few weeks and that breeds curiosity. I don't feel that strongly about it, but thought I might be able to get the straight easily here.

I don't know, I think it's illuminating to see how many people on TheMotte both loathe mentally ill homeless people so much and are so authoritarian that their desired solution to the mentally ill homeless problem is to kill them all.

At this point SneerClub might as well just shut down. TheMotte beclowns itself enough on a regular basis that outside mocking of this place is superfluous. There are some great contributors who rise above the mess, but a large part of this site is just /pol/ but with unnecessary verbosity.

  • -21

Yeah, I think that a lot of folks here have been really struggling with the Problem of Evil, so to speak. There's so much mental illness and frankly broken people in the world that they want a quick easy solution, just sweep all the 'bad people' under the rug to fix it.

The problem as I see it is that there's clearly some major issues with the way we have organized modern societies, or maybe the influence of technology on us, that makes it so an increasing number of people just can't cope. They don't have meaning in their lives, and they can't seem to function well in society.

The progressive view is that we need to better our institutions and safety nets to allow for more flourishing, the conservative ideal looks to be that we just shame and punish people over and over until they act better. I think that we do need both sides, but too few people are willing to find a compromise between the two.

Or maybe crazy people just died off historically and it is the abundance that keeps the homeless alive today?

Not so much the crazy ones as the wildly-antisocial ones - there's lots of kinds of crazy that aren't nearly as disruptive, but there are benefits to getting rid of the worst, whether crazy or not:

In each generation from 1500 to 1750, between 1 and 2% of all English men were executed either by court order or extra-judicially (at the scene of the crime or while in prison). This was the height of a moral crusade by Church and State to punish the wicked so that the good may live in peace.

Meanwhile, the homicide rate fell ten-fold. Were the two trends related? In a recent paper, Henry Harpending and I argued that a little over half of the homicide decline could be explained by the high execution rate, and its steady removal of violent males from the gene pool. The rest could be partly explained by Clark-Unz selection—violent males lost out reproductively because they were increasingly marginalized in society and on the marriage market. Finally, this decline was also due to a strengthening of controls on male violence: judicial punishment (policing, penitentiaries); quasi-judicial punishment (in schools, at church, and in workplaces); and stigmatization of personal violence in popular culture.

These controls drove the decline in the homicide rate, but they also tended over time to hardwire the new behavior pattern, by hindering the ability of violent males to survive and reproduce. The last half-century has seen a dramatic relaxation of these controls but only a modest rise in the homicide rate among young men of native English origin.

This was the height of a moral crusade by Church and State to punish the wicked so that the good may live in peace.

But yet the same church says that we are supposed to suffer in this life and that we will get eternal peace in the next so this life doesn't even matter etc etc.

Eppur si muove - whatever the rhetoric, the result speaks for itself in this case.

If that is true, why are crazy people still in the gene pool period?

Our conception of 'crazy' in the modern world may just be a symptom of our worldview. Many people who have schizo-affective disorders today would probably be legitimately accepted as prophets, or being possessed by demons, or called by the gods in previous societies. And based on historic data, those 'cures' seemed to be quite effective, at least form the anecdotes that we have passed down.

Perhaps our entire frame of the problem is an impediment to solving it.

While it's fashionable to sneer at this today, it is not a new idea that one solution to evil is to fight it. While it's a truism in many circles that the only appropriate things to do when an unhinged mentally-ill drug-addict is acting aggressive towards you are to help them and to walk away, there are no stone tablets from God setting that out as the Truth. (or if there are, I've never heard of them).

Similarly, it is received wisdom -- but not necessarily true -- that every such problem needs a systemic solution which puts no onus on the unhinged person in question, but all of it on "society", government, or those around them to somehow fix their problems without impinging on their agency.

As for "safety nets", the name of the concept is itself deceitful. A safety net is something you fall into after screwing up, then get out of and climb up and try again. What we have today aren't so much safety nets as permanent support.

What we have today aren't so much safety nets as permanent support.

You missed a great opportunity for a hammock analogy there.

While it's fashionable to sneer at this today, it is not a new idea that one solution to evil is to fight it.

Is using a systematized solution to stop evil not fighting it?

I suppose what I'm saying is that there are many ways to fight problems. In general I favor non-violent solutions where possible, which I think is the start of where a lot of system-oriented folks get to. Our whole modern conception of agency is incredible fraught, I don't know if I can even touch that reasonably.

I agree with your point on safety nets. It's a bad term, and permanent welfare is often far worse for people. Once someone's self image becomes weak and dependent, I think it exacerbates the problem rather than solving it.

Is using a systematized solution to stop evil not fighting it?

Systemizing the solution isn't what makes it "not fighting". Demanding that the solution be restricted to "helping" is what makes it "not fighting". Systematizing it does tend to make it too big to solve and removes the responsibility of anyone to solve it. The idea seems to be "to keep the homeless person from assaulting people, you must first solve drug addiction and mental illness".

Systematizing it does tend to make it too big to solve and removes the responsibility of anyone to solve it.

This is the fundamental paradox of a massive, globally connected society. We need systems to coordinate, but humans are built to live in systems. Definitely makes for interesting discourse.

The idea seems to be "to keep the homeless person from assaulting people, you must first solve drug addiction and mental illness".

Part of this is also the nature of democracy. It's hard to win a campaign being 'tough on crime.' Generally more feel-good solutions will appeal to a broader majority, as they're far easier to justify and seem less morally fraught. Even if these types of solutions have worse outcomes overall.

Part of this is also the nature of democracy. It's hard to win a campaign being 'tough on crime.' Generally more feel-good solutions will appeal to a broader majority, as they're far easier to justify and seem less morally fraught. Even if these types of solutions have worse outcomes overall.

Is this some kind of joke? Apart from a few ultra-left-wing cities in a short period after the death of George Floyd, essentially every politician running for election with the intention of winning claims to be tough on crime (some of them are lying, of course). This is most notoriously the case in America, but it is true in every democracy where I have been paying attention. In the UK, the "soft" end of the Overton window is that we should build fewer prisons and spend the money hiring police. (The logic being that a higher chance of being caught more than makes up for a shorter sentence, so you get more deterrence with less punishment). The Chesa Boudin recall tells us that even in San Francisco, being openly soft on crime was a political non-starter by 2022.

that one solution to evil is to fight it.

Great turn of phrase!

I think it's illuminating to see how many people on TheMotte both loathe mentally ill homeless people so much and are so authoritarian that their desired solution to the mentally ill homeless problem is to kill them all.

How many people on the TheMotte believe this? Cite me the actual comment where someone said "that their desired solution to the mentally ill homeless problem is to kill them all" and let us look at how many upvotes it got.

I wouldn't call that a perfect representation since not every upvote means agreement

Indeed. I find the policy suggestion in the post maximally wrong but it is an earnest engagement with the topic and an effort post.

No, I do not want more censorship on TheMotte and I do not want to see such posts modded or such users permabanned. Although I find the opinions that I criticized to be distasteful and as you see I am comfortable saying so, I do not want to see opinions policed here.

I assume he’s thinking of this and related discussion. Downvoted, though I find that to be a terrible proxy for actual belief.

@zeke5123

How could I credibly answer “no, this is a terrible tragedy, I never wanted to take someone’s life” when I’ve got a backlog of posts here saying explicitly that I believe that schizophrenic street criminals’ lives have no value whatsoever and that the world would be better if all of them were summarily rounded up and sent to gulags or executed?

34 upvotes

That poster also calls the event "a tragic and unforeseen accident."

No, Skibboleth correctly interpreted my comment. The bit about Neely’s death being a tragic and unforeseen accident is from the perspective of Dan Penny, who by all accounts did not intend to kill Neely and almost certainly does view the situation as tragic. I do not view it as tragic, and the measures I’m calling for would be neither unforeseen nor accidental.

Is it accurate to summarize your post and your views by saying that your "desired solution to the mentally ill homeless problem is to kill them all"? If this is not an accurate summary, how is it it inaccurate, and what is your actual "desired solution"?

Not all of them, but a substantial portion. I would like to live under a state with the capacity, the credibility, and the sovereignty to effectively carry out this policy, with the legitimate support of the public, but given the current state of our ruling elite I would settle for mass vigilantism. Note that this is specifically about the chronically homeless, the ones who have conclusively and consistently demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to respond productively to less punitive opportunities for self-betterment. The ones with long criminal records, no recent record of employment or stable contributions to society.

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Aw, man. Look, the world would be a better place without a lot of people. We would have more resources if we rounded up the disabled, the elderly, everyone below the bottom quartile of IQ, and all crime-causers, and executed them all. That obviously doesn't make it the right thing to do. I want to live in a society that takes care of me (and others) even if I develop a mental illness through no fault of my own.

I agree that we are at times a bit too sympathetic to troublemakers but you're about 100x too extreme in the opposite direction.

you're about 100x too extreme in the opposite direction.

I understand that, and I have no illusions that my very hardline position will be implemented. I’m anchoring the right end of the distribution of possible positions, and I recognize that the real future approach will ideally be somewhere in between mine and what we have now.

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unnecessary verbosity

Bit like saying “unnecessary ice cream”. Or “unnecessary sex”.

Yeah, don’t threaten us with a good time.

Yep. That’s what people are saying. They are rooting to kill the mentally ill. Maybe the broader point is that mentally ill homeless people often cause trouble so sooner or later something like this will happen and reordering our society to cater to them is not smart.

That is, in fact, exactly what people are saying:

But our ex-Marine instead kills some useless homeless insane person who's a blight on everyone around him and this is a major problem? This is bizarro world where insane violent criminals get treated with 1000x the dignity of innocent families. If we can accept collateral damage in wasteful wars, we should accept collateral damage in maintaining basic standards of behaviour.

How could I credibly answer “no, this is a terrible tragedy, I never wanted to take someone’s life” when I’ve got a backlog of posts here saying explicitly that I believe that schizophrenic street criminals’ lives have no value whatsoever and that the world would be better if all of them were summarily rounded up and sent to gulags or executed?

There are only two tragedies here. One is that the hero’s getting his name dragged through the mud and facing social and legal harassment for taking out the trash. The second is that there are far too few subway vigilantes in the world, and far too many “Michael Jackson impersonators” terrorizing public spaces. The Subway Marine should be honored, just as Rooftop Koreans should be honored, and become a celebrity spokesman for the sandwich chain.

If they wanted to say "this is a tragic but inevitable consequence of our society's failures with respect to public safety and mental health" they could do that without also adding "Neely was human garbage, I'm glad he's dead, and we should do this more often." The fact that they did add that is evidence that yes, 'kill the undesirables' is within their range of acceptable policy.

What proportion of the Motte's posters does this sentiment encompass? Couldn't say - I expect most motte posters are smart enough to figure out that if you are directly asked "Do you support exterminating the homeless" the correct answer is "no" even if they privately feel different. But it's clearly a sentiment that they are happy to express in adjacent conversations and which garners largely positive internet points on this forum.

As a sort of aside, I saved a passage from the old place onto my notes without saving the author.

Although to me it’s highly exaggerated and extraordinarily blunt, it still really encapsulates the core of how I feel about this. It’s obviously a response so some context is missing but if anyone knows the author or can provide this missing context that would be cool.

From Dec 2020

“But utilitarian with regard to whom? The whole problem with utilitarianism is the presence of so-called "utility monsters", and homelessness presents a real world example. A small minority of the population wants to use drugs and shit in the street while slowly dying of medieval diseases. But every tiny bit of aid just pleases them so so much that utility calculus DEMANDS we all pay an 80% marginal tax rate to pay incompetent government contractors to build $500k hovels for these people.

Utilitarianism falls flat because each person's measure of utility is internal to their mind and not comparable to anyone else's. It's a moral system that privileges incompetent, clueless and greedy people at the expense of unassuming, conscientious people.

If it were up to me, I'd make it publicly known that the cops aren't going to lift a finger to aid anyone who hasn't paid at least $300 into the treasury this year. So the grocery stores and homeowners could just bayonet them (no reason to waste the ¢45 and noise of a bullet) and the disruptive homeless would retreat to rural areas and OD in the woods where we don't have to pay to bury them. The down on their luck homeless would stay in a shelter for a while and get back on their feet, and the town could maybe not be filled with human shit for ten minutes.

But notice how this policy isn't based on retribution. I don't hate the people being discussed here. I feel vaguely sorry for and disgusted by them. I am just aware that helping them ranges from expensive to impossible and I like holding on to my money without losing it all to taxes. Every dollar the county housing boondoggle gets is a dollar my children won't get, so bayonets it is. If the chronically homeless could somehow be profitably remediated, they would be my best friends.”

Quite right, if you pay for something you get more of it.

If they wanted to say "this is a tragic but inevitable consequence of our society's failures with respect to public safety and mental health" they could do that without also adding "Neely was human garbage, I'm glad he's dead, and we should do this more often." The fact that they did add that is evidence that yes, 'kill the undesirables' is within their range of acceptable policy.

Most homeless people aren't violent, and don't have law-enforcement records as long as your arm. Most homeless people - even the drug-addicted ones - don't get in your face and scream at you about how they're not afraid to die today, and not afraid to go to jail (insinuating that they're willing to commit acts which would either result in their death or long-term imprisonment - i.e. violent ones). Most homeless people are not schizophrenic street criminals with 40+ arrests, including multiple serious batteries and at least one attempted kidnapping. Most homeless people are just trying to get back on their feet and avoid the shame of being seen in a destitute condition. I have no problem with them, nor do I think that most Mottizens have any problem with them. So no, there's no connecting this to "homeless people" or "undesirables" writ large.

What proportion of the Motte's posters does this sentiment encompass? Couldn't say - I expect most motte posters are smart enough to figure out that if you are directly asked "Do you support exterminating the homeless" the correct answer is "no" even if they privately feel different. But it's clearly a sentiment that they are happy to express in adjacent conversations and which garners largely positive internet points on this forum.

It is a goddamn travesty that in American big cities, public spaces - including sensitive ones like public transit - have been abandoned to people who think it's their birthright to scream at, threaten, assault, batter, or otherwise harass ordinary people. Sometimes these people are obviously suffering from some species of mental defect; sometimes they are just cruel, entitled, and aggressive. Securing the public peace is literally the first responsibility of an organized state, and any state that can't or won't even do that is really no state at all. Moreover, if the state can- or will not do anything, people are justified in attempting to reclaim public areas, including by force if necessary. There is no affirmative obligation to suffer otherwise criminal harassment by others.

People who abuse public spaces in aggressive ways should be punished - not because they're inherently evil or "undesirable" (though they may also harbor genetic tendencies towards, e.g. psychosis that we would not affirmatively select for if we had the option) but because of their actions. Their punishment should not necessarily be death (i.e. no, don't just shoot annoying people on the subway), but I'm not going to categorically say that someone screaming threats shouldn't get cold-cocked (let alone someone who's assaulted or battered a stranger unprovoked), and when people get into physical fights, sometimes death results.

In such cases the death may be sad to the deceased's family and loved-ones, but it was not honorable. It was largely the result of their own bad actions, and (absent serious extenuating circumstances) was inflicted in defense of the public peace and welfare. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. It shouldn't be that hard to not scream in random strangers' faces and threaten them day after day after goddamn day. It's generally sad that their life was wasted on such shitty, harmful behavior, but on the whole society is improved for their absence.

This is not a good post.

I don't know, I think it's illuminating to see how many people on TheMotte both loathe mentally ill homeless people so much and are so authoritarian that their desired solution to the mentally ill homeless problem is to kill them all.

This is a bit of weakmanning.

At this point SneerClub might as well just shut down. TheMotte beclowns itself enough on a regular basis that outside mocking of this place is superfluous. There are some great contributors who rise above the mess, but a large part of this site is just /pol/ but with unnecessary verbosity.

This is antagonism and writing as if you don't want a majority of themotte to participate in the discussion.

1 day ban.

This is a general warning to everyone: I just finished going through the mod-queue for the Jordan Neely post from last week. I did not ban anyone because I was over a day late to modding it, and I didn't feel like handing out 5 or 6 bans. I will be paying attention to this thread, and the general amnesty from last week will not continue.

This is a place for civil discussions. We are not here to wage the culture war. And this is not a place for you to just vent your feelings and frustrations.

@Goodguy is either lucky or unlucky in getting the first ban. If I have to do more bans they will escalate in length.

The belief that he is a “degenerate” whose death doesn't matter is founded on the assumption that he was a menace to society himself, beyond simply being a homeless subway busker. Then it matters a great deal whether the violent crimes people attribute to him actually happened or not.

This is a general pattern in the culture war that really irks me. People decide they don't like someone, then either fabricate evidence or present it in the most damning way. This happens on Reddit all the time. For example, Redditors say the executives of Norfolk Southern should be in jail because they turned East Ohio into an uninhabitable wasteland. If you point out that there is no evidence that the area is or will become uninhabitable by any reasonable definition, they downvote you, because you're challenging their conclusion.

In the case of Jordan Neely, if you think he's a degenerate because he kidnaps children, it's rather important to prove whether that's true. If Jordan Neely is a degenerate even without evidence that he kidnapped a child, then people should present the evidence for that without resorting to unproven allegations.

And don't get me started on the fact that many charges can be framed in completely different ways depending on whether you like the accused or not. For example, “he kidnapped a child” can mean anything ranging from “he snatched a random toddler off the streets and stuffed her in the trunk of his car” to “he took his fifteen-year-old son on an out-of-state family visit in contravention of the custody arrangement with his ex-wife”. When you mention “child kidnapping”, people probably instinctively think of the former, while most cases are probably more like the latter.

