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Why is this response being downvoted? I don't actually know very much about the situation so I really don't have the tools to evaluate what is wrong (or right)

Why is this response being downvoted? I don't actually know very much about the situation so I really don't have the tools to evaluate what is wrong (or right) with this comment.

pjc50 8y ago
Because it's an incredibly stupid claim that firearms would somehow improve the situation? I mean, we had a live-fire slow-burn civil war in the UK for decades (1970s-2000). It didn't help.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Knowing that if you abuse people enough eventually you'll run into someone who shoots back is a massive check on abuse of power. Checking abuse of government's power to enforce its will with violence makes it much more likely to be careful deciding what it's will is. It gives the slippery slope some friction if the will of the government strays too far from that of the people. I don't see it being applicable in the case of the UK where the attitude seems to be to condone or ignore invasive paternalistic government in all cases when it doesn't directly contradict one's personal interests. Edit: I'm not talking about armed resistance here, I'm talking about the fact that it's much harder to normalize the use of government action to just steamroll over groups you disagree with when each misdeed carries a risk of bloodshed and provoking outcry. Recall the recent cattle grazing on federal lands standoff fiasco. While I haven't looked into the merits of either side that kind of standoff would not have happened and the public would never have known of the issue in a country where there is not both freedom of the press (as a byproduct of the 1A) and the right of citizens to bear arms. Even Waco (while tragic and a failure of society to check the power government in a million different ways) is a success story for the 2a and the 1a because the government was not able to mistreat people without public knowledge and scrutiny of their misdeeds.
  - ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
    I think in the modern era, a movement to curtail Government power in the United States would be better served by refusing to pay taxes than military action.
    - Zungaron 8y ago
      An even simpler and more effective solution would be to just stop voting for authoritarians. I don't think anything has served as a more consistent death knell for an American politician than being branded "soft on crime".
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Do you know anything at all of the history of Northern Ireland? It turns out that the government can shoot back too.
    - magduf 8y ago
      If you go farther back to before NI existed, the reason the UK finally gave up and let Ireland have independence is because the Irish used violence against the British who were abusing them.
  - TallGuyShort 8y ago
    There were recent examples of this in the US: armed confrontations with government in which the civilians were branded as unstable extremists. The stand-off led to a court case in which it turns out that yes, the government had been in the wrong the whole time. I think the gun control debate is interesting for a different reason than guns-preventing-tyranny, though: in the UK you see the police tweeting to brag about finding the kind of knives you eat with and still struggling with very high murder rates. In the US there are politicians who openly admit that their gun control proposal will do nothing and is largely symbolic, but they still think they're justified in simply banning the ownership of certain items with no compensation to their legal owners. Even if that's not getting rid of the means of opposing tyranny... isn't that already tyranny? There's a big difference between a blanket, retro-active ban and licensing / regulating / buying-back but that seems largely lost in the other ideological aspects of the debate.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      I see nobody's willing to engage with the actual Armalite vs government shooting war that happened in the UK.
      - TallGuyShort 8y ago
