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JackRiddler » Fri May 27, 2022 12:46 pm wrote:the most prone-to-violence demographic of dumb-fuck isolated young males (mostly) with big senses of grievance are moved to stock up on the ridiculously widely available military-style weapons of mass-killing glorified in the culture and at the movies as the greatest sexual pleasure and solution to all problems. They feel the inspiration of all the dumb-fuck predecessors, go after the softest possible targets, and try to hit a new high score.
JackRiddler » Fri May 27, 2022 11:25 am wrote:drstrangelove » Fri May 27, 2022 1:19 am wrote:Sure the gun issue plays a role. The 2nd amendment is there to ensure an even distribution of weapons to maintain an even distribution of power. This could still be achieved without the need for military rifles etc. The point is to enable a population to effectively carry out a guerrilla war against its government, not win a war against its government. Handguns and shotguns can achieve this.
Not at all. It's there primarily to assure the states entering the republic could maintain their own militias and not have to rely on the new federal government or other states for protection against Indians, slave uprisings, the British, other empires, etc. Madison (for example, not mentioning him as anything like sole cause but he was officially the author of the Bill of Rights) and many others had a militia romance and believed militias were more effective militarily than central armies. The other point (of several) was to enable governments with fast-and-ready forces in case of slave uprisings or Indian/Spanish attacks. The inversion of this that you present here is a modern reading into the text quite contrary to what the framers or the crafters of this amendment intended. I don't see how they could have made it more clear that aside from the slaves and Indians they considered their own free people to be the most dangerous enemy (democracy as "tyranny") and that their intent was to write the first and last constitution ever, extremely difficult even to amend. "Guerilla war" from their own citizens was precisely the opposite of anything they'd countenance. (Note: big-talking Jefferson & co. weren't framers.)
Maybe you should look at the actual history, the first cases when real militias were mustered. First case, to invade the Middle Ground (Ohio Territory) so as to make good on all that delicious land speculation the likes of Washington had led a war to preserve against the British in the first place. It went disastrously, after which a first federal army was organized under "Mad Anthony" Wayne. Second, they were mustered and organized under central command to suppress the Whiskey tax revolt in western PA. Under Hamilton's command, no less. That was a case of "well-regulated militia" called by the government to defend "the security of a free State" against "guerilla warfare" by the people who opposed a genuinely unjust tax. So the opposite.
It's not that your view has no history, it's that it is an anti-federalist history and contrary to any honest originalist reading of the Constitution or the 2nd Amendment. There's no case here on "intent" of the text or the framers.The reason China turned out the way it is' is because an imperial government around 221 BC built the great wall then eliminated all internal fortifications and weapons, making farmers completely reliant on the imperial army and the bureaucracy beneath it.
Since when were farmers the builders of fortifications that could turn back regular armies? Sadly they'd already been subject to bandits and tribute-takers for thousands of years, not just in China, and your assumption about how they might have felt about the protection of a central government suppressing said banditry and the parasitism of intermediate nobility is debatable. If you're thinking of castles, then most of those are held by competing warrior castes a.k.a. nobilities. If they're busy building castles and piling up weapons they don't have time to farm, they have serfs for that sort of thing. That's whose castles the more ambitious would-be monarchs and emperors among the warrior castes like to demolish, and not just in China but in countless cases around the globe, from before 221 BC down to today.
Also, if you think properly about it, you just described the creation of a large internal market without barriers to the free circulation of goods.So long as people have the ability to kill government mercenaries, not defeat them, then the gun deterrent will work because the government will get so weak having to fight against its citizens that it will just get invaded by a competing power.
Hilarity. "Killing government mercenaries" (usually labeled "terrorism") in the real world of actual histories you can read provides the pretexts and contexts for escalations and pacifications and build-outs of the government security apparatus. In the absence of such "deterrence", governments seeking to increase their security powers have been known even to fabricate it, a practice the research of which in part is the reason this site exists.
And if you knew your over-armed Americans, you'd know that their imagined revolt against a tyrannical government of liberals on television would likeliest play out as their deputization as loyal militias under the leadership of a tyrannical governor and the LEOs against some fabricated threat of foreign terrorists, immigrants, revolutionaries, race warriors, Black Panthers, etc.
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drstrangelove » Sat May 28, 2022 5:30 am wrote:the only thing that should've been taken from my view on gun laws is twofold:
1) That people who are armed(and who can feed themselves) have the ability to say 'no' to central authorities.
2) When weapons become monopolised by small private groups within a society, that society tends to become more repressive.
When Rome had citizen armies which supplied their own weapons the empire was less repressive than when it had private dedicated armies. Feudalism then concentrated arms within small groups of private armies which led to serfdom to support them; and the feudal estates themselves could for a period could say no to the monarchy because the army was decentralized. The nation state, mass citizen armies, and the factory system led to a wider distribution of weapons and less repression than serfdom. Obviously more complex than to reduce liberty to this, but the trend holds up.
The title mentions a root cause for this phenomenon, and i think this is it. To create defenseless societies that must accept escalating austerity. And that the primary driver to these shooting events, which obviously make the wide distribution of firearms more dangerous to society, is the intentional glorification of shooters. Psy ops could be used to start a cluster of copycat events. I don't know. All that is downstream.
@ibnDeseretii
London has a higher homicide rate than New York. They do not have guns, and they are working on knife control.
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