Just look at the millions of dollars pot alone creates in tax revenue.
In a decade we will look back and think "how could we be so stupid for decades".
And I'm looking forward when "harder" drugs like cocaine, meth and heroin are legalized or at least tolerated - no more drug turf wars, no more shadow states in Latin America, and especially far fewer deaths and medical issues from contaminated drugs.
Drugs are actually pretty safe, what makes them so incredibly dangerous is the contamination happening in the supply chain, from unclean manufacturing over normal degradation due to improper handling to stretching at the dealer level.
I don't get it. Heroin for example is a serious threat for physic and mental health isn't? If you sell them legally, uneducated and influenceable people would consume them, not realizing entirely their act no? It's real questions, I'm ignorant here.
"Drugs are actually pretty safe" is a ridiculous statement, because it includes everything from caffeine/nicotine to MDPV/datura.
> Heroin for example is a serious threat for physic and mental health isn't?
Heroin is comparable in risk profile to morphine, and is significantly weaker than fentanyl, both of which are frequently prescribed for pain management. Most of the risk of use comes from addiction, which causes other risky behaviors, and contamination. Both of these risks are poorly-mitigated by criminalization of heroin: addicts rarely want to be addicted, but have difficulty seeking help due to criminalization and social stigma, and contamination would be preventable if heroin were manufactured in regulated facilities.
Uneducated and influenceable people currently consume heroin, not realizing their act. The war on drugs has done nothing to prevent this, and in fact has made it harder for people to find real information on heroin. A regulated product could have messages printed on the packaging similar to the way that cigarettes currently do.
I think I understand your point guys. Illegalization and demonization are one way of preventing people from using drugs. What you say is that there is other ways which in addition have other benefits.
Uneducated and influenceable people currently consume heroin, not realizing their act.
I would be tempted to think the fact drugs are rare and difficult to obtain the first times decrease the odds of somebody becoming an addict. Pure speculation but there is some logic still. Say one night I'm crazy, I'm not going to find cocaine right away become hey, tonight is the night. I understand that it's not a proof that it's effective. Just that it might be.
Heroin is comparable in risk profile to morphine
Doctors prescribe morphine, most likely when not using it is worse than using it, which doesn't mean the risk are low. It's just the best of the worse solutions. I understand that when you lost a leg, you can take some hard drug, because anyway, if you don't you're done. I might be wrong again, just telling you the arguments of the common here.
> I would be tempted to think the fact drugs are rare and difficult to obtain the first times decrease the odds of somebody becoming an addict. Pure speculation but there is some logic still. Say one night I'm crazy, I'm not going to find cocaine right away become hey, tonight is the night. I understand that it's not a proof that it's effective. Just that it might be.
Your logic seems fine to me, but it's based on an assumption that it is hard for people to find drugs for the first time. You're probably not frequently presented with opportunities to do heroin, but you're also probably not the kind of person who would do heroin even if you had the opportunity. Drug dealers aren't going to approach you to sell you heroin because the risk/reward ratio is too high. The same is not true of teens and people in their 20s in poor neighborhoods.
> Doctors prescribe morphine, most likely when not using it is worse than using it, which doesn't mean the risk are low.
Thanks so much for showing me this. I'm 100% convince. When I was a teen, I never found canabis, canabis found me. So consuming canabis was for me only a question of whether or not I've the right profile. Which brings us to the exact same position as if the drug was for sale at the corner store.
It's obvious actually. The drug dealer is a store. It gonna find its customers anyway.
Just for the fun, so now if I want to sell drug X, I just got to find people who got a lot of friends - who have potentially the profile to consume that drug. I bet it works really fine. You probably don't have to go in the street at all :P
EDIT: oh but how many people are saved by this: the risk/reward ratio is too high? The risk of the drug dealer is in the equation then. But you're right on something, the strong profile for drug X can do nothing and it's kinda unfair.
> oh but how many people are saved by this: the risk/reward ratio is too high?