I am not a court of law. If harassing and scaring random people around is a regular day in someone’s life then that’s a degenerate who wouldn’t survive for long in 99% of human societies that has ever existed. I don’t have to care about the specifics of their mischiefs to come to this conclusion.

I don't have a primary source, but it was reported in the NY Daily News:

And he was busted in August 2015 for attempted kidnapping after he was seen dragging a 7-year-old girl down an Inwood street. He pled guilty to endangering the welfare of a child and was sentenced to four months in jail.

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-possible-charges-marine-michael-jackson-impersonator-jordan-neely-20230504-plaznkv5pjbuxaqdu2tlxpieqq-story.html

I have not seen that reported in any other article about Jordan Neely, so it is possible the NY Daily News is mistaken.

This is not enough for a top level thread comment. There is a possibility it was just posted in the wrong section, if I didn't have that uncertainty it would be a one day ban. Don't do this.

Edit:

The discussion on this topic last week had some bad posts and bad quality discussion. There was general amnesty for bad posts from that discussion, because I was late to moderating it. That will not be true for this thread. I've already handed out one ban there will be heightened scrutiny on these posts, especially if you are one of the people that received a warning in the thread from last week. If you are already on thin ice and don't trust yourself to avoid culture warring you are better off minimizing this thread and going to one of the other quality discussions taking place.

Does it matter at all? It has no effect on the situation. A raging lunatic is unpredictable. Unpredictable always implies danger. I think that is the reason this incident is not turning into second Floyd no matter how hard the anti-racist industrial complex try to make it one. Floyd was minding his own business and was not immediate danger for anyone, no one likes to be shouted on and to be on their toes by mentally ill (or drugged, or drunk) people. So it is a bit hard to find righteous indignation in the normies.

And if you are in enclosed space with someone that could potentially turn violent any second and cant disengage - engaging and restraining is the better option to protect yourself and the others.

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.

  • no credit cards for gun sales- you don’t pick up the gun until the dealer has cash in hand. Persons under 25 need to wait two weeks before picking up semiautomatics.

  • media coverage of mass shootings is banned.

  • straw purchasers and felons in possession are automatically guilty of attempted murder, not the previous crimes. No plea bargains are permitted and there is a strong mandatory minimum.

  • gang members on the list of prohibited persons. Person to person transfers are prohibited and must be an FFL transfer.

  • insurance companies cannot attempt to incentivize businesses banning licensed concealed carry.

And is there any evidence the guy was a Nazi? He had gang tattoos but the speculation about white supremacist ideology comes from a patch on his jacket reading RWDS, which could be a bar, a mechanic shop, something left on the jacket from the guy who donated it to a thrift store, etc.

Most of this I'd class as police state stuff, and most of it wouldn't help for these sorts of mass shootings. Straw purchasers are a different problem, ordinary criminality. Two week waiting periods don't help with people who plan (which is a lot of these mass shooters).

Almost all of those policy proscriptions is less likely to work for the simple fact that 3D printers go BRRRRRR

Yeah, so you're either skilled enough to do it, or reckless enough to willingly sell such guns to unstable, weird people you don't know.

The whole thing with 3D printers is the skill required is minimal, so long as you can operate a computer.

And more to the point, the cost is usually much lower.

or reckless enough to willingly sell such guns to unstable, weird people you don't know.

That's... generally how black markets work, yeah.

The whole thing with 3D printers is the skill required is minimal, so long as you can operate a computer.

You're out here saying anyone who can operate a tablet or a gaming console can also make a FGC9 without major issues or help ?

I'll also note here that Breivik tried to buy a gun at a 'black market' in Czech Republic and failed miserably.

Not that there isn't one, but you have to be a criminal to access it, which the average spree shooter isn't,

Most other Western countries seem to be dealing with that problem adequately.

Define "adequately."

There's already been at least one attack using such a weapon.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/3d-gun-print-germany-synagogue-shooting-stephan-balliet-neo-nazi-a9152746.html

And they're popping up with increasing regularity across Europe too.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/justice-home-affairs/news/europol-keeps-wary-eye-on-threat-from-3d-printed-guns/

Only in September, Icelandic police said they had arrested four people suspected of planning a “terrorist attack”, confiscating several 3D-printed semi-automatic weapons.

The same month, Spanish authorities discovered an illegal gun-making workshop of a man in his forties in the Basque Country.

That find followed two other such cases in the country in 2021.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63495123

Police are seizing 3D printed weapons in greater numbers. From the start of last year there have been 21 recoveries of weapons, a "significant increase" on previous years, though still small compared to conventional weapons, Mr Perfect says.

Do you think this becomes more or less common in the coming years?

And let us be specific: how many shootings using these sorts of weapons would have to occur in other countries before it wasn't adequately dealt with?

Insofar as in toto most Western governments control the supply of guns pretty well despite the apparent threat of 3-D printed guns. Some individual instances of them being used hardly disproves that picture.

The median mass shooter is not an experienced gunsmith, or an accomplished 3d printer nerd, nor indeed experienced in any kind of small scale manufacturing at all. He’s a troubled but managed to keep his nose clean 19 year old NEET. Making it harder for him to buy guns is making it very difficult for him to acquire them.

I hate to rely on Twitter-mining of social media, but yeah, sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one.

Very low-hanging fruit, but here are Ian Miles Cheong and Tim Pool beclowning themselves in the face of this, and Elon Musk getting real close to it.

Truly, Nazi's and white supremacist are a very diverse and eclectic group.

My theory; Being hispanic means he can be racists as hell and never get called on it, hence the various online postings. With racism being keyed only to white people, everyone in the media makes the assumption that he's automatically white with no research on the matter.

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

Go directly to statistics jail for comparing violent crime in the US when large parts of the country were under COVID restrictions to Australia after COVID restrictions had ceased. If you use the 2019 US figures, it doesn't change the story - the US assault number was 1.7% instead of 1.4% - still well below the Australian level.

IIRC last time I looked it up, UK stats looked similar (assuming US FBI and UK Home Office statistics are a reasonable comparison), but I don't feel like digging for it now.

The equivalent victim-survey based crime numbers are the Crime Survey for England and Wales (I didn't bother looking for Scottish or Northern Irish numbers, but they won't materially affect the UK-wide average). The latest (almost entirely post-COVID restrictions) overall victimisation rate for violent crime is 1.35% - i.e. somewhat below the US numbers. The CSEW does not break down individual types of violent crime because the sample size isn't big enough to produce reliable numbers.

The other thing I looked at, more as a sanity check that the data was comparable than for information, was whether the contribution of domestic violence was the same. Both the US and Australia have about a 20:40:40 ratio of domestic violence/acquaintance violence/stranger violence. The UK talks about "domestic abuse" which is clearly something completely different because the rate is higher than the overall violent crime rate.

Incidentally, can any Aussies on this board let me know how you can have that level of violent crime and not end up with the kind of national freakout about it that the US and the UK go in for?

I was thinking about the national lockdown in Australia which ended in May 2020, but looking at this list of local lockdowns, it looks like Sydney and Canberra spent about 2 months of 2021 under lockdown and Melbourne about 3 months.

Looking at 2019 makes most sense until we have a full year of post-COVID data (which the UK just published, but the US and Australia don't seem to have yet)

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Do we see those effects in societies which have almost no guns available? Are there stats on relative frequency of such crimes in e.g. Japan or Australia?

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.

First of all, I'm not certain the armed populace are not themselves being tyrannical or supporting tyranny. History is littered with pro-tyranny rebellions against the government such as the US Civil War,

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.'

Armed defenders of liberty against state tyranny is one possible dynamic, but armed forces of tyranny against the democratic state is a pretty common one too.

Seems like a good reason to allow pro-democracy forces to keep weapons? I dunno what examples you're thinking of in particular.

Second, I don't think it's true that there's a correlation between stricter gun laws and backsliding on democracy or basic civil rights, and I'd like you to support that claim.

North Korea, 2009:

"N. Korea enacts rules on regulating firearms"

North Korea has had a gun control law since 2009, recently obtained data showed Monday, in what was seen as an effort to tighten control over the society at a time of power succession.

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.

It doesn't seem like a zero gun society there resulted in more assault on women or the elderly.

Not when you pick one that just doesn't have any violence to measure, no.

How the heck to you expect to establish a correlation with ANYTHING when there's scant data to use?

Mexico nominally bans guns but totally lacks the capacity to enforce that, and is quasi anarchic in many places.

Hence why Mexican Citizens should probably be allowed to own guns.

Do you have examples of a free country adopting these laws and that allowing the rise of tyranny?

I mean, I would consider both the United Kingdom and Canada as examples of this. Canada has never had high rates of violence, and yet they have gotten continually stricter on guns. The U.K. is unironically a clown show about it, coming after Kitchen Knives now. <30 years from when they banned handguns for civilians and they're now claiming can't be trusted with a fucking bread knife.

Canada in particular is very "iron fist in velvet glove" about it.

And then they do shit like shut off your bank account if you protest.

If unilaterally seizing the private property of peaceful citizens isn't tyrannical, I don't know what is.

The whole issue is that you're asking me to demonstrate a free society that gave up guns and THEN became tyrannical, when my whole premise is that:

A) Societies which allow civilian gun ownership are less likely to ever become tyrannical (again, see Switzerland)

B) It requires a tyrannical state to actually enact and enforce gun laws in the first place.

So my examples are things like the Taliban seizing power again and immediately confiscating weapons or Venezuela banning guns then kidnapping citizens en masse and further clamping down on dissent.

Tyrants don't trust their citizens with weapons. So they inevitably end up confiscating weapons from civilians.

That's what happens in tyrannies. The get more, not less tyrannical over time. So the solution is to maintain all safeguards that prevent falling into it in the first place.

And civilian firearm ownership seems to be a reliable one.

Canada in particular is very "iron fist in velvet glove" about it.

And then they do shit like shut off your bank account if you protest.

You're theory being that if the truckers were armed the Canadian government would have been... less harsh? If anything that would surely make them come down like a ton of bricks.

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The U.K. is unironically a clown show about it, coming after Kitchen Knives now. <30 years from when they banned handguns for civilians and they're now claiming can't be trusted with a fucking bread knife.

Despite what you have been reading there is no systematic ban on ordinary domestic knives in the UK. There is a ban on swords and machetes -- as there is in many countries -- and you can be have a knife confiscated if you are carrying it outside your home under suspicious circumstances -- as you can in many countries and most US states.

It sounds like there are a bunch of post-Soviet countries with permissive handgun laws. Plus a couple like Russia which want to keep that locked down.

Also most of South America.

the driving force of violence in any given nation is NOT the availability of weapons.

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.

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?"

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.

But surely if it is the culture's perception of violence which has the greatest impact you should put more work into that? If we rework America into a more conservative culture like Japan we could solve the issue and keep gun owners happy, then everyone wins.

Well not really because gun control is, at least from a policy perspective, relatively tractable, and from a political perspective many good measures are well inside the Overton window. 'Reworking America into a more conservative culture' will never happen, at least not whole cloth and not in a way where the results will be easily predictable and definitely translate into a more stable society.

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If we are looking for a US example of pro-tyranny armed citizens rebelling against the government, then the first Klan and the Redeemers (my history is not good enough to know to what extent these were meaningfully different groups) are a more clear-cut example than the Confederacy.

As long as it's a significant factor it's worth doing something about.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This circles back to our comments above on tractability.

well you're hardly going to suggest that slaves enjoyed expansive gun rights, are you?

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.

tyrannical powers generally prefer disarmed populaces

Maybe true, but I don't think it holds any lessons for modern day America.

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?

Nazi Germany would be the most obvious answer - Weimar-era gun laws were repeatedly relaxed by the Nazi regime (with an initially de facto but later de jure exception for Jews) as part of their remilitarization of Germany and ownership of long guns by non-Jews was entirely deregulated in 1938. A lot of the friends and relations of the Gypsies, homosexuals, socialists etc. who the Nazis persecuted would have been armed. Didn't make any difference - the Nazi regime was a paradigmatic case where the answer to "You can have my gun when you prize it from my cold dead hands" would be "Very well, let's do it your way"

And of course, if a determined population actually sticks to their guns in this way, they at least improve the casualty ratio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising

But yeah, had they thrown down their weapons at the start, there'd probably have been less death overall.

Warsaw is notoriously not in Germany. The Polish nation-in-arms had already been defeated on the battlefield long before Hitler thought about the Holocaust - the fact that the Germans would win a violent conflict was already settled, as was the fact that they were willing to use the necessary force (including much bigger weapons than the rifles armed civilians rely on) and brutality to do so.

The claim that "civilian-owned guns are a useful tool of resistance to a foreign invader" is a very different one to "civilian-owned guns are protective against the domestic government turning tyrannical". The first claim seems like it should be answerable as a matter of military history - FWIW my uneducated view is that since about 1900 civilian guns have not been a problem for an invader able and willing to use tanks and aircraft against troublesome civilians, and that effective resistance to foreign invaders has tended to rely on "bombs" (IRA car bombs, VC claymore traps in Vietnam, IEDs in Iraq) rather than guns. I think the second claim is never going to be settled for the reasons we are seeing on this thread.

Saudi Arabia, 2023 (timely!)

"Saudi Arabia announces new gun laws, restrictions on ownership"

But... Saudi Arabia has been a tyranny for its entire existence. As far as I've understood, it's not likely to get more tyrannical by any standards we'd generally consider tyrannical. Nevertheless, they appear, by these laws, to have allowed (and still allow!) some form of handgun ownership.

Monarchy is not the same thing as tyranny, and if you're referring to their laws regarding social issues, consider that this is what most people living there might actually want.

Ages ago I heard a clip where a western reporter interviewed the Saudi king. He asked why doesn't he just make women equal to men under law, he's the king after all and can do whatever he wants. The response was seemingly a tangent about how much he loves his subjects, and how highly he values their opinion and values. The (Facebook, I think) commentariat couldn't make sense of it, and the reaction was an overwhelming "what the fuck is this dude on about?", while to me he was pretty clearly saying "If I pass a law like that, my people will string me up by my feet".

Now, how much does that have to do with gun control, I have no idea, but one shouldn't assume a government is a tyranny just because there's an absolute ruler.

Are there stats on relative frequency of such crimes in e.g. Japan or Australia?

Cherry-picking 2 of the most docile societies on the planet won't work here. It's pretty obvious that people become much more susceptible to knives and bats wielded by men in gun-free societies.

Women generally don't like guns, despite them being a great equalizer. They should still have the option to avoid ceding the power to effectively defend themselves because of biology.

Australia is absolutely as rule-abiding a society as Japan; the rules are just different. Look at the treatment of speed limits for a trivial example.

I do think Australia shares quite a few similarities with the Anglo world, but almost nowhere else folded as quickly or completely to COVID restrictions, gun control, and wokeism. I don't deny that an island nation has effectively instituted gun control (even if there was, IIRC, a minor uptick in non-gun violence as a result).

But Australia is very culturally similar to the US, and is by no means a docile society.

Ehh, maybe if you think of the sort of rural bogans and bikie-types we might stereotypically associate with Australia, but as a Yank, I'm under the impression that that really isn't the case, and they have a Deep Blue Tribe there (probably helped by the fact that Australia only has like four major cities).

And even then, I suspect we may have to revise Japan's "docile" rating if they keep trying to kill their Prime Ministers.

I don’t think we’d be looking at (at least in the first two generations) a low-gun USA. As a practical matter, no one knows where the guns are; they’re not registered and a fair number of states are constitutional carry states meaning that you don’t have to have a CCL. People aren’t going to simply surrender the guns, and nobody knows which houses to even check. The stuff you can find in a constitutional carry state are people who have memberships at shooting ranges and old guys who bought a state deer tag. At best you’ll get shotguns and old deer rifles, not AKs. So being fair to the argument, Australia and Japan, where nobody has guns is probably not the probable outcome. It’s going to be a country that still has a lot of guns (and even in places where guns aren’t officially allowed, it’s easy enough to get one, see Chicago or New York or DC — guns are highly restricted but you can easily get one if you need it) just not in the hands of the law abiding citizen.

My thought (and it will never happen) is a massively overwhelming show of police force. If you can reduce crime and especially violent crime by 15-20%, a lot fewer people will even want guns except for plinking beer cans (and hopefully not on a movie set) or maybe hunting. In the 1960s when crime was low, the most common form of gun was a hunting rifle. People didn’t want more than that because there wasn’t much gang violence, theft, or rape. You could walk down most city streets and be perfectly safe. You could let your kids play baseball in an empty lot without much fear. People want guns now because we no longer live in the kind of society where you can trust your neighbors to do the right thing, where the biggest fear was your kid getting a little drunk or maybe getting cigarettes at the bowling alley. If you can get crime that low, you won’t need to fight to confiscate guns because people who feel safe in their homes won’t want guns.

As a practical matter, no one knows where the guns are; they’re not registered and a fair number of states are constitutional carry states meaning that you don’t have to have a CCL.

The government knows where all the guns an "instant check" were required for are. Yes, they're supposed to destroy the records; they don't. And even if they did, the NSA would keep a backup. That accounts for a lot of them.

I fully agree with your sentiment except in one part: Increasing the amount of police won't decrease the prevalence of crime long-term. Increasing the quality of police training and integrating police more tightly into communities might do some good but ultimately crime isn't a matter of a lack of crime-prevention in the narrow understanding of the term. Reducing crime effectively requires adjusting cultural, social and imo most importantly economic variables. The reason switzerland has a much lower homicide rate while having a comparable rate of gun ownership to the US isn't that switzerland is a draconian police state.