        Are you talking about the conflict over northern Ireland like in your other comments? If not I have no idea what shooting Aramlite was involved in or what conflict they had with the UK. If you're referring to northern Ireland, my point is not that we should get into a back-and-forth of cases where guns did and didn't prevent tyranny - my point is that the debate has seemingly skipped the "reasonable regulation" so many people were suggesting and is now basically a tug-of-war over blanket bans of property people currently own when the politicians will openly admit it will have no impact on violent crime and is intended to be symbolic. What I'm saying is that's already tyranny and is stupid.
        foldr 8y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armalite_and_ballot_box_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armalite_and_ballot_box_strate...
  - notahacker 8y ago
    I'm going to go out on a limb and say the United States has at various stages of their history introduced rather more onerous violations of civil rights than "porn passes" without so much as a whimper of opposition from gun owners..
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
      As this overlaps with another thread, I'm just going to link there [1]. Suffice to say that the fact that blacks in particular were unarmed during the most oppressive days of the US was absolutely not a coincidence and there were laws passed preventing this both directly (e.g. literally blacks may not own weapons) and indirectly (e.g. - you must pay a $200 'tax' to own a weapon). [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17095043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17095043
  - foldr 8y ago
    >Knowing that if you abuse people enough eventually you'll run into someone who shoots back is a massive check on abuse of power. It doesn't seem to be in practice. Did it stop segregation in the South, for example? That was a far more egregious abuse of power than a porn pass.
    - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
      There were laws in most states banning blacks from owning guns [1], presumably largely out of fear that they might fight back if armed. Even long after the civil war laws were passed to implicitly prevent blacks from being able to obtain guns. For instance the National Firearms Act of 1934 put a whopping $200 tax on firearms purchases. The goal, like many earlier bills, was just to ensure that blacks and poor whites could not effectively arm themselves. Even the gun control act of 1968 was influenced out of a fear that black groups, such as the Black Panthers, were starting to arm themselves and demonstrate accordingly. There's a really interesting article on that here [2]. And actually this is a general theme throughout history. For instance gun laws which effectively disarmed their target population played a crucial role in the numerous 20th century genocides. From the Jews in Germany, to the Armenians in Turkey, to the "intellectuals" in Cambodia, to subversives and dissidents in Stalin's Soviet Union, and many more. First came the the restriction of guns then came the unveiling of what the beasts behind these governments truly were. This of course is not to imply that all efforts at gun control come with some ulterior motive, but simply to exemplify that governments that do have that ulterior motive tend to be damn scared of an armed population. [1] - http://www.old-yankee.com/rkba/racial_laws.html http://www.old-yankee.com/rkba/racial_laws.html [2] - https://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/the_nra_once_supported_gun_control/ https://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/the_nra_once_supported_gun_...
      - foldr 8y ago
        >There were laws in most states banning blacks from owning guns [1], presumably largely out of fear that they might fight back if armed Those laws were passed because black Americans in the South did have easy access to guns following the civil war. The guns don't seem to have helped them much.
- jakeogh 8y ago
  Ban carrying knives next? And 3D printers; gonna need a license and a pile of DRM phoning home to make sure you didn't make a banned object.