I don't know, and I'm pretty sure that it is unknown in general. However, drug use is lower in countries where drugs are legalized and regulated, and rehabilitation rates are higher. If this trend holds, whatever number of people are saved by being too risky for drug dealers to approach, the number of people saved by regulated legalization is likely to be higher.
> I would be tempted to think the fact drugs are rare and difficult to obtain the first times decrease the odds of somebody becoming an addict.
I would be interested to understand the basis for your belief that it is a fact that (a) drugs are rare, and (b) drugs are difficult to obtain the first time.
Opiods (including morphine and oxycodone) are highly addictive. Highly educated and un-influenceable people get addicted to them through prescription use. Your post comes off as downplaying this very real risk.
I don't see where I said that heroin wasn't addictive: I said quite the opposite. If your objection is that I didn't use scaremongering phrases which have no scientific meaning, like "highly addictive", I did that intentionally. Scaremongering language does not improve the dialogue around heroin use and criminalization.
Why do you assert that "highly addictive" isn't scientific?
You could measure things like the average number of trials needed to get rid of an addiction as a measure of whether this product is highly addictive or not.
Because, what's "highly addictive" as opposed to "addictive" or "slightly addictive"? At the very least you'd have to compare heroin to other drugs using statistics to see how many people use the drug, how many times they use it, and what dosage, how many become addicted, and how many are able to break that addiction. And even then, that doesn't prove the drug itself is more addictive than other, because there are a lot of other possible explanations for why people might become addicted to one drug over another than the drug itself. There's a likely a large social aspect which has not been adequately studied: the Rat Park experiments[1] demonstrate give strong evidence that environmental factors are a key part of addiction. It's possible that people who are currently addicted to heroin would be addicted to any drug with a similar social stigma and legal status, because they would seek out behaviors they view as self-destructive, regardless of whether those behaviors actually are self-destructive or not. Do we include analysis of social aspects in what we consider to be highly addictive? And finally, there's a genetic component to addiction, especially with alcohol and benzodiazepines. Do we consider this, or are we just folding that into a flat study of the general population?
In short, saying something is "highly addictive" isn't a scientific claim because we don't have any definition of what "highly addictive" would mean. We can't even start to test the assertion because we haven't decided what the assertion means.
My objection is you imply that only un-educated and influenceable people use heroin, and that they wouldn't with better packaging. Drugs in the same family are abused by people of all walks of life, in large part starting with prescription use!
I said "Uneducated and influenceable people currently consume heroin, not realizing their act" in response to "If you sell them legally, uneducated and influenceable people would consume them, not realizing entirely their act no?" It was not my intent to imply that these are the only people who consume heroin.
The point is that drug policy is not targeted towards harm reduction or safety, but towards the demonization of the drugs, which means there's possible improvement if we stop doing that.
This is the rub of the issue. I have a friend who works at a addiction treatment clinic (mostly heroin) whose experience has made her quite opposed to legalizing hard drugs, but she still has no love for existing public policy around drugs.
I don't think there is anyone in the world with some sane common sense that _wants_ to legalize drugs like meth and heroin that have high addiction rates, but there are hundreds of thousands that see the benefit of removing the stigma around the drugs, bringing manufacture of the substances into cleaner laboratories and regulated stores. I had a friend die some years back because he shot a large dose of fentanyl into his arm thinking it was typical low to mid-range heroin. Had he bought from a regulated dealer, the likelihood of the mixup would have been significantly less and his girlfriend would have been more likely to call for emergency services sooner instead of being afraid of punishment. Junkies are gonna be junkies, but they're still human beings and they deserve some respect for being a life. Instead of pointing fingers at how awful a person they are for the choices that lead them to addiction, might we, without having some magical something that takes the addiction away forever, help reduce the harm they are doing to themselves and society?
> lots of young people were coming back from 'Nam strung out.
It's quite possible that we saw a bunch of boys coming back "strung out" from the most psychologically damaging war in the country's history, not smoking pot.