Were gun trends in the 2010s driven by the recession? Or by the rather passionate response to Democratic administrations? Obama was a bogeyman on a lot of CW issues, and I think that confounds the issue.

Regardless, much as I’d like to smash crime back down to 2011 levels, I don’t think we can reduce gun culture without disentangling it from the red/blue split.

This I'm a bit skeptical about because we did get crime quite low by the 2010s and it didn't do much of anything to tamp down gun culture and purchases.

They were still high by international standards, and there was an entire political coalition promising to enact soft anarcho-tyranny on the issue.

The rise in crime in the 1970's happened across the first world, and it didn't lead to a demand for liberalised handgun laws in any country except America.

and it didn't lead to a demand for liberalised handgun laws in any country except America

It didn't really even lead to a demand for liberalized handgun laws in America over that time either- it would take until the mid-to-late nineties for licenses to carry concealed in public to become rubber-stamp affairs (and another 20 after that would be done away with entirely), and that was also in the midst of a ban that limited the number of permissible rounds to 10 (admittedly, the '94 AWB and its 10-round limit predate even the chunky 90s-00s subcompact handguns which barely hold that many rounds in the first place).

To be fair, it also took until the late '90s for the largest English-speaking countries to completely destroy the concept of gun ownership in general; the bans in UK and Australia (and to a point, Canada) all came after the US' AWB.

Second, I don't think it's true that there's a correlation between stricter gun laws and backsliding on democracy or basic civil rights, and I'd like you to support that claim.

What if it happens that the right to keep and bear arms is a basic civil right?

All of that said, a society of high interpersonal violence and crime is I believe inimical to liberty

But "wrong door" shootings and the popular type of mass shootings where a disaffected person kills a bunch of strangers are a small percentage of homicides. And it's possible to have high gun ownership but low homicide rate -as low-homicide portions of the US or high gun ownership parts of europe show. The US's crime rate should be much lower, but thinking about mass shootings, wrong door shootings, or civilian gun prevalence as ways to lower it is mistaken, imo.

I see value in both @hydroacetylene and @huadpe’s answers. A little police state is not a bad thing—not when police are the raison d’etre of the state. The problem is incentivizing them to remain little.

I don’t see a way to let police preempt shooters without also letting them preempt and inconvenience anyone else. The Tang China tack, punishing police for false alarms? There’s no way to know what could have happened. Red flag laws? It helps if civilians have to bring the accusation, but still, there’s incentive to confiscate first and ask questions later. Police will always be incentivized to disarm the populace. It makes their job strictly easier.

Tribalism makes this all worse. So long as Our Team is getting disarmed and Their Team is doing the disarming, both sides are correct to recognize the incentives. I don’t know if it’s physically possible to depoliticize this. Changing how the media reports gun violence has to be a start. “If it bleeds, it leads” has never been in the public interest.

In summary: I don’t have a good answer, and think that most mainstream ones are pointless or counterproductive. It’d be nice if we never talked about it, but anyone aiming at an innocent was immediately drone-struck. We’re so far from that world that I’m not sure what is best. That’s why I’m venting here instead of, I dunno, running for office.

I don't think you should be able to show a firearm unless you're in a place / circumstance where you can legally discharge that firearm.

Could you clarify? The place you've described is "any place", which doesn't disallow non-uniformed shooters, and the circumstance you've described is "with justifiable belief in an imminent unprovoked threat of death or grievous bodily harm", which does disallow police officers and security guards at any time before it's too late to go get a gun.

And it makes it so that if you see someone strapped, you can know it's a problem and run/call the cops/etc.

Sadly, this rule would only be reliable if certain false prerequisites like "concealed carriers' clothes never shift the wrong way" were true. There are a lot of people who never want to open carry but who also never want to go to jail (or worse; IIRC I read about this in the discussion of a CCW holder killed by police) for not concealing well enough.

Sure. Under my rule, you can concealed carry in public, but you can't pull out your weapon until and unless there is in fact a justifiable belief in an imminent threat.

This is supposed to be the rule for police and security guards already in most places.

Sure. Under my rule, you can concealed carry in public, but you can't pull out your weapon until and unless there is in fact a justifiable belief in an imminent threat. You can open carry if you're allowed to hunt in that area or if it's a range or somewhere else shooting is allowed.

This would also have the effect of making it a crime to open carry a gun inside your own home, in any city or county that bans shooting within the municipal boundaries.

Yeah, but other than making you feel less icky seeing people with guns in public, what does banning open carry actually accomplish? I can't think of a single mass shooting that would have been prevented by such a law. Has a mass shooter ever been misidentified as a lawful citizen peacefully open carrying? This is exactly the sort of "I can't identify any way this would actually help solve the stated problem, but it would make me feel better emotionally" policy suggestion that makes gun rights supporters distrustful of "compromise" legislation.

Hell, your first suggestion for a reasonable compromise to alleviate the problem of mass shooters is to... moderately inconvenience a group of shockingly law-abiding people in a way that has no plausible impact on mass shootings but does prohibit a lawful activity that you already dislike for unrelated reasons anyway. This is why gun rights supporters aren't interested in compromise. If every suggested "compromise" for decades takes the form of a pointless restriction that seems almost deliberately designed to do nothing but antagonize you, eventually you stop giving your opponents the benefit of the doubt that they're operating in good faith.

He wasn't stopped by the many other laws he violated. Assuming enforcement of your specific policy will not suffer the same problems as laws related to immigration or deported foreign nationals not being allowed to purchase firearms is special pleading.

How would visit from the police stop him from murdering the family, exactly?

This is, of course, completely ignoring the fact that your top policy suggestion, taken in the most charitable light, would do absolutely nothing if he was shooting a gun in his back, not front yard (because then there is no way to see it as open carry).

Really, your comment is an extremely clear example of how the policy proposals of gun control people only serve to annoy the out group, and have very little effect on actual criminals.

Discharging a gun in your front lawn without a good reason (self defense), is already a crime in the vast majority of jurisdictions (including that person's according to some reports). Which would make this another example of "just enforce the law you losers" cases.

At least in rural areas it's pretty frequently legal to engage in target shooting on private property: as far as I know in Texas it's legal to discharge firearms on your own property outside of city limits provided you're at least 300 feet from neighboring occupied buildings. Within city limits it's generally a local law issue. Rifle and shotgun shots (presumably mostly for sport or hunting) are not an uncommon sound if you start wandering backroads.

Which would make this another example of "just enforce the law you losers" cases.

As far as I can tell, the suspect in question wasn't in the US legally, and thus couldn't have legally acquired the firearm in question.

Discharging a firearm in your front yard is not an example of open carry. I would be absolutely shocked if what he did was not already illegal under current law, and on the off chance it wasn't, why not ban the dangerous and concerning activity he was actually engaged in rather than a much broader activity that almost exclusively penalizes law-abiding individuals?

I mean, recognize that it's still an absolutely miniscule portion of the deaths that occur in the United States on a yearly basis. <100 mass shooting victims (for the strictest definition of 'mass shooting') per year in a country of 350+ million... it requires a microscope to detect that blip.

It looks slightly scarier if you consider all firearm homicides, disregard deaths from 'old age' and consider that it's the sort of thing that can randomly end your life even if you're young and healthy.

And yet, the biggest threat in the "death from random happenstance" category is still car accidents. And considering that you can also get grievously injured and survive it strikes me as far more reasonable to be worried about getting T-boned in an intersection than gunned down at the mall.

The single change I made that most reduces my risk of untimely demise was shortening my commute every day so I minimize my time on the road, especially my time driving at speed.

So genuinely ask yourself, if you don't go around constantly anxious about a car accident, on what possible grounds do you go around anxiously worrying about a mass shooter?

Note, of course, it's still probably sensible to wear your seatbelt.

Ultimately, being truly afraid of mass shootings requires buying into the authoritarian narrative that you're at massive risk of victimization unless you surrender your means of defense. It's pure availability bias, not an ACTUAL threat you should prioritize.

But yes, pick up some CCW training and a good holster because responsible carry can save you or others from many other threats aside from mass shooters, and allows you to take a more 'active' role in your community's defense if you wish.

As far as policies go, we need to strike a balance between safety and individual autonomy.

I've offered a compromise position for a long time now: Ban registered Democrats from owning guns.

I don't see anything wrong with restricting the gun ownership rights of those who don't believe in gun ownership rights, and they should leap at the chance to get ~30% of the population to give up firearms. By their very own logic this is a step in the right direction.

I somehow doubt they'd take up the offer.

Also, cars have immediate, obvious utility to basically the entire population. For all the theory behind an armed populace, stochastic self-defense, etc. a gun should never be involved in buying groceries. That goes a long way towards making cars feel justified.

I went down to Florida a week ago to golf some. I was on the putting green before a round and overheard some boomers talking about the different guns they owned, and the conversation eventually shifted to the new Florida gun laws that allow permit-less CC (think someone joked "do you have a holster attachment on your bag?"). They were all dumbfounded as to why anyone would want someone with no firearms training to have guns on them in public, and couldn't understand the possible motives for passing such a bill.

The next day driving north I saw a random with a gun for the first time in my life on the interstate; two motorcyclists on a windy day (so their shirts were flapping up) with holsters on over their sweatpants (and no helmets).

They were all dumbfounded as to why anyone would want someone with no firearms training to have guns on them in public, and couldn't understand the possible motives for passing such a bill.

Well, Florida has had shall-issue concealed carry since 1987 and has issued millions of concealed carry permits and seen that it doesn't cause excess violence or deaths?

So the 'motives' are probably based on noticing the real-world results. I dunno.

has issued millions of concealed carry permits

That undermines more than supports the argument for permitless carry, doesn't it? I can see a strong argument for permitless carry in states where the legislature says "shall-issue" but the licensing agency says "ooh, sorry, on your application you did/didn't close the top on the digit '4', please try again, that'll be another $200 filing fee", but if training requirements are actually providing training rather than obstruction then they don't seem like a bad idea in theory.

it doesn't cause excess violence or deaths

I don't think you can extrapolate from "Florida allows trained licensees to carry concealed and the homicide rate kept declining" to "Florida allows anyone to do so and the homicide rate won't jump" ... but "dozens of states allow anyone to do so and the homicide rate kept declining" is decent evidence. New Hampshire isn't exactly a murderous hellscape.

I think the point is more that "in the absence of strong evidence that there's a serious danger to public safety, the default position should be in favor of expanding/preserving rights."

Florida basically concluded that anyone who isn't a felon, drug abuser, or otherwise legally proscribed from owning a gun can most likely be trusted to carry one, based on years of legal permit-holders generally being more law abiding than average.

It's a norm that I personally appreciate. If we can accept utilitarian arguments in favor of limiting certain civil rights, then it needs to be mediated by the 'null hypothesis' being that we should allow behaviors until the evidence is strong enough to justify reconsideration.

We of course end up arguing endlessly over what certain evidence actually means.

Reminder that permit less carry is now the fact of the law in most states now.

You say this like many of the same people pushing gun control aren't explicitly anti-car or at least very heavily pro-public-transport and would absolutely want to restrict car ownership to suit their ends.

Shrug.

Out of the people I know who are most nervous about guns, all of them are regular drivers. They may appreciate and endorse public transit, but anti-car is out of the Overton window for a lot of people, especially outside the densest cities.

Never underestimate how much familiarity breeds acceptance. This is part of the reason I take friends and family shooting whenever I get the chance.

Aren't those two very different subsets of the large group that is 'center-left people'? Gun control is a very broad democratic issue, while anti-car is a much more niche issue, at least 1/10th the size if not smaller (plenty of suburban moms who have no issue with cars or suburbs are democrats). And I don't see too many gun-control arguments on YIMBY twitter - there's a bit, but the strong advocates of both are different people.

I suspect that if you were to interrogate a lot of YIMBYs you'd find above average support for gun control, but so far YIMBY groups have tried to avoid holistic activism and stick to land use reform, so it doesn't come up much.

a gun should never be involved in buying groceries

Hunting is the original grocery trip, though.

You mentioning self driving cars in contrast to mass shooting just gave me a dystopian vision of a future where you could have as many guns as you wanted but they were all equipped with an AI technology, where every gun would be programmed to identify the target as being an aggressive threat or not before being shot at. Raises many ethical and philosophical questions, might be good for a sci fi story. Has anyone ever gone down this line of thinking before?

I'd be against this technology on broadly libertarian grounds and in fear that the government or someone else could just reprogram the guns to stop working altogether or not work against cops/military personnel, and besides that in the real world we'd have the old regular guns around anyway so all the "bad guys" would have the pre-AI guns or jailbreak the new ones and we'd run into the same problems as before anyway

It’s sort of the premise of the anime Psycho Pass. Police are armed with goofy sci-fi handguns that scale their output to the threat of the target. This is part of the city’s mass surveillance, which can read an individual’s mental state perfectly. So the guns will outright refuse to shoot a nonviolent target. The plot unfolds when the system refuses to recognize a complete psychopath.

Of course, this is starting from a Japanese baseline, so no reasonable civilian has any desire or ability to own a weapon.

Ultimately, being truly afraid of mass shootings requires buying into the authoritarian narrative that you're at massive risk of victimization unless you surrender your means of defense.

I think this isn't quite charitable enough. Mass shootings are pushed into our faces multiple times a year, with extremely emotional language and the full might of the leftist media apparatus.

My rational brain can understand and regurgitate the undeniable fact that they're a statistical anomaly not worthy of consideration when looking at national policy. But my animal brain, if only for a second, is absolutely filled with horror at the thought of my kids bleeding out on a tile floor at school because of a subhuman monster. Nobody who spends any time on the internet or in front of a TV can avoid being shown these images, and there's enough statistically illiterate fools to bring it to you in face-to-face conversations as well.

I can state with certainty that the folks pushing for gun control from the top are pieces of shit. But I can also empathize with how horrible being even remotely close to a mass shooting would suck.

My main issue is that such an event that occurs ANYWHERE in the country is used to push fear everywhere in the country.

It makes no sense for someone residing in Oregon or Idaho to really feel unsafe because a shooting happened in Texas. It makes less than zero sense for an event that occurs in New York City (yes, even one that knocks buildings down) to strike fear into the hearts of people in Florida and California.

The homogenization of the national 'crimescape' is just absurd given the scale of this country and the diversity of cultural and socioeconomic demographics.

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.

Practically speaking, what measures will gun rights advocates actually tolerate? It seems like the only thing they can countenance is more guns.

It seems to me that there are many ways we could 'reformat' our conception of gun ownership in a way that would preserve the ability of 'the people' to bear arms while making them less available for use in crime or mass shootings (or suicide), but I find it incredibly unlikely that the current American gun culture would find it at all tolerable.

Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.

The best you can do is probably something like move to New Hampshire. The most reasonable thing you can do is nothing.

The odds of concealed carry protecting you from victimization of any kind, let alone a mass shooting, is incredibly low, if for no other reason than because a middle class defense contractor is already extremely unlikely to be victimized and the efficacy of concealed carry in stopping mass shootings is... mixed. It's a psychological prop more than anything.

Mass shootings are, frankly, more analogous to terrorism than ordinary crime. Terrorism doesn't kill very many people, but it does scare people and make them feel powerless because it is outside the 'normal' sociology of murder. Nevertheless, carrying a gun because you might get jumped by terrorists is hard to justify.

Practically speaking, what measures will gun rights advocates actually tolerate? It seems like the only thing they can countenance is more guns.

Correct. Since the entire history of gun control regulation has shown that advocates of gun control will never admit to a policy failure. Any violence that occurs is ultimately because there was insufficient gun control in place, thus no failure is actually a failure of gun control policy, it is instead a failure to go far enough.

California has some of the most stringent gun laws in the country and also one of the higher murder rates. To say nothing of fucking CHICAGO. You literally can't get much stricter than Chicago in restricting firearms, and you also can't find many places with a higher murder rate. They've tried heavy gun control and it didn't help. So can they admit that gun control has failed in this instance?

If there are no circumstances under which they'll admit the policy is failing, then in what sense can they be said to be acting in good faith?

Every single compromise gun rights advocates have made previously has been met with demands for further compromise, and nothing is offered in return.

The best you can do is probably something like move to New Hampshire. The most reasonable thing you can do is nothing.

Speaking of, NH has some of the most permissive laws and also a negligible homicide rate. Again kinda makes the point for me.

The odds of concealed carry protecting you from victimization of any kind, let alone a mass shooting, is incredibly low, if for no other reason than because a middle class defense contractor is already extremely unlikely to be victimized and the efficacy of concealed carry in stopping mass shootings is... mixed. It's a psychological prop more than anything.

The odds of a fire extinguisher protecting you from a house fire of any kind, let alone an arsonist, is incredibly low...

You see the subtle error in reasoning here?

Terrorism doesn't kill very many people, but it does scare people and make them feel powerless because it is outside the 'normal' sociology of murder.

And because those instances are given outsized attention by the national media, who has every intention of maximizing the fear felt by their viewership.

But that's a fundamentally different problem. If it weren't terrorism it'd be something else.

You literally can't get much stricter than Chicago in restricting firearms, and you also can't find many places with a higher murder rate

Speaking of, NH has some of the most permissive laws and also a negligible homicide rate. Again kinda makes the point for me.