Why is this response being downvoted? I don't actually know very much about the situation so I really don't have the tools to evaluate what is wrong (or right) with this comment.

pjc50 8y ago

Because it's an incredibly stupid claim that firearms would somehow improve the situation? I mean, we had a live-fire slow-burn civil war in the UK for decades (1970s-2000). It didn't help.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Knowing that if you abuse people enough eventually you'll run into someone who shoots back is a massive check on abuse of power. Checking abuse of government's power to enforce its will with violence makes it much more likely to be careful deciding what it's will is. It gives the slippery slope some friction if the will of the government strays too far from that of the people. I don't see it being applicable in the case of the UK where the attitude seems to be to condone or ignore invasive paternalistic government in all cases when it doesn't directly contradict one's personal interests. Edit: I'm not talking about armed resistance here, I'm talking about the fact that it's much harder to normalize the use of government action to just steamroll over groups you disagree with when each misdeed carries a risk of bloodshed and provoking outcry. Recall the recent cattle grazing on federal lands standoff fiasco. While I haven't looked into the merits of either side that kind of standoff would not have happened and the public would never have known of the issue in a country where there is not both freedom of the press (as a byproduct of the 1A) and the right of citizens to bear arms. Even Waco (while tragic and a failure of society to check the power government in a million different ways) is a success story for the 2a and the 1a because the government was not able to mistreat people without public knowledge and scrutiny of their misdeeds.
- ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
  I think in the modern era, a movement to curtail Government power in the United States would be better served by refusing to pay taxes than military action.
  - Zungaron 8y ago
    An even simpler and more effective solution would be to just stop voting for authoritarians. I don't think anything has served as a more consistent death knell for an American politician than being branded "soft on crime".
- pjc50 8y ago
  Do you know anything at all of the history of Northern Ireland? It turns out that the government can shoot back too.
  - magduf 8y ago
    If you go farther back to before NI existed, the reason the UK finally gave up and let Ireland have independence is because the Irish used violence against the British who were abusing them.
- TallGuyShort 8y ago
  There were recent examples of this in the US: armed confrontations with government in which the civilians were branded as unstable extremists. The stand-off led to a court case in which it turns out that yes, the government had been in the wrong the whole time. I think the gun control debate is interesting for a different reason than guns-preventing-tyranny, though: in the UK you see the police tweeting to brag about finding the kind of knives you eat with and still struggling with very high murder rates. In the US there are politicians who openly admit that their gun control proposal will do nothing and is largely symbolic, but they still think they're justified in simply banning the ownership of certain items with no compensation to their legal owners. Even if that's not getting rid of the means of opposing tyranny... isn't that already tyranny? There's a big difference between a blanket, retro-active ban and licensing / regulating / buying-back but that seems largely lost in the other ideological aspects of the debate.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    I see nobody's willing to engage with the actual Armalite vs government shooting war that happened in the UK.
    - TallGuyShort 8y ago
      Are you talking about the conflict over northern Ireland like in your other comments? If not I have no idea what shooting Aramlite was involved in or what conflict they had with the UK. If you're referring to northern Ireland, my point is not that we should get into a back-and-forth of cases where guns did and didn't prevent tyranny - my point is that the debate has seemingly skipped the "reasonable regulation" so many people were suggesting and is now basically a tug-of-war over blanket bans of property people currently own when the politicians will openly admit it will have no impact on violent crime and is intended to be symbolic. What I'm saying is that's already tyranny and is stupid.
      - foldr 8y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armalite_and_ballot_box_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armalite_and_ballot_box_strate...
- notahacker 8y ago
  I'm going to go out on a limb and say the United States has at various stages of their history introduced rather more onerous violations of civil rights than "porn passes" without so much as a whimper of opposition from gun owners..
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    As this overlaps with another thread, I'm just going to link there [1]. Suffice to say that the fact that blacks in particular were unarmed during the most oppressive days of the US was absolutely not a coincidence and there were laws passed preventing this both directly (e.g. literally blacks may not own weapons) and indirectly (e.g. - you must pay a $200 'tax' to own a weapon). [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17095043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17095043
- foldr 8y ago
  >Knowing that if you abuse people enough eventually you'll run into someone who shoots back is a massive check on abuse of power. It doesn't seem to be in practice. Did it stop segregation in the South, for example? That was a far more egregious abuse of power than a porn pass.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    There were laws in most states banning blacks from owning guns [1], presumably largely out of fear that they might fight back if armed. Even long after the civil war laws were passed to implicitly prevent blacks from being able to obtain guns. For instance the National Firearms Act of 1934 put a whopping $200 tax on firearms purchases. The goal, like many earlier bills, was just to ensure that blacks and poor whites could not effectively arm themselves. Even the gun control act of 1968 was influenced out of a fear that black groups, such as the Black Panthers, were starting to arm themselves and demonstrate accordingly. There's a really interesting article on that here [2]. And actually this is a general theme throughout history. For instance gun laws which effectively disarmed their target population played a crucial role in the numerous 20th century genocides. From the Jews in Germany, to the Armenians in Turkey, to the "intellectuals" in Cambodia, to subversives and dissidents in Stalin's Soviet Union, and many more. First came the the restriction of guns then came the unveiling of what the beasts behind these governments truly were. This of course is not to imply that all efforts at gun control come with some ulterior motive, but simply to exemplify that governments that do have that ulterior motive tend to be damn scared of an armed population. [1] - http://www.old-yankee.com/rkba/racial_laws.html http://www.old-yankee.com/rkba/racial_laws.html [2] - https://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/the_nra_once_supported_gun_control/ https://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/the_nra_once_supported_gun_...
    - foldr 8y ago
      >There were laws in most states banning blacks from owning guns [1], presumably largely out of fear that they might fight back if armed Those laws were passed because black Americans in the South did have easy access to guns following the civil war. The guns don't seem to have helped them much.
jakeogh 8y ago
Ban carrying knives next? And 3D printers; gonna need a license and a pile of DRM phoning home to make sure you didn't make a banned object.