Prohibition might reduce the total number of people who have ever tried a drug, but I very highly doubt it reduces the number of people addicted to a drug. It could just as easily increase the number of addicts.
Ugh, who cares about "narratives"? We have science to tell us which narrative is correct and which isn't, and for the most commonly used recreational drugs, we do know.
Heroin is chemically identical to diamorphine that you receive in hospital unless it's been adulterated. The most serious side effect is constipation. Heroin was available over the counter for decades and caused few serious problems (people were no more addicted to it than coffee). It was sold in much lower concentrations so risk of overdose was virtually non-existent.
I've known heroin users, and I also know chronic alcoholics. Heavy consumption of alcohol is at least as bad as a heroin habit and can be as hard or harder to quit.
I've never used street heroin but I was a very heavy drinker up until 1.75 years ago. I cut down gradually after having my first child, til the point when I stopped for a year. I had my first drink again in February of 2015 and have had alcohol semi-regularly since then without issue. I discovered that the problem was I drank too fast. I had learned to use alcohol incorrectly, I think if my parents had shown me how to drink when I was 12 - 14 and gradually introduced me to the effects and how different rates of consumption and different forms of alcohol can effect you I would have been better equipped to have a healthy relationship with alcohol. As it was I learned from my friends (the blind leading the blind ... literally). Still, I'm really fucking glad alcohol is legal, because if I was drinking moonshine I would have been in serious trouble and probably wouldn't be alive now.
Yes I was in hospital on diamorphine for 3 weeks (had a little button to deliver it to me). When I left hospital I had oxycontin and endone pain killers, both of which are opiates. I've not used them since.
Not if you have a steady, cheap supply of the product you're addicted to. I'm pretty seriously addicted to caffeine, but I don't have a problem with that because I can get high quality coffee very cheaply.
Replace "heroin" with "oxycotin" or "valium". We already sanction the sale of drugs with potentially nasty addictive effects to the "uneducated and influenecable". And while prescription drug abuse is certainly a social problem, I'm going to suggest that the sum of the ills surrounding it don't begin to scratch the sum of the ills wrought by the drug war.
When I was 16, I've been given a book which summarized the addiction power of many drugs. Here are those I remember:
LSD: 1 star (if I remember correctly)
Canabis: 1 star
Cigarets: 2 stars (notice how people have a hard time to stop smoking)
Alcohol: 3 stars
Cocaine: 3 stars
Heroin: 6 stars
In my mind, if you try heroin once, you're addicted. Is that close to be correct? Because if it's correct, then the less people try it, the less there's addicts.
> if you try heroin once, you're addicted. Is that close to be correct?
Absolutely not. Most likely you'll feel sick and vomit, then be really high for a few hours and then afterwards feel incredibly guilty and decide to never make a habit of it. The number one factor in addictiveness is whether or not you have a "crappy life", probably closely followed by whether or not you have an addictive personality and whether or not you'd prefer one cookie now or two cookies in ten minutes.
Trying all drugs is illuminating because you learn that there is no "magic" drug that feels so amazing that all your problems melt away. That's a fairy tale.
I'm not sure I understand the scale here; there is often not a number of usage to addition, it's often a matter of sustained and/or heavy usage. Yes, some drugs lower that threshold (and I thought cigarettes were much more addictive than alcohol), but it's not a x-time-and-done issue.
Also, note the lack of caffeine on the chart, it being very common drug that is highly addictive
Different people seem to have different propensity for addiction, and it is likely genetic. There's also such thing as psychological dependence, which is different from physical addiction but can be just as powerful. I don't think you can create a simple score card for addictive potential that applies equally to everyone.
I don't have any insight into the values themselves, but each of those are going to have such variances as to make any simple summary useless. Products just to get people to stop smoking are a huge market and many people fail in their attempts to quit. But many people never get hooked in the first place, and even long-term smokers stopping cold is not that uncommon. For alcohol, I've never known a non-problem drinker who couldn't give it up at any time (for weight loss, Lent, personal challenge, avoiding prescription drug interaction). Similarly, my understanding is that heroin is incredibly addictive for some people but not others.