This is ridiculous. One cannot prove anything with one or two data points. To take just one example, here is some tentative evidence that permitting decreases homicides, and RTC laws have the opposite effect. I'm obviously not saying that just because there's a study here you have to agree with me, but at least engage with the literature rather than saying 'look at Chicago' and calling it a day.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29785569/

The odds of a fire extinguisher protecting you from a house fire of any kind, let alone an arsonist, is incredibly low...

You see the subtle error in reasoning here?

Fire extinguishers do not impose wider social costs.

And because those instances are intentionally given outsized attention by the media who has every intention of maximizing the fear felt by their viewership.

Different thing, but you seem to be framing this as a fault of the media but surely if there is blame to be assigned here it has to go to the consumer, given that the media is surely just satisfying the demand for such news which we all demonstrate by consuming it as much as we do.

This is ridiculous. One cannot prove anything with one or two data points. To take just one example, here is some tentative evidence that permitting decreases homicides, and RTC laws have the opposite effect. I'm obviously not saying that just because there's a study here you have to agree with me, but at least engage with the literature rather than saying 'look at Chicago' and calling it a day.

Chicago is such a useful example of the people who claim to want to solve the nations' problems absolutely failing to achieve any of their stated goals, though!

Its like, you can't solve violence in your own city, and attempt to externalize the blame for this fact, and then claim to be in a better position to solve violence on an national level than the people who live in the less violent areas! Chicago is itself a refutation of the efficacy of it's own policies.

I'm not certain what data you would, in particular, find convincing, but consider that the major source of firearms DEATHS in the U.S. is suicide. If you want to save lives, THAT is where you need to start.

And there are multiple countries that have strict gun laws and much higher suicide rates. Japan and South Korea as glaring examples here.

This suggests that, again, guns are not the driving or decisive factor here, and it would probably be better to investigate root causes rather than going after firearms directly.

Fire extinguishers do not impose wider social costs.

Would you support a ban on matches, lighter fluid, and fireworks, or other implements that can be used for arson? There's definitely a wider social cost there.

My point is that the extinguisher is there to defend against a low-probability but high impact event. You don't have a fire extinguisher because you genuinely think it's likely that you will have to put out a fire, but if a fire does break out it can burn down your entire house and/or kill people. So the precaution is fully warranted.

Likewise, you don't carry a gun, in most instances, because you think it's likely you'll ever be accosted by a violent criminal or mob... but if violence does break out it can destroy your belongings and/or kill people. So the precaution is fully warranted simply because of the fact that when violence does break out it can have outsized impact.

There's little evidence that a person who is legally carrying a firearm on their person imposes a 'wider social cost' in this respect, incidentally

And, of course, there is the evergreen fact that one of the most crime-ridden part of the country is the Deep South, which has permissive gun laws and a hoplophilic culture. With that in mind it's hard to take idea that the solution is yet more guns seriously.

That wasn't my comment.

Chicago is such a useful example of the people who claim to want to solve the nations' problems absolutely failing to achieve any of their stated goals, though!

No isn't because one data point cannot prove that. For all we know, Chicago may well have even more violence than it does already if gun control was relaxed. It may not of course, but simply pointing to one city proves nothing. Numbers are your friend.

Also, I will reiterate that it's very difficult for cities to control guns on their own, national or at least state level action is much more effective.

If you want to save lives, THAT is where you need to start.

I agree that gun suicides are very important to tackle! That why I support ERPOs and waiting periods which have been shown to effectively prevent suicides.

And there are multiple countries that have strict gun laws and much higher suicide rates. Japan and South Korea as glaring examples here.

Again, this proves nothing.

This suggests that, again, guns are not the driving or decisive factor here, and it would probably be better to investigate root causes rather than going after firearms directly.

Are they mutually exclusive? Governments aren't limited to one policy response per issue.

Would you support a ban on matches, lighter fluid, and fireworks, or other implements that can be used for arson

Probably not because the social cost of the arson facilitated by those items probably doesn't outweigh the value we get from their benign applications.

There's little evidence that a person who is legally carrying a firearm on their person imposes a 'wider social cost' in this respect, incidentally

Well they do, in part a) firearms are not tied to a person and more firearms in general circulation is bad for public safety, and more importantly b) even if they were SDGUs aren't that great compared to the average, and in consequence the expected utility for even a legal owner is negative given the facilitation of an easier suicide, accidents etc.

Probably not because the social cost of the arson facilitated by those items probably doesn't outweigh the value we get from their benign applications.

I'd like to see you apply this calculation to firearms.

Given that the uses for hunting, sport/recreation, and the occasional self-defense are necessarily far greater than the uses for criminal activity.

There are approximately 15 licensed million hunters in the U.S.

10 million who do sport shooting (these numbers probably overlap).

So on the one hand we've got literal millions who use guns for 'benign' applications (assuming you don't have some serious objection to hunting).

On the other other, around 50,000 deaths/year which involve firearms in some way.

So what would you estimate the 'social cost' of those 15 or so million people who use firearms without harming anyone being unable to hunt is?

This is excluding DGUs, now.

Not clear to me why we think it absurd to ban matches (50,000 burns require hospitalization every year, 4,500 burn deaths per year) just because it makes it harder for people to light candles, but civilian-owned guns are somehow inherently dangerous to even own.

and in consequence the expected utility for even a legal owner is negative given the facilitation of an easier suicide, accidents etc.

This seems obviously confounded by factors that contribute to suicide and accidents independently of gun ownership.

So I find it doubtful that for the median gun owner it turns into a net negative, even if we see on the lower end of the bell curve that accidents and suicide are an actual risk.

In the same way that owning a pool makes it WAY more likely you or a loved one will die of drowning, and yet there are fairly easy precautions one can take to mitigate those chances (learn to swim, learn CPR, fence in the pool, provide life vests) to almost zero.

Not clear to me why we think it absurd to ban matches (50,000 burns require hospitalization every year, 4,500 burn deaths per year) just because it makes it harder for people to light candles, but civilian-owned guns are somehow inherently dangerous to even own.

Dont forget to add in the deaths from pools. Or seed oils.

So what would you estimate the 'social cost' of those 15 or so million people who use firearms without harming anyone being unable to hunt is?

Hard to say of course, but bear in mind none of the potential restrictions mooted by any mainstream figures in the U.S. would seriously damage hunting or shooting for sport in the U.S. After all we still have both of those in Britain.

This seems obviously confounded by factors that contribute to suicide and accidents independently of gun ownership.

So I find it doubtful that for the median gun owner it turns into a net negative, even if we see on the lower end of the bell curve that accidents and suicide are an actual risk.

In the same way that owning a pool makes it WAY more likely you or a loved one will die of drowning, and yet there are fairly easy precautions one can take to mitigate those chances (learn to swim, learn CPR, fence in the pool, provide life vests) to almost zero.

We make policy for aggregates, not individuals. Whether for some people owning a gun might be a net positive is irrelevant, society-wide they seem to do more harm than good which is the relevant point.

After all we still have both of those in Britain.

You also still have mass shootings in Britain even with the limited type of firearms you can legally acquire there (.22s are still plenty fatal if you put enough of them into the target; that's fundamentally what buckshot is), to say nothing of more general mass casualty events typically involving trucks. Of course, you'll never fully ban shotguns, because you have enough politicians and backers that have ludicrously-expensive H&H products to get away with that- I don't believe that this is "making policy for aggregates, not individuals".

In fact, Britain appears to be so incredibly violent that the nation takes placing a bunch of restrictions on kitchen knives seriously as well and has significant numbers of soldiers and heavily-armed paramilitary on patrol (more liberal European countries have this as well, of course). Maybe it's a good thing the gun law in that nation in particular is largely "no".

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or shooting for sport in the U.S.

Can you tell me what you think shooting for sport looks like?

Because substantially all of the restrictions proposed would impact it.

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Gun control in Chicago has failed. Specifically, it's failed to control access to guns, which are regularly used to commit crimes. The question of whether or not reduced access to firearms would have an impact on crime rates is not answered by Chicago. And, of course, there is the evergreen fact that one of the most crime-ridden part of the country is the Deep South, which has permissive gun laws and a hoplophilic culture. With that in mind it's hard to take idea that the solution is yet more guns seriously.

The odds of a fire extinguisher protecting you from a house fire of any kind, let alone an arsonist, is incredibly low...

You see the subtle error in reasoning here?

No. You're going to have to spell it out for me. The number of times of a tragic misunderstanding, accident, or interpersonal dispute involving a fire extinguisher led to severe injury or death is functionally zero. If your fire extinguisher had a greater chance of exploding and killing you than it did of stopping a fire, keeping one in your kitchen would be dumb.

And to be frank, for most people a home fire extinguisher is a prop.

Speaking of, NH has some of the most permissive laws and also a negligible homicide rate. Again kinda makes the point for me.

I agree. The actual underlying problem is culture - most Americans have a weirdly positive view of violence, of which the aforementioned hoplophilia is merely one manifestation. That doesn't change the fact that weapons are a major facilitator for homicide (and other crimes and suicide), else people wouldn't bother. Not to mention, mass reeducation is likely to be both unpopular and of dubious effectiveness, so the policy remedies in that direction are pretty weak.

And, of course, there is the evergreen fact that one of the most crime-ridden part of the country is the Deep South, which has permissive gun laws and a hoplophilic culture. With that in mind it's hard to take idea that the solution is yet more guns seriously.

The South isn't notably more hoplophilic than e.g. Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, or Alaska. Those all have loose gun laws.

Indeed, the South has LOWER gun ownership rates than those named states.

And yet those states are significantly less violent than the national average, let alone the South.

So if you're trying to claim a correlation I would bet you can find a stronger one than that.

This is kind of the glaring issue in the U.S., where homicide rates simply do not follow from gun ownership rates on a state-by-state basis. And violence is, of course, concentrated in cities. So in practice, gun control laws punish suburbs and rural areas for urbanites' bad behavior.

Quite unfair, no?

No. You're going to have to spell it out for me. The number of times of a tragic misunderstanding, accident, or interpersonal dispute involving a fire extinguisher led to severe injury or death is functionally zero. If your fire extinguisher had a greater chance of exploding and killing you than it did of stopping a fire, keeping one in your kitchen would be dumb.

The point is that because an event is rare that doesn't mean that a precaution against it is unjustified.

I suspect that house fires are actually rarer than most violent crime these days. The rate of deaths due to fire is certainly on the decline

And yet, the impact of a fire, if it happens, is massive enough that the risk probably shouldn't be ignored. Clipping the tail risk is a good idea.

You wouldn't dismiss somebody as a paranoid wacko for keeping fire-suppression tools around should the need arise, even if the odds are infinitesimal.

But it is seemingly easy to say that a guy who keeps a gun around is being paranoid, without even grappling with the actual risk imposed if you do happen to be victimized by a criminal.

So mitigating the risks of harm due to fire = keeping a fire extinguisher around.

Mitigating the risk of harm due to crime = ?

Thinking stochastically, there are steps you can take to minimize the risk of crime/fire happening, but given how much damage can be done, and given the fact that you can never get the risk down to zero, what steps is it reasonable to take?

The number of times of a tragic misunderstanding, accident, or interpersonal dispute involving a fire extinguisher led to severe injury or death is functionally zero.

There is some dispute about that re the Capitol Putsch, which would fall under the most literal definition of 'interpersonal dispute'.

Are you referring to the completely made up and fake story about Brian Sicknick being hit with a fire extinguisher? Well, if your point is that people can lie to provide fictional evidence in favor of their policy goals, you certainly have made it.

That's why I said there was "some dispute" regarding the matter.

You literally can't get much stricter than Chicago in restricting firearms

Thought experiment: Set aside the 2nd and 4th amendments for a second. Suppose the United Stated banned civilian firearms, all of them. No manufacture, no sales, no ownership. All citizens must surrender their guns to the authorities. Anyone who has ever posted a gun on social media gets their house searched for contraband. Children are taught in school about the importance of turning in their parents if there are guns in the home. What does the murder rate look like in Chicago a year later? How about 10 years later? Surely you concede that there would be less mass shootings in the USA, how would random 20-year-olds be getting access to weapons after a generation of total control?

What does the murder rate look like in Chicago a year later? How about 10 years later? Surely you concede that there would be less mass shootings in the USA, how would random 20-year-olds be getting access to weapons after a generation of total control?

I mean,

See my other post about conservatively estimating that we could expect around 50,000 LEO casualties in trying to enforce a gun confiscation program.

PLUS the fact that guns can be 3D printed now, so it's not sufficient to confiscate those already in circulation.

Surely you concede that there would be less mass shootings in the USA, how would random 20-year-olds be getting access to weapons after a generation of total control?

I might concede this if you concede we would probably see an increase in vehicular-based massacres

Since nothing in your hypothetical has actually dealt with the issues that make mass shooters want to kill people, we have full reason to expect many of them will merely shift methods.

And if we accept the idea, for arguments sake, that we could toss out our civil rights in the name of achieving lower crime, then maybe the example of El Salvador represents a much MORE EFFECTIVE path we could follow to achieve a similar impact on violent crime.

So perhaps it looks really suspicious to zero in on the Second Amendment and impacting the rights of huge swaths of peaceful citizens in your zeal to bring down the crime rate, when there are readily conceivable alternatives that are less intrusive?

Thought experiment: let's just ignore the fourth and fifth amendment and massively incarcerate the most violent members of Chicago's population. What does the murder rate in Chicago look like a year later?

See my other post about conservatively estimating that we could expect around 50,000 LEO casualties in trying to enforce a gun confiscation program.

I flat-out do not believe this. At most you would get about 10 LEO deaths on the first day, and then the military gets called in to put down the insurrection. Rules of engagement are always optional. "There is absolutely no difficulty in using any level of the American security forces against the barbarians."

PLUS the fact that guns can be 3D printed now, so it's not sufficient to confiscate those already in circulation.

Can you 3D print gunpowder?

I might concede this if you concede we would probably see an increase in vehicular-based massacres

I do concede that. The standard economic result is that when one good is banned, some of that demand goes towards a substitute good, but not enough to completely make up for it. I would expect the new rate of vehicular massacres to be somewhere between the current rate, and the current rate + the gun massacre rate. I also suspect that "massacre-prevention software" would soon become standard on cars if this became an issue.

And if we accept the idea, for arguments sake, that we could toss out our civil rights in the name of achieving lower crime, then maybe the example of El Salvador represents a much MORE EFFECTIVE path we could follow to achieve a similar impact on violent crime.

Oh, I am absolutely not advocating for large-scale gun confiscation. I am simply pointing out that it is both possible to do, and that it would achieve it's primary goal of reducing gun murders (and murders in general).

I flat-out do not believe this. At most you would get about 10 LEO deaths on the first day, and then the military gets called in to put down the insurrection. Rules of engagement are always optional. "There is absolutely no difficulty in using any level of the American security forces against the barbarians."

How does the military respond to disparate Americans shooting at LEOs knocking on their own doors?

Again a question of scale. How precisely do you expect the U.S. to successfully occupy itself?

I would expect the new rate of vehicular massacres to be somewhere between the current rate, and the current rate + the gun massacre rate. I also suspect that "massacre-prevention software" would soon become standard on cars if this became an issue.

Good. Then we can agree that gun deaths would decrease under a heavy gun control regime (although likely a massive spike given the aforementioned issue with enforcement) but there's as always the question of whether that simply results in further encroachments by the government once it has taken this step.

Simply put, I don't want to live under the rule of a government that doesn't trust its' citizens enough to allow them firearms.

How does the military respond to disparate Americans shooting at LEOs knocking on their own doors?

If you shoot at the cops, they know your address. After the first week all patrols will be accompanied by Predator drone air support. You'll have two Hellfire missiles crashing through your roof in minutes after opening fire. If they can't get officers to shoot at Americans in person, they can sure as hell get some loyal private to sit at the drone terminal in Alexandria.

And when friendly fire or kid bits end up on national news?

You know this is comical. Its like when Biden says something like, "what are you going to do about nukes." You can't fricken drone strike a single family house (let alone a single person's apartment) without causing mass collateral damage. Plus, the fact is you can't just siege Joe in 1F until he shits himself to death when there are 10000 Joes, nor can you snipe him when he leaves 1F without eviscerating all the other civil rights that exist. You'd be treating suspected gun owners worse than indicted criminals skipping bond.

All, in the end, probably for little benefit. Ask thyself, would the average gun control advocate accept this compromise (assuming it was ironclad): You get 10 years of doing your thing. But, if in year 10 the homicide rate of America is greater than any of Germany, England, or France all gun control laws enacted since 1900 are repealed permanently. Would they accept? Of course not. Nor for 20 or 25 years. Probably not even 50. This would all be rational, even though most of them would be dead, or nearly so at T=50. Because they would lose that bet. I mean, unless they engaged in a massive genocide program and somehow managed to gerrymander that to not be included in homicide.

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If you shoot at the cops, they know your address.

So "shoot while they're knocking at someone else's door" is the equilibrium strategy, then? At least "one of us got shot before we killed the shooter" can be spun as a heroic story; "one of us got shot before some kid at a desk bombed innocent people" (not to mention the crime scene where evidence of the bullet trajectory used to be) is the sort of thing that makes you look for a better job than "sucker who draws fire on the civilian-bombers' behalf".

And that's assuming no other collateral damage, which is ... a stretch. The 1985 MOVE bombing was horrifying enough to show up in the news last year, even though all the "this is unconstitutional", "pay millions of dollars to the victims", etc. decisions were made decades ago. This does not scale up.

