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Your comment, predictably, is indeed popular. What won't be popular: the second amendment was crafted specifically so that functionaries of State power can't a

by caeril 6y ago

Your comment, predictably, is indeed popular. What won't be popular: the second amendment was crafted specifically so that functionaries of State power can't abuse their position without the risk of extrajudicial reprisal. Not at all saying that this specific case is a matter of positional abuse ( definitely appears to be a tragic lone mental health case, which is a whole other problem in our society entirely ) - merely stating that the right to bear arms is intended to be a check against it.

qz2 6y ago
It made sense when they came up with it but it was a large can of worms which didn’t age or scale well. Now you have a society based on mutual assured destruction at a civilian level devoid of trust and community.
- centimeter 6y ago
  > devoid of trust and community I assure you, this has nothing to do with being armed. This should be pretty clear from a number of observations: A) The most heavily armed communities in the US are highly community-oriented and trustworthy towards their respective in-groups B) Lack of social cohesion seems to be just as prevalent in western nations with full disarmament The actual proximate causes of social decoherence are things that HN is probably mostly in support of, on net; urbanization, multiculturalism, etc.
  - qz2 6y ago
    The difference when there are ubiquitous firearms and not is the level of fear and nervousness among strained relations. Any division is amplified then. All it takes is someone to lose it and it’s a cheap solution. And everyone knows it. The communities you speak of are a division. I worked for a large defence contractor in the US for a number of years and got to see the contrast in professional and personal relations between their European and American employees. It’s scary when you see.
    - centimeter 6y ago
      > when there are ubiquitous firearms and not is the level of fear and nervousness among strained relations 100% disagree. The saying "armed society is polite society" is absolutely true, at least when it comes to the interaction between arms and western social ethics. Obviously your results may vary in the Congo or Chicago or whatever. Even if we accept the (most likely contextually false) premise that reducing firearms access for non-criminals also meaningfully reduces firearms access for criminals, I do not have any preference (ceteris paribus) between getting shot, stabbed, or having my head bashed in. In fact, I might prefer getting shot. In the more realistic case where criminal firearm attainability is less than perfectly correlated with non-criminal firearm attainability, it makes sense for non-criminals to be armed as well. There's also the MAD dynamic; people are less likely to physically escalate if there is a possibility of a high-severity response. > it’s a cheap solution A murder charge for an unjustified shooting is hardly "cheap".
geofft 6y ago
I don't think that's quite right. I will absolutely defend that the Second Amendment was crafted so the citizens retain the power to take up arms against the state, but that is a very different thing from "extrajudicial reprisal." The Second Amendment absolutely protects the ability of citizens to declare their government invalid, set up their own, and defend themselves. It does so because citizens already have that right - as argued in the Declaration of Independence ("it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government"), and later codified in things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The task of the Second Amendment is not to codify that right; it is to codify a right to a mechanism by which the citizens may protect the right to self-determination of government, which is more fundamental but only theoretical if an unwanted government comes at you with guns. There is no right to extrajudicial reprisals against individual members of the government. The Second Amendment does not recognize one, nor does anything else in the Constitution, nor does any other well-accepted document about rights. There is a right to invoke the structures of the government to redress grievances and to hold judges and other officials responsible for abuse of their office, and there is a right to oppose the government wholesale if they refuse. But that is still a defensive right. If a corrupt judge wants to take your land, and corrupt police try to make it happen, you need a means to defend yourself, sure. But I cannot find any reason to believe that the authors of the Constitution would have said that an appropriate check on government power is the risk that members of the government would have their family members killed in reprisal - the risk that people would be deprived of life (or even liberty or property) without due process of law.
- caeril 6y ago
  Ordinarily and historically, I'd fully agree, but the antigun refrain of "lol you're going to fire your AR-15s at drones and tanks and A-10 Warthogs?" does have some degree of merit. 2A was written when citizens were not robbed of ~7% of their earnings to fund a standing military machine. In the modern era, any effective resistance to tyranny is - UNFORTUNATELY - going to be asymmetric, guerrilla, and dirty. Which - again, UNFORTUNATELY - is going to involve morally ambiguous activity.
  - geofft 6y ago
titanomachy 6y ago
This country sure has a lot of "tragic lone mental health cases".
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
cutemonster 6y ago
> functionaries of State power can't abuse their position But they can and sometimes do Weapons don't stop that. Encryption could be part of a check against that
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago
  Could encryption also enable these "functionaries" to further hide their abuses of powers? That token has at least two sides.
  - cutemonster 6y ago
    They'll allow themselves to use encryption in any case I think. Just like prioritizing protecting themselves (but not protecting everyone's PII). (I think Daniels law is good and that it should be for everyone)
dalbasal 6y ago
>> the second amendment was crafted specifically so that functionaries of State power can't abuse their position without the risk of extrajudicial reprisal. What makes you say that? I'm not disagreeing, necessarily, but is there any writing to support this reasoning? Who held this position?