How much more opiate is in a hit of street heroin than your usual medical injection of IV morphine for traumatic pain? I've had the latter and while it was fairly awesome, it's not exactly world-changingly addictive either. I'd rate it about the equal of alcohol on your scale.
That's not the point. The point is we're already spending tons of money trying to prevent something that is clearly extremely accessible. May as well give them safe places to do it. We're dealing with the reality not the ideology. And that reality is we have a lot of addicts.
Cocaine and heroin for sure, but my understanding is that meth is a different category entirely and I'm not sure if it can be tolerated as easily as the others.
Methamphetamine is already legal in the US. It's Schedule II, same as most opiates[1]. (The illegal stuff like LSD and pot are Schedule I.) The brand name is Desoxyn and it's approved for obesity and attention disorders. Breaking Bad did another social injustice by not mentioning this. (Plus it'd have been an interesting plot: diverting such meds, hiring engineers that work for the manufacturer, stealing production designs, creating brand recognition, then selling counterfeit products (happens a lot to opiates), etc.) There's even a generic brand selling it! A quick search says meth tablets did $10M in sales in 2009; I suppose that's rather low and might be why people don't hear about it as much. Plus I'm guessing the DEA gets triggered by doctors prescribing it, even more than oxy?
Edit: Mayne pharma 2014 did 4% of its ~$113M in US products in methamphetamine. So that's 4.5M from a single generic maker. Could mean the total is well over 9-10M annually.
1: Including hydrocodone, except if you mix hydrocodone with a liver-toxic drug like APAP, then it magically drops into the lesser Schedule III. Because screw people.
If some hard drugs were tolerated, it would stop people for going to the extreme alternatives. Why would you risk losing an arm to Krokodil if you can buy heroin safely at the drugstore and take it in a controlled environment?
Yes, you risk addiction. You risk ruining your life. But you do too with a lot of existing drugs. Alcohol comes to mind.
As a nit: There's nothing really wrong with "Krokodol" which is just a slang name for desomorphine. The problems are due to poor manufacturing and unhygienic use. So you could just as well say "why risk taking street heroin when you can buy Bayer Heroin at the pharmacy".
Meth is just the moral panic du jour, before the 2000s being a long-term functional amphetamine user was stereotypical behavior for jobs requiring long-term concentration (truck drivers, pilots, double-shift factory workers, doctors, students, finance types, etc.). It wasn't even a controlled substance till the 70s.
Turnover is pretty quick in the meth-using population. People only start meth because they don't have access to less awful shit. Actually I think this is why heroin use is increasing so rapidly in the Midwest right now: no one wants to end up like Uncle Mike the Meth-head.
The point is, with legal heroin, meth will be an ever-shrinking problem.
I would have thought legal cocaine was a more appropriate comparator. Heroin and meth are so different in effect that I seriously doubt your claim that one is just a substitute for the other.
That's fine, I don't use any of those so I'm not an expert. There were 3 heroin ODs in my rural county a month ago, which is new. Previously the non-alcohol-substance-related deaths were all meth. Also visually I can't really separate meth users from heroine users. They have the same vacant stare and horrible skin. I guess you could say their teeth are fucked up in different ways. The coke users I've known have been completely functional, with no obvious drug-related health issues.
Regardless, it seems a bit reductive to theorize about a path-dependent phenomenon like addiction solely from the perspective of blood chemistry. Saying "substitute" implies that meth-heads are switching to heroin, which I already denied to be the case. They aren't switching to heroin, but their younger siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles are using heroin rather than meth.
> The negative externalities of prohibition are so much worse than from abuse and addiction, even for meth, crack, whatever.
Among the negative externalities of prohibition are exacerbating the negative effects of addiction, by increasing the stigma and risk associated with admitting you have a problem.