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Can you 3D print gunpowder?

I think @gattsuru or Beej once pointed to a furry who had figured out how to make guncotton at home all electrochemically and such, so...sort of, yes.

There is a 3d2a guy working on electronically primed polymer cased ammo. Very much a hobby project on a shoestring budget. One of the NGSW program entries used polymer ammo but the army went with Sig (to go with their Sig pistols and Sig LPVOs), you can buy polycased 308 ammo right now. The other area people go to for impractical is barrel rifling which at this point is mostly solved with electrochemical machining, at least for the lengths of things like the FGC which are designed around zero access to firearms parts regimes.

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Cathode_G does also have a non-corrosive primer (as above, link has no nudity, but be prepared for furry porn elsewhere on his feed) recipe, though most disposable guns in a highly restricted regime will probably just stick with the corrosive but dead-simple matchhead.

Primers are also kinda like the lye in cathode_g's guncotton formula; they have too many industrial and home uses to effectively ban. Even China still has them in common use for construction. If you don't want to bother with chemistry or corrosive primers, there's literally millions of these things out there.

Brass cases are obnoxious, but I'm not convinced they're the right decision rather than the available one. SuckBoyTony's done some interesting things with manufacturing polymer cases, and there's a lot of design space ignoring cases entirely that's largely unexplored because it makes so little sense these days. If you're custom-casting and electroplating bullets in mass, you could start experimenting with wacky designs like the Daisy V/L, Activ-style shells, or gyrojets, or truly caseless ammo... but unless you have absolutely no access to spent brass, it's mostly just coming up with new ways and reasons for the ATF to shoot your dog.

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Polymer cases would provide substantial weight savings (and reduce how much brass you need), but I don't think anyone has cracked the problem, or at least hasn't come up with anything commercially viable.

True Velocity has apparently nailed it down for .308 and .50 BMG. The recent-ish US Army trials that produced the XM5 and XM250 almost had the 6.5x51mm be adopted in a polymer case.

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I'm by no means an expert, but AFAIK making a case that can provide an adequate seal without breaking (and be cycled in without jamming and extracted without breaking, perhaps creating an obstruction in the barrel...) is far harder than making a simple gun.

It isn't actually that hard. It's simple drawn brass. https://www.petersoncartridge.com/technical-information/drawing-brass/

In addition, you can actually just turn a cartridge on a lathe from brass bar stock. Or mild steel. Both will work and while it's not as efficient as drawing brass, all you need is a lathe.

And each cartridge can be reloaded multiple times with equipment that is basically ubiquitous in the US.

I guess you'd be incentivizing revolvers though.

Cathode_G! (cw: sfw as explosives can be on direct link, but the rest of his feed does have furry porn) Absolutely fascinating guy.

If we're going to demolish civil rights, why don't we start by reinstating stop-and-frisk, and see what effect that has on the crime rates? Maybe actually lock up felons in possession?

I'm not willing to countenance a massive reduction in rights when lesser reductions are taken off the table purely in the interest of racial balancing.

Children are taught in school about the importance of turning in their parents if there are guns in the home.

Well Chicago schools aren't exceptional for their ability to educate children... https://www.foxnews.com/media/chicago-democrat-sounds-alarm-55-schools-report-no-proficiency-math-reading-serious

Most of the murder in Chicago is drug or gang related, I expect they'd switch to knives, clubs, acid or machetes. Murder rate would be lower of course and I very much hope that adopting East German style intensive policing means that gangs are wiped out as well. But it's not neccessary to suppress everybody if you're just trying to suppress the problem people.

The root cause is the gangs and the drugs. Just wipe them out, not all gun-owners everywhere.

Children are taught in school about the importance of turning in their parents if there are guns in the home.

Ah, so we'd further entrench the meme of Stop Snitchin'.

All fair points. I shouldn’t let my frustration get carried away.

I am coming to think that any solution has to start from such a “reformatting.” When I was in college, there was a triple murder in town, some kid killing his family. It was big gossip for a couple days. But that was it. No Discourse about changes to be made, and certainly no national headlines. That “normal” sociology covers it just fine.

Is it possible to push mass shootings into that category? If state-level media mentioned it in passing and national-level didn’t at all, that might help bring public perception in line with the actual lack of threat. I’m not sure.

I would be interested in hearing what other “reformat” options you have in mind. I could see reducing personal ownership, but instating city and state arsenals and training would fit the idea of a “well-regulated militia.”

Is it possible to push mass shootings into that category? If state-level media mentioned it in passing and national-level didn’t at all, that might help bring public perception in line with the actual lack of threat. I’m not sure.

Let them keep happening without doing anything :v

I'm being facetious but also not - as far as I can tell, most mass shooters are pursuing notoriety or revenge against society, so if the broader reaction is a shrug, the appeal will fall off. But you can't persuade people to act like that, which really only leaves acquired exhaustion.

I would be interested in hearing what other “reformat” options you have in mind.

Not terribly far off that. Club/civic organization/municipal-centric models preserve recreational uses and keep ownership away from direct federal control while making it harder for guns to leak out to criminals, would be mass shooters, etc... If the revolution kicks off, you can all raid the club's ammo locker on the grounds that we're past enforcing gun laws, but in the mean time if Psycho Dave wants to go for a drive with a pair of rifles and 25,000 rounds of ammunition his club mates can see that and step in. I don't care if people want to own assault rifles or go hunting, but I also have a pretty negative view of everyday carry of firearms, especially open carry.

Practically speaking, what measures will gun rights advocates actually tolerate? It seems like the only thing they can countenance is more guns.

We also enthusiastically support enforcement of existing laws that target criminal acquisition, possession, and use of firearms. Most such laws, particularly those related to straw purchases on behalf of felons, are essentially unenforced.

The odds of concealed carry protecting you from victimization of any kind, let alone a mass shooting, is incredibly low

Based on what evidence? There have been multiple cases of public shooters ended by CCW response within the last few years, and I'm drawing them only from the cases where they got meme'd into public awareness. General self-defense via firearm happens, at best estimate, somewhere in the range of several hundred thousand times a year.

More generally, the mass shooting meme seems to be getting worse, likely as people get crazier and more polarized. It's hard to tell how much of this is perception vs reality, but I'm very glad my church now has armed security.

General self-defense via firearm happens, at best estimate, somewhere in the range of several hundred thousand times a year.

True, but firearms don't seem to be a uniquely effective self-defence weapon, or at least there is some tentative evidence in that direction.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091743515001188?via%3Dihub#s0010

Results from the NCVS find that guns are used by victims in less than 1% of crimes in which there is personal contact between the perpetrator and victim, and about 1% in cases of robbery and (non-sexual) assault. There were no reported cases of self-defense gun use in the more than 300 cases of sexual

...Is this not straightforward survivorship bias? A woman who presents a firearm to a would-be rapist very likely doesn't have an actual crime to report. Likewise for a host of other crimes, from muggings to assaults to murder.

More generally, every crime successfully completed is an instance where lawful self-defense would deliver a likely-superior outcome. If self-defense rates are really this low, why aren't we trying to improve them?

woman who presents a firearm to a would-be rapist very likely doesn't have an actual crime to report. Likewise for a host of other crimes, from muggings to assaults to murder.

Presumably they have an attempted rape/mugging/etc. to report to the survey?

More generally, every crime successfully completed is an instance where lawful self-defense would deliver a likely-superior outcome

Is it? Maybe I'm just too soy but if an armed mugger demanded my wallet etc. I'd rather give in than take my chances trying to defend myself, a lot of tail risk involved there, not to say that people shouldn't defend themselves though.

If self-defense rates are really this low, why aren't we trying to improve them?

Well I guess we can but the point is that increasing gun usage doesn't seem like it would actually achieve that goal.

I have a more prosaic objection: I don't find high-end DGU numbers believable. High-end estimates rely on self-reporting, which has two major issues. The first is that respondents could simply be lying. Self-reporting of anything is generally terrible. The second is that a sincere report does not mean an actual DGU occurred - the respondent could have imagined the threat entirely, or they could have pulled a gun to win an argument or similarly be misrepresenting what actually happened.

This is definitely true, and Hemenway has actually also done some good work on this front, but in fairness high-end DGU estimates go way higher than 'several hundred thousand'. The one I see a lot is 2.5 million which originates from a rubbish Kleck and Gertz study from the 90s.

What is the reason for stopping the government from using modern databases and technology to be able to effectively investigate these matters?

The concern is that such modernization will make it easier to create a registry of who owns what, which can and inevitably will used for mass confiscation. If you don't believe me on the inevitably will part, look at NY state which has a registry and has used it to confiscate guns that were legal when purchased and registered, but later made illegal: https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/another-nypd-gun-confiscation-letter-emerges/

Similar things have happened in Canada with their long gun registry, in Nazi Germany with mandatory gun registration leading to mass confiscation, and several other places.

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You just told me that violations of the background check and false statement laws run rampant and virtually unchecked.

The ATF is barred by law from retaining records of legal firearms purchases. That is, if you attempt to buy a gun, submit the instant check form, are cleared, and complete the purchase, they are not allowed to keep a record of the gun you purchased. Laws have been written, passed, and enacted specifically to prevent them from doing this, because gun owners know for a fact that compiling a firearms registry is one of the dearest desires of the gun banners and the ATF both, and so they fought hard to ensure that doing so was flatly illegal.

We have very, very good evidence that the ATF has simply ignored these legal restrictions, and has in fact built such a database. Because laws Blues don't like don't matter.

Nothing prevents the ATF from retaining records of illegal attempts to purchase a firearm. When a felon or a straw-purchaser submits an instant check form, they have just signed a form confessing to a felony. The ATF exists to investigate and prosecute such crimes, which are about as open-and-shut as you can ask for. They have consistently declined to do so in all but a vanishing number of such cases, year after year, for decades.

The authorities absolutely refuse to enforce the laws we actually have on actual criminals. They refuse to prosecute straw purchases. They often decline to prosecute actual use of guns in actual crime. They absolutely have time to hammer the shit out of law-abiding gun owners, gun sellers, and gun manufacturers. It's the same anarcho-tyranny we see in numerous other aspects of modern life.

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What is the reason for stopping the government from using modern databases and technology to be able to effectively investigate these matters?

Because they had one and used it to harass people, leading the Gun Owners Protection act to be passed.

It wasn't preemptive.

There was a pretty famous one in 2013 that received NRA support, but was shot down because Dems preferred a version that didn't bother with a fig-leaf of due process.

Which kinda points to the problem. It is quite possible both for the ATF to require ridiculous levels of paperwork and come down like a brick shithouse on FFLs that don't require clients to spell out Yes and No on every line, while also ignoring a vast realm of straw or otherwise unlawful purchases (plausibly including the son of a sitting president!). It is quite possible for there to be a lot of support for Universal Background Checks in general, and then actually-written background check proposals to be so badly drafted as to require restructuring hunter education classes.

More broadly, there's also an issue where this is all very obviously just another step toward the next big restriction. We don't have particularly good reason to believe the rules that actually do get enforced actually prevent mass or spree shootings, and a lot of times they get brought up even when they very clearly couldn't prevent them (eg, several bills named after an incident where the mass shooter stole a firearm involved background checks) ... but they are great at making it difficult to be into firearms, or to get new generations into firearms.

Do you (that is, the generalized you of gun rights advovates)? One of the constant fights in Congress is about universalizing the background check system to curtail private sales that don't go through it.

Because that is a regulation that mostly just would exist to annoy hobbyists and the inheritors of pap's guns, and would have no statistical impact on gun crime in any way.

Likewise, the ATF is frequently cited as a boogeyman and the paperwork FFLs have to do described as overly burdensome.

Because they are? The current system both places heavy burdens on FFLs, but focuses almost zero effort enforcing laws that would actually prevent homicide.

What are the particular ways in which enforcement of existing laws could be strengthened that wouldn't catch the ire of gun rights advovates? Can you be specific?

They could re-purpose 95% of their enforcement actions to border security and prosecuting straw purchases. They could also probably tinker with minimum security requirements for commercial distribution of guns, that is semi trucks, etc which occasionally are successfully raided.

Practically speaking, what measures will gun rights advocates actually tolerate? It seems like the only thing they can countenance is more guns.

There is generally a sense among gun owners that there have always been more concessions to be made. Any "compromise" with gun owners needs to be an actual compromise, not just a "you lose one more inch" style compromise.

I'm not huge into the gun scene, but some of the compromises I've heard could be:

  1. Easier gun modification, specifically silencers. Its a pain in the ass to get a silencer on a gun right now. And unlike how Hollywood depicts them, silencers do not "silence" a gun. They turn it from instant hearing loss without ear protection to hearing loss under prolonged use. They also require subsonic rounds (otherwise the crack of the bullet breaking the sound barrier defeats the purpose).

  2. Some form of national gun transportation standardization. There are scenarios where you can legally own a gun, have it locked up in your trunk, drive across the wrong state line and suddenly you are violating a law.

  3. Some form of concealed carry reciprocity. States all have their own versions of concealed carry (or don't allow it).

There are 51 versions of gun laws out there. Standardizing them in a way that doesn't treat California or New York laws as basis for standardization would potentially be appreciated. One way I could see them doing this is create different levels of constitutionally approved gun restrictions. Maybe 5 levels. With level one being the strictest, maybe equivalent to cities in California, New York City, or DC. And level 5 being the least strict, something you might see in rural Alaska. Municipalities are allowed to choose one of these levels of strictness, but they can't keep making up all their own restrictions and bullshit.

One thing I'd personally be interested in seeing it to remove all special exception carve-outs for law enforcement or active military. Instead there is only one category of carve-out: "Militia". The police and military can be assigned to this carve-out. But there is also a path for regular citizens to join the militia (devil would be in the details here).

Four: Re-open the registry for machine guns.

That is, new machine guns (i.e. full autos) can be manufactured and can be owned and used by non-FFLs, but they might still have to be registered/a tax stamp applied.

As part of that, it shouldn't be illegal to own components that can convert a semi-auto into a full auto.

There is generally a sense among gun owners that there have always been more concessions to be made. Any "compromise" with gun owners needs to be an actual compromise, not just a "you lose one more inch" style compromise.

This is just sort of politics though, and it happens on every other issue. Gun owners like to use phrases like 'one more inch' quite a lot but the reality is that these things do go back and forth. Sometimes they lose inches, sometimes they gain them back (see Heller, Assault Weapons Ban, NYSRPA v. Bruen etc. etc.).

but they can't keep making up all their own restrictions and bullshit.

I mean this sort of thing really does seem like an unequal compromise because it amounts to putting a hard cap on gun control but still allowing very lax states. Why would Democrats agree to that, especially when all polling indicates that gun control is a winning issue for them?

Why would Democrats agree to that, especially when all polling indicates that gun control is a winning issue for them?

It's not and historically has been a great way for Democrats to lose elections. Almost all the polling you're talking about is vague preference polling that has things like "should laws be stricter?" along with things like "<current law already on the books> is too far". Same sort of thing with economic policy questions. At least the Gallup poll includes data from the 90s or 50s depending on the question.

Almost all the polling you're talking about is vague preference polling

No. AWB, ERPOs, safe storage laws, licensing and raising minimum ages all consistently get comfortable majorities.

Why would Democrats agree to that, especially when all polling indicates that gun control is a winning issue for them?

Because Democrats might want to win outside of their usual blue areas?

Beto O'Rourke tried the "Hell yes we're going to take your AR-15" shtick in Texas.

He later achieved the honor of losing to Abbot by Nine Points.

Not that this was the only reason, of course.

He lost by nine points in an R+5 PVI state in a Democratic presidential mid-term. Shocking.

Republicans won the House elections by 20 points overall.

I mean this sort of thing really does seem like an unequal compromise because it amounts to putting a hard cap on gun control but still allowing very lax states. Why would Democrats agree to that, especially when all polling indicates that gun control is a winning issue for them?

At the national level they could argue to change the specific restrictions in the strictest gun control category. At the state and local level they get to fight over upgrading the strictness level of gun control.

Also the whole attitude of 'we can win, so why compromise ' is part of why gun owners are so "uncompromising".

'we can win, so why compromise ' is part of why gun owners are so "uncompromising".

Well that's just politics on both sides though. If I have policy preference X, and think I can get it done, why would I compromise for less than X? I wouldn't begrudge the same behaviour from pro-gun activists..

I’m answering the first part for myself but I think unless/until the streets are safe and you don’t have to worry about being mugged or stores being looted or other forms of street crime, I don’t see any way you’ll convince people to give up guns. And so I think you’ll either going to need to rearm the police and get serious about “broken windows” policing, or deal with people wanting arms for self defense.

Most reformats I’ve seen are more like “disarm, then we’ll eventually circle back and deal with your concerns.” Which is frankly a bad deal and everybody knows it. If I said something like “give me your ring and then I’ll give you something for it later,” or worse “just give me your ring, and I’ll stop calling you a greedy ass,” nobody thinks this is a good deal. Nobody thinks it’s a reasonable idea. And no concerns are actually discussed. Like for people who want a gun because of break-ins or something, they’re not going to accept keeping the gun in a locker off-site. They’re not going to accept limits on bullets. Especially if they’ve had to deal with the cops and had a prowler and had to wait 15 minutes for the cops to show up, write a few notes and drive away. As self defense guys say “when seconds count, help is only minutes away.”