by caeril 6y ago

qz2 6y ago

It made sense when they came up with it but it was a large can of worms which didn’t age or scale well. Now you have a society based on mutual assured destruction at a civilian level devoid of trust and community.

centimeter 6y ago
> devoid of trust and community I assure you, this has nothing to do with being armed. This should be pretty clear from a number of observations: A) The most heavily armed communities in the US are highly community-oriented and trustworthy towards their respective in-groups B) Lack of social cohesion seems to be just as prevalent in western nations with full disarmament The actual proximate causes of social decoherence are things that HN is probably mostly in support of, on net; urbanization, multiculturalism, etc.
- qz2 6y ago
  The difference when there are ubiquitous firearms and not is the level of fear and nervousness among strained relations. Any division is amplified then. All it takes is someone to lose it and it’s a cheap solution. And everyone knows it. The communities you speak of are a division. I worked for a large defence contractor in the US for a number of years and got to see the contrast in professional and personal relations between their European and American employees. It’s scary when you see.
  - centimeter 6y ago
    > when there are ubiquitous firearms and not is the level of fear and nervousness among strained relations 100% disagree. The saying "armed society is polite society" is absolutely true, at least when it comes to the interaction between arms and western social ethics. Obviously your results may vary in the Congo or Chicago or whatever. Even if we accept the (most likely contextually false) premise that reducing firearms access for non-criminals also meaningfully reduces firearms access for criminals, I do not have any preference (ceteris paribus) between getting shot, stabbed, or having my head bashed in. In fact, I might prefer getting shot. In the more realistic case where criminal firearm attainability is less than perfectly correlated with non-criminal firearm attainability, it makes sense for non-criminals to be armed as well. There's also the MAD dynamic; people are less likely to physically escalate if there is a possibility of a high-severity response. > it’s a cheap solution A murder charge for an unjustified shooting is hardly "cheap".

geofft 6y ago

I don't think that's quite right. I will absolutely defend that the Second Amendment was crafted so the citizens retain the power to take up arms against the state, but that is a very different thing from "extrajudicial reprisal." The Second Amendment absolutely protects the ability of citizens to declare their government invalid, set up their own, and defend themselves. It does so because citizens already have that right - as argued in the Declaration of Independence ("it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government"), and later codified in things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The task of the Second Amendment is not to codify that right; it is to codify a right to a mechanism by which the citizens may protect the right to self-determination of government, which is more fundamental but only theoretical if an unwanted government comes at you with guns. There is no right to extrajudicial reprisals against individual members of the government. The Second Amendment does not recognize one, nor does anything else in the Constitution, nor does any other well-accepted document about rights. There is a right to invoke the structures of the government to redress grievances and to hold judges and other officials responsible for abuse of their office, and there is a right to oppose the government wholesale if they refuse. But that is still a defensive right. If a corrupt judge wants to take your land, and corrupt police try to make it happen, you need a means to defend yourself, sure. But I cannot find any reason to believe that the authors of the Constitution would have said that an appropriate check on government power is the risk that members of the government would have their family members killed in reprisal - the risk that people would be deprived of life (or even liberty or property) without due process of law.

caeril 6y ago
Ordinarily and historically, I'd fully agree, but the antigun refrain of "lol you're going to fire your AR-15s at drones and tanks and A-10 Warthogs?" does have some degree of merit. 2A was written when citizens were not robbed of ~7% of their earnings to fund a standing military machine. In the modern era, any effective resistance to tyranny is - UNFORTUNATELY - going to be asymmetric, guerrilla, and dirty. Which - again, UNFORTUNATELY - is going to involve morally ambiguous activity.
- geofft 6y ago

titanomachy 6y ago

This country sure has a lot of "tragic lone mental health cases".

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

cutemonster 6y ago

> functionaries of State power can't abuse their position But they can and sometimes do Weapons don't stop that. Encryption could be part of a check against that

_underfl0w_ 6y ago
Could encryption also enable these "functionaries" to further hide their abuses of powers? That token has at least two sides.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  They'll allow themselves to use encryption in any case I think. Just like prioritizing protecting themselves (but not protecting everyone's PII). (I think Daniels law is good and that it should be for everyone)

dalbasal 6y ago

>> the second amendment was crafted specifically so that functionaries of State power can't abuse their position without the risk of extrajudicial reprisal. What makes you say that? I'm not disagreeing, necessarily, but is there any writing to support this reasoning? Who held this position?