It also pushes addicts outside the protection of the law, making them easy victims for other crimes. They won't seek the protections of the criminal justice system because they perceive themselves as being on the wrong side of it and likely to be as abused by the system as they were by their victimizers.
If we legalize hard drugs, we should also legalize local communities being able to running people out of towns and neighborhoods - drug abusers are a blight on communities.
I do not believe for a moment this lie! If you ask anyone involved in the anti-drug business, both directly and indirectly, they will tell you that drugs are serious problem in this country. Likewise, if you ask EMTs about alcoholism, they will you alcohol is a significant problem in this country. They have even termed a person who has been drinking alcohol for many years as a "wet brain" because even when they are sober their minds don't function fully.
> And I'm looking forward when "harder" drugs like cocaine, meth and heroin are legalized or at least tolerated - no more drug turf wars, no more shadow states in Latin America, and especially far fewer deaths and medical issues from contaminated drugs.
KEEP DREAMING! The legalization of marijuana in Colorado did not get marijuana dealers into legal territory. They simply moved on to more horrific drugs. Legalization of all drugs will only invoke the dark side of street pharmacy, similar to "medicines made in Canada" bs.
> what makes them ... dangerous is the contamination
And I am sure that the drug itself poses no affects on the mind! Are you retarded?!
> Just look at the millions of dollars pot alone creates in tax revenue.
Yes! of course why not! Let's make all sin a legal thing and tax it like crazy! Money, after all,validates anything long-time wisdom deems to be a problem. Now if there was no money, maybe it should not be legalized then, shouldn't it?
Sin? Really? Laws need to be based on reason, not dogma; sin is religious dogma and has no place in law. If that's your only argument against drugs, then you have no real argument against drugs.
> If you ask anyone involved in the anti-drug business, both directly and indirectly, they will tell you that drugs are serious problem in this country
Of course they will, their paychecks depend on it, that doesn't make it true and you shouldn't be looking to those who personally gain from the anti-drug business as a trusted authority on the drugs. They have incentive to lie to you; incentives matter, look to science, not business, for real answers.
> KEEP DREAMING! The legalization of marijuana in Colorado did not get marijuana dealers into legal territory.
It got marijuana users into legal territory, which is what's important.
Then do you believe that alcohol should be illegal and that alcohol sellers and users should go to jail?
If not you are a hypocrite. I have alcoholics in my family and I've also known users of other "hard" drugs, and alcohol is certainly as bad as cocaine or heroin.
> and alcohol is certainly as bad as cocaine or heroin.
statistically speaking alcohol isn't even in the same league as any other drug. it ruins and kills more people than any other drug period. it's highly hypocritical that we as a society are accepting of it (and glorify it), yet we shun e.g. marijuana. just look up the numbers they don't lie... (ftfy)
> [alcohol] ruins and kills more people than any other drug period.
Since the subject is how good or bad the substance is, the relevant figure would be the number of people it ruins or kills, divided by some measure of how many people take it and how often they take it. The number of people who take alcohol is much greater than the number who take illegal recreational drugs, so we would expect many more alcohol deaths even if all drugs were biologically equivalent. I think that, on the correct metric, marijuana would beat alcohol hands down (that is, it is safer), but I'm less certain about heroin or cocaine. Do you happen to know those numbers?
(for the record, I am in favor of legalizing all drugs)
Unless you're using statistics measuring effects per capita of the population using each individual substance, the alcohol vs other drugs discussion is a arguably pretty massive turn into "my personal rant" territory. There is a ton of bad data in this area based on decades of willingness to believe the absolute worst results are 100% correct. More scrutiny has begun to reveal the social impact of particular drugs is much more nuanced than previously considered.
Stopping to re-evaluate the data leads to better outcomes. Such as the correlation between decriminalisation of canabis and a reduction in drug related crime. The same as we saw with the repeal of prohibition and the reduction in the need to bootleg for something society broadly decided was "fine". If the social contract between government and the governed breaks down so far that you have public wilful disobedience of a law, then it's unlikely that you can imprison enough people for breaking that law to ever stop the inevitable change to those laws.