It seems to me that there are many ways we could 'reformat' our conception of gun ownership in a way that would preserve the ability of 'the people' to bear arms while making them less available for use in crime or mass shootings (or suicide), but I find it incredibly unlikely that the current American gun culture would find it at all tolerable.

Well, the issue is that while gun control proponents like that frame, you are actually talking about three completely different issues with three different plausible solutions.

  1. Crime. This is the vast majority of non-suicide gun deaths, but most generally gets no attention (except when being aggregated to push gun control, or to scare boomers about cities). Simple solutions that don't really impinge gun rights exist for this such as: actually prosecuting straw purchasers, targeted Terry stop regimes, border security, and other general law enforcement scrutiny being increased such as beat cops and more enforcement against domestic violence complaints (in other words, stop dropping charges when the girlfriend recants a week later).

  2. Mass shootings. A tiny minority of deaths that drive lots of discourse. Hard to fix without significantly affecting gun and free speech rights simultaneously.

  3. Suicide. Something I think most people don't actually care much about, other than using it to aggregate "gun deaths" at a higher number. To the extent people genuinely care, the fix is also quite hard without also impinging the 1st and 2nd simultaneously. Low hanging fruit might include cooling periods t prevent spontaneously buying a gun and killing yourself on the same day.

Practically speaking, what measures will gun rights advocates actually tolerate? It seems like the only thing they can countenance is more guns.

If we're honest, yes. I think more people with more guns is better. And I will countenance no taking of guns from people.

The odds of concealed carry protecting you from victimization of any kind, let alone a mass shooting, is incredibly low

Elisjsha Dicken

If we're honest, yes. I think more people with more guns is better.

Do you think more people with more guns is good intrinsically, regardless of potential costs? Or do you think more people with more guns will reduce violence?

I think it's an intrinsic good for people to be prepared to defend themselves, their families, and their communities.

Sorry for the doomer take, but I don't see a solution to this. NAFTA, unchecked immigration, the sexual revolution and its consequences, and constant race baiting is collapsing our society.

The problem isn't guns, the problem is that there are millions of disaffected people living in a country founded on the idea of individual human rights. That works when the people are hyper-invested in their families and the future that they'll be living in; that doesn't work when everybody is depressed and hates each other. No amount of restrictions or "doing something" is going to change that.

How do you solve the problem? I don't know, man. Maybe it's something [not so] simple like: Make everybody go back to church, bring the jobs back, undo the social problems created due to the sexual revolution, and encourage people to create families (but like I said, get people back in church, preferably a Catholic church).

How many of these mass shooters have been men living with a wife and kids? 0?

I think that a program to make angry young man with no sense of hope about the future and an intense hatred of the present care more about the future and have some investment in the present might work better than constant kvetching and trampling on human rights. In fact, I suspect that more trampling on human rights will probably make the problem worse.

But hey: it's only the future. Not that big of a deal, right? Let's let some dorky lawyers and political grifters figure it out, they've been doing a really good job on everything else! Hey maybe we can get a McKinsey consultant on the job!

How many of these mass shooters have been men living with a wife and kids? 0?

Yeahhhh. Seems pretty obvious that the perps in almost every case are people who have determined (correctly?) that they have very little to lose, and also very little to look forward to on their current life trajectory.

This is why Stephen Paddock was and is such an anomaly, since he seemed to have his life 'together' for most pursuits and purpose, though his personal life was very fraught with struggle, it must be admitted.

There's probably some other "X factor" in there that causes them to lash out rather than simply collapse into a stupor of video games and drugs and degenerate gambling on the stock market.

But the rise in suicide, the rise in rates of depression, opioid overdoses, the increase in dissatisfaction with life, the general purposelessness that seems to be permeating whole generations... it all likely has a similar root cause with those few who decide to go on rampages.

The Las Vegas mass shooting is such a weird event. The event was odd, he has all sorts of oddities in his private life that suggest asset. I don't know what the real story is, but we definitely didn't get it.

I try to eschew true tin-foil hat thinking. I never ever bought into Sandy Hook "crisis actor" stories, and I think most mass shooters are acting of their own volition, even if they were technically 'known to the FBI.'

But man, so little of the Las Vegas situation makes sense as described without there being some kind of conspiracy involved, even if the specific act of killing civilians was never a part of it, it reads like this was a situation that would have traced back to someone important and thus they opted to cloud the waters and feign ignorance rather than allow anyone to look too closely. Maybe the truth gets declassified in 30-50 years.

Maybe the truth gets declassified in 30-50 years.

I hope so but given the lack of declassification of the Kennedy Assassination records I'm not optimistic.

What’s so weird about it?

His wiki article makes him look about as unhinged as I’d expect for a mass murderer. Clearly capable of planning, but just an absolute train wreck of a lifestyle.

A guy wins against the house for decades in Vegas, doesn't strike you as profoundly odd?

He's old, crime is a young man's game. The murder rate for the elderly makes everyone look violent.

His home was burgled after the crime.

Depends on how neurotic he was. Would it make any more sense for the feds to somehow bankroll him through Vegas?

And I thought he made most of his money in real estate, then blew it on video poker and high-end firearms.

They wouldn't bankroll him through Vegas they'd bank roll him through a black account or he was doing his own gun sales and claiming gamble as a cover for where the money comes from.

https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-vegas-shooter-estate-20180301-story.html

That lists his estate as $800,000 far too little assets to fund the level of gambling he sustained. Other articles list sales here and there but very modest gains. The big transaction is a gain of less than $1,000,000 years before the shooting. Enough to fund a long modest retirement or a short burst of massive gambling but this guy was gambling for years with little other income to support it.

Mainly it's the apparent lack of any real grievance against 'society' that would inspire one to act violently and indiscriminately.

The extent of the planning almost seems like his main goal was literally just to set a record for deaths, which indeed he did. Like he wasn't trying to lash out at any particular target, he just one day had the thought "I bet I could kill a shit-ton of people if I shot at a crowd from this casino hotel window."

And the sheer number of people he managed to kill is also slightly suspicious for just one man to pull off.

And parts of the plan are a little absurd on their face, the number of guns the guy brought, for instance. Even if you wanted maximum carnage, you'd bring like 2-3 guns at most, and tons of magazines for reloading. You certainly wouldn't bring in cases and cases of guns, if you were trying to keep a low profile!

The bit that really tickles one's conspiracy sense is multiple guns having bump stocks, which were an item the ATF sought to ban, shortly after the event.

Most hobbyist shooters will tell you these things are novelties at best, not something you'd use if you WANTED to kill a bunch of people.

And then the shooter's brother gets arrested for CSAM shortly thereafter.

Then charges were dropped and the guy more-or-less disappeared.

None of this is to convince you that it was a vast conspiracy, just to explain why this one stands out as a "WTF was happening?" situation.

Edit: Oh yeah forgot the strange missing hard drive situation.

Then charges were dropped and the guy more-or-less disappeared.

Absolutely Comped

which were an item the ATF sought to ban, shortly after the event.

How does this suggest anything conspiratorial? High-profile mass shooting uses X implement, government responds with ban. Just seems like they were impelled to action by the shooting.

Do I actually need to point out that governments, including the U.S., have used false flag tactics to achieve or advance domestic policy goals?

That that's a thing that has 100% happened before?

The fact that the 'government responds with a ban' doesn't DISCOUNT the possibility that the government intentionally created it's own justification for the ban.

That evidence tends to explain both possibilities. We'd expect a conspiracy to create the pretext for a particular government action would result in... government taking the action. This is not a contradiction.

Do you know how many other shootings or violent crimes bump stocks were involved in prior to this? Approximately zero.

Again, not asking you to believe in the conspiracy just noting why it tickles that particular part of the brain.

including the U.S., have used false flag tactics to achieve or advance domestic policy goals?

When?

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Great comment, reported for quality contribution.

The problem isn't guns, the problem is that there are millions of disaffected people living in a country founded on the idea of individual human rights. That works when the people are hyper-invested in their families and the future that they'll be living in; that doesn't work when everybody is depressed and hates each other.

This is an underrated point. So many times when societal ills come up in rationalist discourse, people hand wave away, are ignorant of, or flat out ignore the fact that at least 1/5 (probably more in actuality) of the US population is depressed or has some mental disorder. Even given that our modern psychiatric framing is largely faulty, this mass wave of disaffectedness means that traditional solutions, things that worked for our forefathers, need rethinking.

Even though past societies had plenty of times of upheaval, they had different ways of fixing things. Revolutions, massive aligned religions, cultural processes and holidays like the Roman Saturnalia which acted as a pressure release valve for hierarchical resentment. We've been increasingly preventing a release of the pressure, and it will only get worse as we continue to do nothing.

How many of these mass shooters have been men living with a wife and kids? 0?

Honestly I doubt that this would change much - cases where people go bonkers and kill their families are much less rare than they should be.

The problem isn't guns, the problem is that there are millions of disaffected people living in a country founded on the idea of individual human rights. That works when the people are hyper-invested in their families and the future that they'll be living in; that doesn't work when everybody is depressed and hates each other. No amount of restrictions or "doing something" is going to change that.

The cornerstone of progressive education is that people are, at worst, a disease killing the earth. At least half of them are actively evil. And even the innocent ones who have done nothing yet are completely disposable if a woman finds them inconvenient.

Is it? Would it be too much to ask for some substantiation of what is quite an outlandish and uncharitable characterisation?

And even the innocent ones who have done nothing yet are completely disposable if a woman finds them inconvenient.

There is almost no-one anywhere is the West who would agree that this at all resembles their view.

It could be the case that you simply interact in such circles that you are not exposed to such disposable men, but it both biologically obvious, and has been throughly examined from an academic perspective.

I assume that last part refers to abortion.

The cornerstone of progressive education is that people are, at worst, a disease killing the earth. At least half of them are actively evil. And even the innocent ones who have done nothing yet are completely disposable if a woman finds them inconvenient.

This has many problems:

  • Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is

  • Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

You've also been warned about these type of comments in the past.

5 day ban

IIRC a cracked journalist went into the characteristics of mass casualty attackers and found that all of them came from broken homes. This being the opposite of the usual cracked biases, I tend to take it seriously.

The problem isn't guns, the problem is that there are millions of disaffected people living in a country founded on the idea of individual human rights

Why are they mutually exclusive? I don't have strong views on your proposed explanation, but we have plenty of disaffected people in Britain yet manage to keep our mass shootings down to single figures per decade.

I mean your argument really breaks down when comparing the gun deaths in the US vs countries that are even more liberal like Canada. More guns and easier access to them certainly lead to more gun violence.

B.J. Campbell would probably disagree. Here is one such article of his where he would, as it relates to a particular segment of the American populace most affected by gun violence. He argues that the missing link is indeed broken lives.

While Canada certainly has fewer guns per capita than the US, we still have lots. AR-15s specifically are slightly hard to come by, especially since the most recent push -- but anyone who wants one can certainly have a black scary semiauto .223 of some stripe.

This seems sufficient for mass shootings, regardless of how many more guns are floating around the US? Like, you can really only shoot one at a time.

but anyone who wants one can certainly have a black scary semiauto .223 of some stripe.

Sure... if they're willing to wait an entire year for the license that takes a weekend, 400 bucks, and (for Restricted) knowing 2 people who'll vouch for you to obtain.

And by and large, this system works. It will still get you killed if you need a gun right now (the archetypical example of this is a stalker who isn't obeying their restraining order; angry exes kill families quite a lot and cops can't be everywhere), but even that isn't a design problem and has more to do with its implementation.

This is the "compromise" position, and if approached in good faith it works exceptionally well specifically because it keeps guns out of the hands of the poor, the stupid, and the friendless- all traits associated with criminality (European citizens are fine with this approach; the US' system of wokeness considering everyone trustworthy until proven otherwise is specifically a reaction to this!). True, existing socially-vetted owners can still become insane later, but the compromise is specifically "we prove ourselves to you, and in return you treat the people who do get through with a 'forgone conclusion, they would have just used a truck or fire instead' attitude (and as such don't launch a bunch of legislation to punish everyone else)", and by and large that works. Most European countries have more liberal gun laws than blue US states (and British Commonwealth states) do as a result- and the most liberal ones were occupied by the Soviets or on their border.

This position can't be reached in the US (and to a significant degree, the government couldn't enforce it even if they wanted to- everyone owns property and there's just too much ground to cover to stop illicit manufacturing), so you end up with a bunch of patches on symptoms like "high capacity mags" and "assault weapons" even though a single-shot shotgun and a .22 is all you need to perpetrate a mass shooting (which is how it happens in the UK). They then proceed to export this solution around the world; which is why the populations of countries closest to the American orbit (Aus, UK, NZ, CA) had licensing schemes and population tolerance thereof that were subsequently completely destroyed (the compromise that was licensing can no longer exist because the population is now too Americanized to tolerate it). For example, NZ was the freest former English colony in terms of gun law, but the population's ability to compromise had been hollowed out by exposure to American culture war until an Australian national came along and shattered it. Canada is more complicated, because it's close enough to the US that the concept of high-trust high-freedom leaks through more, but also lacks the political safeguards to keep that part of the nation safe from its largest cities that the US does... so the rest of the country (culturally closer to the red part of the US) suffers.

Sure... if they're willing to wait an entire year for the license that takes a weekend, 400 bucks, and (for Restricted) knowing 2 people who'll vouch for you to obtain.

How many American mass shooters would have been unable to manage this in advance? It's not like these are spur of the moment events. Anyways if you are poor(ish) and/or stupid, the black market remains an option.

While the situation is not as clearcut as in the US, my guess is that there's very little the government in either place could actually do that would make a difference to mass shootings -- an analysis of what percentage of American mass shooters would have been able to complete a PAL by hook or by crook (you don't actually need an RPAL to get a scary-looking 223 with 5/30 mags that are trivially de-neutered, either) would be fairly interesting.

That is an interesting one. There's a lot of friendless mass shooters that wouldn't have been able to get two people to vouch for them. On the other hand, some of those guys used guns that were owned by relatives. Ballpark? Maybe a quarter of mass shooters wouldn't have been able to fulfill those criteria.

By what metric you consider Canada more Liberal?

The post references religion as an answer. The US is substantively more religious than Canada. I mostly just used liberal as a stand in for “less religious”, bit sloppy but I don’t know many who would argue Canada is more conservative than the US.

A solution to what? From here

The FBI collects data on “active shooter incidents,” which it defines as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Using the FBI’s definition, 103 people – excluding the shooters – died in such incidents in 2021. The Gun Violence Archive, an online database of gun violence incidents in the U.S., defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people are shot, even if no one was killed (again excluding the shooters). Using this definition, 706 people died in these incidents in 2021.

This is of 26,031 homicides, 20,958 of which were firearm homicides. Mass shootings aren't a sign of mass disaffection or societal collapse, which would exist independently if at all. Even of those 706, most of them are closer to family or crime-related violence than school or nazi shootings (chosen randomly here)

Two people were killed, and three others were injured, after a fight between two biker gangs led to a gunfight in a bar parking lot in the Fountain City neighborhood.[557]

An argument between two men escalated into a shooting that killed a young girl, and another man. Three children, including a toddler, were also shot.[561]

A fight at a house party led to six people being shot, with two dying from their injuries.[568]

A gunman invaded the home of his ex-wife in the Spring Branch neighborhood and began shooting. Two people were killed, and two others wounded including a teenager.[57]

A targeted shooting at a nightclub wounded ten, and killed two, after two men opened fire in the Oakhill Jackson neighborhood.[602]

This isn't obviously personal, but googling the above - "Michael Valentine and Nicole Owens were killed the night of the incident. Owens was Rush's ex-girlfriend, and mother of his child".

Four people were shot, two fatally, in a drive-by shooting in the West Englewood neighborhood.[572]

This is least obviously not a random mass shooter who hates society. "The group was standing on the sidewalk about 7:30 p.m. in the 1900 block of West Garfield Boulevard when someone inside a gray vehicle opened fire at them, Chicago police said.", and no further details were forthcoming on google. But ... intuitively, are drive-bys committed by incel mass shooters, or poor, usually black criminals?

So where does that leave OP? How has NAFTA or unchecked immigration caused high black crime rates? (compare to the lower crime rates of poor asians). What does the sexual revolution have to do with this, if domestic dispute homicides are more common than incel shooters? And race baiting? Non-sequitur.

Mass shootings are a culture bound

mental disorder/meme in my book - chiefly spread via popular media. To end mass shootings, we must therefore target the meme. We stop them by not talking about them anymore. Stop showcasing people crying on TV. Stop discussing the shooters and their motivations. Stop the endless parade of sadness. Stop talking about common sense gun control and people taking your guns. Stop reporting on twitterers murdering other twitterers by twittering. Stop the X year memorials. Stop the everyone everywhere needs 3000% more mental healthcare or elsing. Stop the victimization porn. Stop the outrage porn. Just stop it all.

The second amendment is constitutional, and so is to the first. What you are talking about is not an easy fix.

Nowhere in the parent comment was legal compulsion to go against the 1st Amendment mentioned. The signal-boosting the media gives to mass shooters is very much voluntary, as with most media coverage in the first world.

All crime can be solved by people voluntarily refraining from crime...bit saying that isnt going to change anything.

True, but you're ignoring how much the media is owned by a few select interests and how much 'internet censorship' there is. If the players wanted to they could put a pretty effective "moratorium" on news about shootings.

The signal-boosting the media gives to mass shooters is very much voluntary

Indeed, by "your rules, fairly", collective responsibility for encouraging mass shooters begins with the people who want to impose collective responsibility on their enemy for mass shootings. Of course, they've investigated themselves and found no wrongdoing.

Broadcast rights are treated as a regulated commons, which is why you can't say fuck on TV.

No, not by law. Worse still, it requires eschewing recriminations for personal responsibility and community.

Yes, this would stop or at least vastly reduce the amount of mass shootings (and terrorism) that happens, but it's too profitable for the media to not cover it.

Yep yep, the incentives are entirely in the wrong direction. An economist would have us change the incentives to change the behavior.

In this corner of the world there were recently two shootings. On the morning of a day in may, a young teenager nabbed his old man's 9mm, using to shoot to death several children and a security guard in a school. In the evening of the next day, a young adult used an automatic firearm, he wasn't allow to own due to prior thefts and assault of an officer, to murder several adults. Both suspects were taken alive, the former immediately, the latter the next morning. Neither appears to have been motivated by any sort of ideology.

The ruling coalitions first response was temporary increase of security presense at schools and a "practical disarmament of this country". The latter including measures such as: two year halt on issuance on new fire arm permits, increase in penalties for illegal firearm possesion, audit of all of firearm license holders by means of medical, psychological, and drug examination. The education secretary resigned, but not before blaming internet, computer games, and "western values".

The opposition meanwhile blames hatred, crime, lies in their opinion spread by the media aligned with presently in power parties; demanding a ban on reality shows, TV shows and print media which promotes violence and "primitivism" or spread fake news. They take no issue with anti-gun measures.

The head of governments reply to these claims by those across the aisle, was that several people including minors have already been detained for theats of violence and glorification of murderers and that there are mesures on the way regarding social media. He defended reality shows, for their regulation could lead to ban of violent films. He didn't comment on his secretary of education's comments.

From this it is seen the impulse to curtail liberty using as an excuse events which on average only minutely influence crime statistics, let alone lives of the average person, is universal.

The Second coming under fire happens in America also, but it it being in constitution makes gun rights more resilient than in other countries. But it is the First which shows the true disparity between the Land of the Free, and rest: freedom of speech is considered by un-Americans to be common to all peoples, yet in the aftermath of an nonideological crime, only America sees this right not only not under threat, it is not even considered to be relevant in the discussion.

From this one sees the impulse to curtail liberty, using events which on average only minutely influence crime statistics, let alone lives of the average person, as an excuse is universal.

People say this a lot but it's hardly unique to guns and not necessarily a bad thing. When events like mass shootings get used as rationale for policy decisions I don't think it's so much a direct response to only that kind of event but something targeted more broadly but for which a particular mass shooting might stand out as a particularly worrisome manifestation of the broader problem that captures the public imagination. See George Floyd, James Bulger, Sarah Everard etc. Indeed, one can see from your summary of the various responses from politicians that each to an extent sees the shootings as the consequences of wider social ills, whatever they might be.

I don’t know why gun rights advocates don’t just admit that yes, if all guns were confiscated and a very strict licensing regime was put in place gun homicides would likely drop substantially.

What advantage would attain to gun rights advocates for "admitting" this?

Anyway, you underestimate state capacity. US state capacity against its own citizens is effectively unlimited, COVID proved that.

On the other hand, more guns than people, they aren’t effectively tracked, government record keeping that does exist is incredibly incompetent, and local police departments have generally not been interested in enforcing actually existing gun laws.

US state capacity against its own citizens is effectively unlimited, COVID proved that.

non-urban areas of even very blue states didn't enforce most of the covid hysteria

and it wasn't enforced in many pockets in urban areas either

enforcement led to anger which led to pullback of enforcement or stopped enforcement entirely, it very rarely resulted in escalation by the state

the same is true for various civilian disarmament regimes already in place in some states throughout the US where outside of urban areas (and in some parts of those urban areas), none of those things are done

if state capacity was effectively unlimited, why was it limited in practice?

I don’t know why gun rights advocates don’t just admit that yes, if all guns were confiscated and a very strict licensing regime was put in place gun homicides would likely drop substantially.

Mostly because it's a truism.

Real question is how many gun deaths would occur in the process of trying to enforce the confiscations.

Estimate about 50 million gun owners in the U.S., conservatively estimate 1% of them decide to put up a fight rather than comply. Conservatively estimate that in 10% of such encounters that at least 1 LEO is seriously injured or killed.

50,000 casualties. Out of ~800,000 police officers in the U.S.

And this is assuming large-scale compliance by gun owners, and a relatively low rate of LEO injury. Granted it'll probably be spread out over the course of years.

And one cannot ignore the fact that 3D printers can turn anyone into a gun manufacturer too.

Estimate about 50 million gun owners in the U.S., conservatively estimate 1% of them decide to put up a fight rather than comply.

It will be much closer to zero than that. Especially after they shoot the first one who gets physical with them (without even using the gun). And destroy the houses of the first few who give "boating accident" lines.

Yeah, it really wouldn’t be hard for a dedicated government with a popular mandate to confiscate every gun not buried in an unmarked field. Take Jan 6. Millions of Americans were convinced that American Democracy had just died. Tens of thousands showed up in person to protest. How many charged head-first into certain death to do something about it? One.

If you're working off the assumption that there won't be equal amounts of escalation as there will be compliance in response to heavy-handed tactics by government agents...

Well, cowabunga it is.

Or perhaps more recently and less spectacularly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff

It's weird to hold the idea that some portion of legal gun owners are ticking time bombs willing to throw their lives away to kill random people if pushed to far, but that there WON'T be some amount of violence and deadly attrition if the government sustains a campaign of door-to-door confiscations.

And of course can't get around the fact that the violence is being INITIATED by the government in these instances.

It's weird to hold the idea that some portion of legal gun owners are ticking time bombs willing to throw their lives away to kill random people if pushed to far, but that there WON'T be some amount of violence and deadly if the government sustains a campaign of door-to-door confiscations.

I think in both cases the "some" is very small. The US government declares "Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in" and enforces it through door-to-door confiscation, they'll do it with very little bloodshed. What little there is will be almost all on the formerly law-abiding gun owner's part.

I guess we're both without real precedent to point to in the U.S. for universal door-to-door confiscations of any item of importance or value.

But I do note that the U.S. has a long and storied history of individuals telling cops to fuck off when they come to the door.

Like, the State of Texas chose not to go after a single, particularly well armed family for 15 years.

Do I doubt they could have gotten them? No.

But imagine the cops having to make a similar calculus, times 1,000,000 households.

You assume that a few 'examples' being made of people putting up resistance will break the morale of the rest.

Not clear why the flip-side, a dozen or so cops getting capped in the process of serving warrants during the initial weeks of the confiscation effort wouldn't also demoralize their side.

Why do we assume the unshakeable will of LEOs vs. the meek compliance of the American citizenry?

Not clear why the flip-side, a dozen or so cops getting capped in the process of serving warrants during the initial weeks of the confiscation effort wouldn't also demoralize their side.

There won't be a dozen or so. There might be one. They would respond with overwhelming force, and further confiscation would be done by cops in full riot/stormtrooper gear, and that would be the end of that.

Why do we assume the unshakeable will of LEOs vs. the meek compliance of the American citizenry?

It's not the will of the LEOs, it's the will of the confiscators giving them orders. There will be enough LEOs who won't push back on their orders.

They would respond with overwhelming force, and further confiscation would be done by cops in full riot/stormtrooper gear, and that would be the end of that.

Those cops have to go home after work, yes?

Like, you're aware that these policemen have lives and families which are not hardened against attacks?

I'm really curious as to what your precedent is for assuming there's not some significant portions of the population that is willing to get froggy even if the cops go full Waco.

Like, Waco fucking happened, that's a precedent here. 4 agents dead, 16 injured in ONE standoff.

That wasn't even a universal confiscation push.

Bluntly, I find your position actively ignores the sheer numbers and actual precedent.

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It's not the will of the LEOs, it's the will of the confiscators giving them orders. There will be enough LEOs who won't push back on their orders.

I don't really put much stock into this in a post-Floyd world. I imagine that, in your hypothetical scenario, by Week 3 of the Great Gun Confiscation, officers will start conveniently calling in sick.

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I see your point, but I do think the truth is somewhere between you and @faceh.

The number of those who resist will be far below 1%, but they'll be incredibly proficient, well-trained, and armed. I personally know some crazies that would successfully kill multiple cops if we progressed to door-to-door confiscation.

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And of course can't get around the fact that the violence is being INITIATED by the government in these instances.

Now that I think about it, I don't even think they'd have to initiate violence. They could just shut down the bank accounts of anyone who doesn't consent to searches. Trudeau really let the cat out of the bag on that one.

These are the same police officers that were too terrified of shooting an untrained minor at Uvalde. I frankly don't see them having the stomach to face down people who are both more dangerous and better armed.

3D printers

Printing what? They may make it easier to build certain types of guns, or better guns. But what you want to build clandestine guns is a machine shop; the hardest part of a gun to build is the barrel. Especially if you are talking about rifles. Yes, dedicated clandestine gun manufacturers can and have overcome these difficulties. But barrels are the bottleneck. Not easy at all to drill a straight, centered hole through a bar of steel with a tolerance of a thousandth of an inch or better. Nor is it easy to then rifle that barrel.

Printing what? They may make it easier to build certain types of guns, or better guns. But what you want to build clandestine guns is a machine shop; the hardest part of a gun to build is the barrel.

the current tech as of last year was a 3d-printed mandrel, threaded with copper wire, which is used to electrochemically etch functional rifling into an appropriate steel tube. No drilling or other heavy machining equipment necessary.

Is there a problem with building the tubes themselves? If gunmakers can get those barrels drilled to the right precision...

steel tubing of the appropriate specifications is a fairly basic industrial/construction raw material, I'm given to understand; there's probably a way to make it from round stock, square stock, ingot and ore as well, but at some point there's no additional benefit because the materials necessary are ubiquitous and uncontrollable.

Got it. They just need to expand/widen a hole in .25 inch tubing to get it to be .308 inches or something like that.

Yeah...clandestine gun manufacturers could do pretty well IF they put some thought and preparation, as well as a decent amount of resources, into it. I'd think it'd cost...roughly as much as a used car to get what you need to build a good gun and decent ammunition.

Think, however, about the crude gun that was used to assassinate Shinzo Abe. It was essentially a crappy homemade shotgun. That is about what your lone wolf criminals are working with; larger, more organized groups could get better tools.

Got it. They just need to expand/widen a hole in .25 inch tubing to get it to be .308 inches or something like that.

Or just use tubing of the correct diameter. There's other options as well that I haven't seen people exploring as much, like rolling a barrel from sheet steel.

I'd think it'd cost...roughly as much as a used car to get what you need to build a good gun and decent ammunition.

Cost here is very dependent on exactly what you're trying to accomplish, and is one of the most obvious areas where the conversation's focus on rote abstractions hides a number of significant realities. There's cheaper and much more effective things you can make for less resources than a DIY masterpiece 5.56mm NATO cartridge factory. Nullifying gun control 1:1 with DIY tech can be done, but the fact that people are pushing it so hard is an artifact of memetic incentives, not a reflection of baseline reality. In the actual event, I do not think people will be making 5.56mm cartridge factories, because the memetic incentives will no longer be those of performative activism, but of deadly conflict.

Think, however, about the crude gun that was used to assassinate Shinzo Abe. It was essentially a crappy homemade shotgun. That is about what your lone wolf criminals are working with; larger, more organized groups could get better tools.

That particular weapon was seriously over-engineered. As an offhand example, the steel pipe barrels aren't actually necessary: you can make a perfectly functional large-bore black powder firearm out of literal paper. Again, the common knowledge generated in this space is not remotely exhaustive, and is largely shape by the incentives of performative activism, not practicality. cartridge repeaters and even automatic weapons are absolutely within the skill range of the top 30% or so of the population now, and technological progress will lower the skill floor significantly in the near future. Powder and cartridge production might be a bit harder, but not much. Smallarms are at the bottom end of the effort/reward curve, though, even for individuals, and organized groups have access to entirely different spheres of capability.

There seems to be this intuition that technology is somehow magical or mysterious, or otherwise unreachably complex. It's not. It's astonishing the proportion that's purely social, purely memetic; people consider one thing easy and another thing hard not necessarily because of actual differences, but because social effects have streamlined one process and not the other. One sees this quite a bit in the gun culture, even before 3D2A took off, but I think it's difficult for people to really appreciate the implications.

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I don’t know why gun rights advocates don’t just admit that yes, if all guns were confiscated and a very strict licensing regime was put in place gun homicides would likely drop substantially

What's the point in admitting "hypothetically, if every legal and illegal gun was confiscated, gun crime would drop". As far as I know most gun rights people don't have an objection to the government confiscating illegal guns used by gangs.

I don’t know why gun rights advocates don’t just admit that yes, if all guns were confiscated and a very strict licensing regime was put in place gun homicides would likely drop substantially.

We just had two mass shootings in Serbia in a week. And former eastern bloc countries actually have quite tight regimes for firearms. Also they were somewhat of a first for the nation. Around this parts it is usually easy to get hunting licence but that's it. And good luck if you want something more potent than double barrel 12 gauge (which I adore to be fair, especially the legendary ИЖ-12 and ИЖ-16 )

Edit: The vox title on the topic is a master class in lack of self awareness.

Serbia’s populist president pledges “disarmament” after mass shootings.

Gun control measures could further erode civil liberties under President Aleksandar Vucic.

Yeah, my reaction to that bit from 2rafa's post was "Balkans gonna Balkan, man, sorry."

Not quite related, but I think there's an island in Greece where there is de facto no gun control and it's kind of a no-go zone for police simply because it's a wild-terrain kind of place and it's been swimming in guns since at least WWII.

Is this Crete? Or the Mani peninsula?

Might be Crete? I remember hearing it during a Black Pants Legion stream, I think.

ИЖ-16

The over-under shotgun? I didn't know they were popular at all, let alone abroad.

They have both side by side and over under. it is just the more nimble cousin of the 12 gauge chambered in 16.

I'm not exactly a firearms enthusiast, but to my limited knowledge, ИЖ-12 was chambered in all kinds of gauges: 12, 16, 20, not sure about paradoxes, though.

compared to the US and its lefty open borders contingent? if they banned weapons in the USA the flow of armaments would just inverse in polarity and it would be Fentanil and assorted drugs PLUS weapons sold. Anoter Fast and Furious fiasco but in the US instead of Mexico.

And that what means for US gun control when the southern border of the US is virtually non existent?

ИЖ-12

How does one pronounce this, anyway?

Exactly like it is spelled.

Rhymes with siege but a little softer. I’d transliterate it as ‘eezh’.

I don’t know why gun rights advocates don’t just admit that yes, if all guns were confiscated and a very strict licensing regime was put in place gun homicides would likely drop substantially.

Because 'We're the baddies but there's so many of us we'll make it politically impossible for you to take our guns' is a lot less inspirational than 'We're martyrs watering the tree of liberty and defending ourselves from a tyrannical government.'

  • -27

How about "Firearm ownership is literally written into the founding document of this country as a fundamental right and thus we are literally entitled to ignore your pleas for gun control unless and until you can garner sufficient political support to amend said document."

Since "we're trying to overturn a civil right that the very founders of the country thought important enough to specifically enshrine AND ignore the actual procedure for making changes to the founding document in the effort" isn't exactly inspiring either, and it's certainly accurate to describe the gun-control movement's approach to the issue.

Or in short, the deal is that we follow the rules set forth when the nation was created, and those rules happen to include this particular provision for gun rights, so amend it or, literally, GTFO to a country that is more politically suitable to your own beliefs.

There have been other amendments to the constitution. Why not make another to improve things?

I don't think the founders could foresee the future that well that they could predict events hundreds (or thousands) of years in the future and consider everything.

If you can get 32 States on board, go for it...

Correct and that's why there is a built-in amendment process.

There have been other amendments to the constitution. Why not make another to improve things?

Sure, the US is basically smashing every other large country on everything, when demographically adjusted. Why not constitutionally amend to eliminate social security and medicare? Or the income tax? Or mandate the execution of drug dealers? Evidence is much more in favor of those than the repeal of the 2nd Amendment.

There have been other amendments to the constitution. Why not make another to improve things?

American prohibitionists actually managed to do just that. They built a sufficiently large anti-alcohol coalition that pushed their amendment through. Gun-prohibitionists can't muster enough support to repeat their achievement.

Honestly I think there'd be more chance of getting a "2A II -- ShallNotBeInfringedandweMeanItThisTime Boogaloo" amendment passed than anything the left could do for the forseeable future. Agitating for a constitutional convention on the matter might be a fun shit-stirring project if Desantis decides not to go for President this time around.

Constitutional convention is an existing far right boondoggle.

What's the holdup? A few states short of a load, or too nuclear?

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"Firearm ownership is literally written into the founding document of this country as a fundamental right . . . "

That's just a set-up for the Cersei Lannister response: "This is your shield, Lord Stark? A piece of paper? tears paper to shreds"

And that sounds like a set up for "No, this is my shield."

And at that point, gun rights are a revolution-complete problem.

...are you under the impression that Cersei Lannister and her children lived happily ever after? Because I get the feeling that you might be under that impression.

I mean, because she was kinda proven correct? They lost to might makes right, even after gambling the entire future of humanity on her political enemies winning a battle where her aide could have been significant.