Not trying to make personal rant but just speaking from much personal experience I was replying to a comment (and agreeing) that if we (as a society) are going to be ok with and accept ethanol as legal, it's highly hypocritical. Ask any drug counselor, rehab worker, or social worker which drug is the most devastating to society and you will find that alcohol compares to none. Is it because it is more widely available? Yes I'm sure that has something to do with it and that's what I wanted to point out. It's also often misunderstood how dangerous alcohol is compared to other drugs on a physical level. You can do all the heroin in the world and when you quit, you will feel like you're going to die but most likely you won't. However if you quit alcohol you are likely to go into grand mal seizure and potentially die. anyways now I am ranting and could go on and on.. but yeah I agree it's biased because alcohol is legal, my point is just that we shouldn't make other drugs illegal if one of the worst ones is legal.
[citation needed] because this is where you really go off the rails and I have a sense that it's part of your argument's foundation.
There is no such thing as sin, legally, and there's something to be said for letting people do what they want to do. If the government wants their taste to handle problems (and more, natch), then that comes as no surprise.
There are all kinds of things that do people varying degrees of "harm" and are legal. Jogging and sugar come to mind.
There is no shortage of people who know exactly how you are supposed to live. Some of them get organized enough to convince the power structures to force you.
I oppose these efforts wholeheartedly even when I agree with the aims. Unintended consequences are the order of the day when you dabble in saving people.
Also, Prohibition was enacted via a constitutional amendment, yet a large portion of people simply ignored it. It always gets understated what a massive crisis this ended up being for the integrity of the US Constitution. If one amendment was seen as optional by an increasingly larger group of people, maybe the others would be as well. It was important for the integrity of the government that they repeal the amendment. I have a feeling if prohibition were enacted via a complicated loophole like the one that keeps the horrible 21 drinking age afloat it would have been much harder to repeal in full.
You can actually see this happening today with abortion, which is becoming increasingly unobtainable in the U.S. despite being (theoretically) a Constitutional right.
Interesting observation. There is nothing in the Constitution about abortion and it being a right, though. So what we are actually seeing is widespread disrespect for Supreme Court rulings taking hold. The recent ruling on gay marriage is only going to accelerate that trend.
"Anthony Mitchell claims in a lawsuit that on July 10, 2011 he was at home, when officers called his home and said they needed to occupy the house in order to gain a "tactical advantage" in dealing with a domestic violence case at a neighbor's home. Mr. Mitchell told the police that he did not want them entering his home. Officers showed up a bit later and broke down the door anyway.
The lawsuit alleges that officers are guilty of crimes including assault, battery and abuse of processes as well as violating constitutional amendments, notably, the suit alleges officers violated the Third Amendment to the US Constitution"
The Instapundit (a law professor) has written a paper on how things like invasions of electronic privacy fit the concepts behind the 3rd Amendment (a major reason the Brits did it was surveillance of the occupied houses' inhabitants): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=2616034
But one thing many don't know is that Prohibition did, in fact, reduce alcohol consumption: As Okrent told me, tax stamps from before and after Prohibition's passage suggest there was, indeed, a decline in drinking — one that was sustained for several years.
What? If there is a large illegal markets for alcohol sales, how can tax stamps be considered an indication of alcohol sales?
But after these huge, untaxed channels of getting alcohol to Americans were established, why would we expect all of them to go legal after repeal? Would that in fact make them more vulnerable to criminal charges, tax evasion at the least, from their past actions?
If you've already built the infrastructure and practices to smuggle an illegal good, it is unlikely that you immediately start paying taxes once it becomes legal.
The illegal sale of something has risks and costs (obviously) so the criminals will only engage in it if the price of the good being sold is high enough. When prohibition started the price of alcohol went up to cover the risk of selling it illegally. Once prohibition ended the price dropped and it was no longer worth the risk to selling it illegally.
However, you are correct that they had already built up the infrastructure and practices for smuggling, so they simply moved to other more profitable goods like guns, harder drugs, and people.