Did we read to the same books or watch the same show? If anything ASOIAF's core thesis seems to be "might makes right is no basis for a system of government"

Questionable. Every ASOIAF government that doesn't feature a central power with its boot firmly on the throats of its constituents, barring a few fringe polities that aren't explored at all, immediately dissolves into cycles of bloodshed, revolution and genocide. The Targaryens' death warrant was written the day they lost their dragons; it just took some time to execute the warrant. The Baratheon dynasty likewise falls apart once its founder, who stamped out rebellions with his own hammer, died and left no one of parallel martial ability to reign after him. Daenerys replaces the authoritarian slaveocracy of Astapor with a proto-communist government of the people, which rapidly disintegrates into civil war and a near-total genocide of the entire city. Arguably the only successful governments in ASOIAF, measured by the ability to stay in power for more than a couple of generations at the least, are those governments which make it clear that they rule by the sword.

In GOT (the show at least, I'm telling myself I should wait till he finishes to read, lest I be disappointed as I was with the show), Cerise's reign is ended by an overwhelming army and a freaking dragon.

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In a stunning upset, Jeb! won both the Democratic and Republican nominations simultaneously.

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No, but in the process of not living happily ever after, they made the lives of an awful lot of ordinary people who got caught in the crossfire very, very miserable. I want to avoid getting into the position where Cersei has to be violently removed from power via a horrifying and drawn-out war in the first place. So ideally, there'd be a better plan at the beginning than "you lose because this piece of paper says so."

The guys who tore the Articles of Confederation to shreds and replaced it with the current constitution did pretty well for themselves.

I personally find that even less inspiring but whatever floats your boat man.

  • -11

Aiming less to inspire and more to point out that the country's founding document is what makes it 'politically impossible' to take guns and that the 'baddies' are simply the ones demanding you adhere to the actual agreement instead of ignoring it where convenient.

If the country's basic political framing is demoralizing to your position, well again, the options to both change it via the well-established process or to leave to someplace more suitable are open!

If the country's basic political framing is demoralizing to your position, well again, the options to both change it via the well-established process or to leave to someplace more suitable are open!

Or to have it ignored. It's not a magical document, convince enough people in the right places it is illegitimate or out of date and you can avoid the process entirely.

If I founded a country and said the only way to change the founding rules is by me deciding it, it's quite possible in 300 hundred years the inhabitants of SSCReaderonia would entirely disregard my well-written constitution. And they would probably be right to do so. I just got first mover privilege, no reason that needs to last after I am dead.

The political framing is downstream of people believing it is the basic political framing. It's not like the Supreme Court has not been challenged to enforce its rulings before.

Not advocating this should be done by the way, just pointing out it isn't an either/or. There are many different options.

The current US constitution was the second "founding document" for the United States.

The first, the Articles of Confederation, which a number of "founding fathers" signed swearing that it "shall be inviolably observed by the states we respectively represent," was not amended under the process laid out in the document but was instead just crumpled up and tossed aside for a new constitution in secret.

While the procedure for amending the Articles of Confederation required unanimous consent from all the states, Rhode Island and North Carolina were heavily opposed, with Rhode Island refusing to send delegates and repeatedly stating their opposition to a new constitution. For refusal to sign the new constitution, Rhode Island was embargoed and threatened with blockade until they capitulated.

Talk of the current US constitution being almost sacred and inviolable, how one is bound to follow the procedures laid out by guys who had just wiped their ass with the last constitution's procedures, is a lot like seeing an usurper who killed the previous king wax eloquent on the importance of fidelity to the crown and always following peaceful succession.

Because 'We're the baddies but there's so many of us we'll make it politically impossible for you to take our guns'

You can be anti-gun and you can believe that gun advocates are wrong and on the wrong side, but tagging them "the baddies" is literally just a boo light. Argue better than this.

Why don't left types just admit that a wall on the southern border would reduce illegal immigration and....

It's because they don't want the policy and the objection to it isn't based on the efficacy of it. Why give up ground for no reason?

I don’t know why gun rights advocates don’t just admit that yes, if all guns were confiscated and a very strict licensing regime was put in place gun homicides would likely drop substantially.

Because the way politics works in the US, all the nuances and caveats you listed (and which are a key part of your overall point) would go completely unheard by people. We live in the country of the soundbite (not that we are necessarily unique in this, of course). The instant gun rights advocates said "I admit that if all guns were confiscated, murder rates would go down", every single gun control proponent would be writing editorials that said "even gun rights advocates admit gun control works". They would run campaign ads that go "Senator so-and-so admits gun control works (insert sound clip here). Yet he voted down these measures every time, blah blah he is the devil vote for me instead." In short, it would be a complete disaster for gun rights and for the careers of those who advance them. The latter outcome is probably the bigger of the two, of course, since politicians are pretty much the most self-serving creatures in existence. But even people honestly considering the cause of gun rights would have some concern about the former outcome.

It's kind of like when Scott Alexander writes an essay about some controversial topic or other. Every single time, he includes a million lines trying to say "yes, if you take this one sentence out of context it sounds bad but that's not what I'm saying and you fail at reading comprehension if you think that". Every single time, there's at least one person who is unscrupulous enough to take that sentence out of context and use it to demonize him. And every single time, Scott is caught off-guard because he made the mistake of believing he was dealing with people who are acting in good faith. Or at least until he stopped writing about controversial topics (which is probably the right call for him).

So yeah, that's why gun rights advocates don't do what you're suggesting. I'm not saying that's praiseworthy of them, or even that it's merely acceptable in a "I don't like it but I understand" kind of way. Just that's why. The gun rights people are playing politics, and politics is full of flat-out evil people who will twist your words into a weapon against you the instant they can. So they prioritize not giving those people ammunition.

I guess short-term it's the right strategy, but it makes pro-gun people sound like lunatics when they deny that getting rid of the guns would reduce murder. It's not quite as bad as the people who insist that those racial crime statistics don't mean what you think they mean, but it's the same kind of politically-convenient reality denial. If you don't have an affirmative case for why gun rights are more valuable than X dead kids per year, I hate to tell you, but you're going to lose.

it makes pro-gun people sound like lunatics when they deny that getting rid of the guns would reduce murder

The proposition here was that getting rid of the guns would reduce gun murder, not murder in general.

If you don't have an affirmative case for why gun rights are more valuable than X dead kids per year, I hate to tell you, but you're going to lose.

If it's framed that way, gun rights have already lost.

it makes pro-gun people sound like lunatics when they deny that getting rid of the guns would reduce murder.

Why is our hypothetical anti-gun person trying to get a pro-gun person to admit something that has no practical relevance to the debate? I don’t think the pro-gun person assuming that his interloper is just sound-bite hunting is very crazy.

Saying something like “assume a magical fairy takes all guns out of private ownership in the US, would murders go down?” seems a lot fairer, because you’re making it clear “I’m saying something kind of silly to establish if you’re debating in good faith”.

But if you say “do you admit if there were no guns in the US then there would be fewer murders?”, I don’t think it’s surprising if the pro-gun guy assumes ill-intent.

You're not wrong, but... have you looked at the US lately? We are the very epitome of short-term thinkers. Corporations routinely burn down long-term profits for next-quarter profits, voters flip-flop between candidates in the two parties because they are pissed off at the current one... but don't bother to remember that they're voting in the party they were pissed off at 4 years prior. People cripple themselves with debt and make their life awful in the long run because they really want something right now. We are a nation of short-term thinkers. It should hardly be surprising that extends to politics as well.

If you don't have an affirmative case for why gun rights are more valuable than X dead kids per year, I hate to tell you, but you're going to lose.

Progressives have zero affirmative case for why their policies permitting violent vagrants to kill people are more valuable than X stabbing victims per year; they have yet to lose.

First they reinvented original sin as white privilege, and the selling of indulgences as buying sustainable / environmental / electric. Now they’ve reinvented the mortification of the flesh.

I find this both scary and amusing. Maybe I’m just up too late, too tired.

This is amusing. It seems to be like some kind of zombie Christianity or something. Yes, secular humanism is Christianity with the serial numbers filed off, but this is an interesting thing indeed.

I guess short-term it's the right strategy, but it makes pro-gun people sound like lunatics when they deny that getting rid of the guns would reduce murder.

and yet this strategy had led to more gun rights being regained throughout the US than before when honesty-bot and cooperate-bot had hollowed out those rights over sixty or so years

If you don't have an affirmative case for why gun rights are more valuable than X dead kids per year, I hate to tell you, but you're going to lose.

allowing that framing of the discourse in such a way means gunrights have already lost which is why they've wholly abandoned the strategy you apparently think is the right one

should the gunrights/self-defense advocates given the honesty-bot and cooperate-bot strategy another 60 years to see if it would eventually work in the "long term"?

If you don't have an affirmative case for why gun rights are more valuable than X dead kids per year, I hate to tell you, but you're going to lose.

The affirmative case is obvious: X dead kids per year is a small price to pay for the impediment to tyranny an armed populace offers. How many kids will the next totalitarian state kill for ideological reasons? It's going to be more than die by the happenstance of gun crime.

I guess short-term it's the right strategy, but it makes pro-gun people sound like lunatics when they deny that getting rid of the guns would reduce murder.

I respectfully disagree. As a gun nut, it's the only strategy. I'll admit it "privately" on here and that's pretty much it.

There is no room for compromise, reasonableness, or mercy with the gun control lobby. If you could guarantee me that a licensing and insurance regime would remain static for the lifetime of the republic I could build you a great framework that would vastly reduce gun violence.

But we have to deal in the real here. We already have a fucking constitutional amendment that says, in no uncertain terms, civvies get to keep the guns. And now we have to do this bullshit arguing about what a militia is with a bunch of hateful, statistically illiterate idiots. This is the strongest possible enshrinement of a fundamental right that you can get! And still, it's constantly under bad faith attacks.

Nah. No way, no how.

First off, getting apples to apples comparison of violent crime between the UK and US is difficult due to differences in standards and reporting practices. For example, it my understanding that the UK only records a death as "intentional homicide" if there is a suspect and then has separate categories for manslaughter and suspected foul-play. Whereas the US records all three under the single header homicide before breaking it down by degree. When one digs into the numbers one finds that most of soundbites and examples cited in the media about US violence relative to the UK are playing fast and loose with this distinction. IE comparing all gun deaths in the US (including accidents, suicides and those shootings ruled lawful) to the specific subset of "intentional homicides" committed with firearms in the UK.

Second off, and kind of related to the point above, the more "red adjacent" an American is the more likely they are to question the validity of "gun homicides" as a metric. Sure if you could somehow Thanos snap all the guns in civillian hands out of existence gun crime would likely be dramatically reduced, at least temporarily. but what of it? There seems to be this underlying a assumption behind a lot of these posts that a person killed with a knife, or lynched by a mob, is somehow less of victim. For my part I don't see how that can be, KIA is KIA.

The cynical bastard in me can't help but suspect that a lot of this is downstream the progressive affinity for external loci of control and the broder millue of secular post-modernist nonsense. When some strapping schitzo with a dozen prior arrests kills Granny by bashing her head in with a brick, or pushing her into the path of an oncoming train nobody panics because it's all part of the plan. The posts about focusing on mental health and how "we all live in a society" were already written before the corpse was cold.

Meanwhile if Granny pulls a revolver from her purse and plugs her would be killer center-of-mass, or some bystander intervenes and drops him. Everyone loses their minds.

The simplest and most straight forward argument in favor of "liberal" gun laws is in the old saw, God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal.

If guns were as easy and cheap to access in the UK as they are in the US then gun crime in Britain would probably rise, just as cheap Balkan guns imported by Albanian gangs have meant higher rates of gun crime in some Western European countries over the last 15 years as EU borders have expanded and become more porous.

You know, as an American libertarian it is far easier for me to say that in this fashion America is far more similar to Brazil than the UK. A total gun ban would just mean that Glocks get auto sears like they do in Chicago, but the entire US.

Huh. Somehow I’d never heard of these.

I’m assuming this sort of low-capacity machine pistol is impractical for anything other than killing densely packed people.

They're useful for any scenario that one is willing to trade off accuracy for rate of fire. When it comes to murdering a rival gang member in a drive-by, that makes them just plain useful. They're only impractical for scenarios where you care about accuracy and risk to bystanders, which aren't likely to be the primary considerations for the sorts of people that are doing drive-bys.

My thought was that the main tactical advantage of machine guns, suppression, was poorly served by small magazines. Wikipedia seemed to agree:

Machine pistols are considered a special purpose weapon with limited utility.

It does mention that one of those “special purposes” is close-quarters, indoor combat. And notes that the more practical machine pistols sort of converge on submachine guns, adding foregrips or detachable stocks.

I’d overlooked shooting from a moving vehicle (drive-by, or the mythical Texas helicopter hunting).

Sure, and even the drive-by scenario would be better served by a using heavier calibers, longer barrels, and larger magazines (or belt-feed, if feasible). I was comparing the advantage of full-auto strictly to a semi-auto pistol without respect to whether there are better weapons still on the basis that concealability was strictly required.

It does mention that one of those “special purposes” is close-quarters, indoor combat.

The trick with handguns is that they aren't actually all that great at ending threats- they aren't quite powerful enough to do this reliably and tend to require multiple rounds (the price for concealability). So you give a pistol more rounds per trigger press; this was the idea behind the pistols that fire limited bursts rather than dumping the entire magazine, but they're more mechanically complex (whereas the Glock solution is just engaging a tab that pushes the sear back down when the slide closes all the way).

Basically, machine pistols give you a less powerful but far more compact shotgun equivalent (shotguns themselves fire the equivalent of 8 rounds of 9mm per trigger press- this is usually enough) that by its nature is pinpoint accurate when needed. The best example of this is Eastern European criminal use of vz. 61 Skorpions- they're even smaller than a cut-down double-barrel shotgun is yet offer just as much firepower; dump half the 20-round mag into something and the results are not meaningfully different from what a single shell of #00 buckshot does. You have to be closer to the target for this to work with 9mm handguns, though.

Guntube doesn't really understand that point and tend to be more "dump the entire mag to blow up some watermelons, also magdumping means half your rounds are over the target" though- they're specialist weapons that basically don't exist outside of rental ranges and video games and as such the knowledge base about how they're actually used is limited to a book I've only read a review of. There are a couple things that should make the community's understanding of this concept a bit more mature, but one of them is limited to 3D printing and the willingness to file SBR paperwork and the other one isn't on the market yet.

Hm. Thanks for the write up.

Out of curiosity, from that Reddit Skorpion link…is “bottle opener” a euphemism?

Yes.

...He might be referencing some other device, but this is the one in the news, after it got two gun guys convicted of selling "machine guns" that were actually engraved pictures on a flat metal card. not "engraved" in the sense that you could pop it out by hand, but the exact equivalent of a paper template pasted on top.

In any case, he's saying that the ATF will fuck you just as hard for a DIY binary trigger as for a full-auto converter, so why go for the lesser option?

More comments

There are a few ways to convert an AR-15 with one or two drop-in parts such that it will fire in full-auto. Most of them superficially resemble the plane-type or the claw-type of bottle opener- the former also has a piece that sticks up to be pushed by the bolt carrier.

The general solution to achieving full-auto fire is "hammer must stay back until the bolt is fully closed, once it is, trip the hammer"; these parts are a mechanical linkage that makes that process possible.

It's possible to prevent this, but while it's a very low technical bar to go from semi-auto to full-auto, that trivial inconvenience is generally sufficient to stop criminals from doing that.

They also make a very distinct noise, which is why they are on them.

I don’t know why drug rights advocates don’t just admit that yes, if all drugs were confiscated and a very strict licensing regime was put in place drug overdoses would likely drop substantially

Multiple people die smoking fentanyl on the LA rail system every month. Over 100k Americans died from drug overdoses in 2021. Drug issues have massively spiked since then so who knows how horrifically high 2023's numbers will be. Drug overdose deaths outnumber gun homicides around 5 to 1.

These drugs are completely illegal and have been for a long time. The police spent decades confiscating these drugs. Drug deaths are currently very common.

I have as much hope for an effective War on Guns as I do for the War on Drugs. Unless you have a magic wand that destroys all guns forever, I dispute the efficacy of this proposal.

Did you read the whole post? The fact that it's impossible to actually eliminate guns is the very point that @2rafa was making.

I don’t know why gun rights advocates don’t just admit that yes, if all guns were confiscated and a very strict licensing regime was put in place gun homicides would likely drop substantially.

because nothing at all is gained doing this and a particular beachhead is lost to people who regularly lie, cheat, and steal to get what they want including crafting a statement about only "gun homicides" in order to frame the discourse in such a way as to serve that agenda

civilian disarmament proponents won't even admit they're civilian disarmament proponents, but gun rights advocates should play honesty-bot which aided in the loss of many gun rights over the last 100 years

additionally, why should I anyone care if only gun homicides go up and down? ceteris paribus is only true in hypotheticals, a person killed by knife or car is still dead even if they weren't shot, defensive use does reduce future crime, and the avoidance of "gun death" is not the only thing which matters in life

gun rights advocates don't admit it because it's a loss for nothing gained and it's intentionally framing the question to serve the gungrabber agenda

and on that basis, gun control is indeed stupid.

no, civilian disarmament is stupid because it forces people to be helpless in the face of violence making the individual less able to defend themselves and what they value

I prefer far flatter variance in violence projection ability for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I find it disgusting that one would use violence against an individual for mere possession of the ability to defend themselves and force them to be at the mercy of someone who is simply stronger.

civilian disarmament is stupid because it forces people to be helpless in the face of violence making the individual less able to defend themselves and what they value

Which is why disarmed countries are so much more violent? No, they are less.


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