Assuming the black-market networks created as a response to prohibition shut down completely, of course. They may have continued operating as a means of tax avoidance, leading to less taxed consumption post-prohibition.
I can't really tell what they're trying to say here.
The repression involved in the implementation of alcohol prohibition had an effect of pushing a common and integral part of society into the black market.
The NRA is promoting the right to bear arms, and actually it would seem that the effect they're seeking should be the exact opposite.
Effectively, as prohibition pushed a polite leisure into the black market. The NRA's goal appears to be the exact opposite: that is, to keep a polite leisure out of the black market.
I don't think German understands the irony of this, because I get the impression that they want to compare the moral status of the prohibition movement to the moral status of the NRA.
> The Anti-Saloon League knew that if you controlled the margins, you could win legislative majorities and even supermajorities. In any given district, they'd say, Look, 45 percent of the people are for the Democrat, and 45 percent of the people are for the Republican. Who controls the 10 percent of the middle? And that's what they fought for — those 10 percent who would vote for whomever the ASL told them to vote for. By picking only one issue and not caring what legislative candidates — state or federal — cared about in terms of other issues, they were able to have an enormous effect. It's a practice that's been copied to the letter — I don't know whether by design — by the NRA.
The NRA didn't get overtly political until after the 1977 Cincinnati (annual meeting) Revolt. From my readings of the participants in that and the following efforts, the most commonly presented principle, by Neal Knox, was "When I feel the heat, I see the light." As in credibly threaten them with the prospect of spending more time with their families, and enough of them will adjust. Or be replaced, perforce. Ask the shade of Tom Foley, first Speaker of the House to lose reelection since before the Civil War.
It helps that we're freaking huge, the NRA has 5 million dues paying members now, and influences 100 million plus gun owners.
That's not how I understand it. I read it as saying the Anti-Saloon League worked by creating a large block of single issue voters, which is similar to the NRA's policy of only caring about gun control laws.
Daniel Okrent answers it in the first question. It has nothing to do with morality or similar organizations. He's saying the tactics are the same: find the minority of voters who feel strongly about your issue and get them to vote your way, and don't worry at all about their personal politics or morals.
Other organizations get too wrapped up in trying to coddle people with a certain political leaning. There may be plenty of anti-abortion Democrats, but because they are Democrats they don't really get much attention from anti-abortion activists.
That's a very good point about the NRA: it's a single issue organization, all things related to guns. It did, of course, support Citizens United (http://www.cuvfec.com/documents/case-08-205/Supplemental_Que...), since McCain-Feingold presented an existential threat in getting it's word out (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10403936 for specific actual examples), but that was just a means to the end of "all things guns". Marksmanship, safety, and of course being allowed to practice the former, which events and a '77 membership revolt forced them into.
We have "no enemies to the Left" or Right, political party, sexual orientation (http://www.pinkpistols.org/), you name it, as long as you're not plotting to violently overthrow the government.
I'm not sure I understood your comment correctly, but I hardly think either group thinks a large black market would be good for their cause.
The difference I see is that the anti-saloon league obviously underestimated how large the black market would be for alcohol.
I would not be surprised (in fact, it seems to be a talking point) if the NRA is purposefully overestimating the size of a potential black market for firearms. But I'm totally speculating here.
> The campaign behind Prohibition was hugely successful — and may have inspired the NRA's modern tactics
I see the NRA adopting something more akin to pro-choice advocacy - a zero compromise scorched earth policy, where any attempt to discuss banning the most extreme products (late term abortions, unlicensed fully automatic weapons) results in arguing uphill against a slippery slope.
Seeing as how the NRA signed off on a ban of new licensed "fully automatic weapons" in the FOPA of '86, and I can't recall them in my politically aware lifetime challenging the NFA of '34's licensing regime for full auto-weapons, perhaps you might want to study up on this.
If by "modern NRA" you mean the post-"assault weapons" ban NRA, extremely notable because it was the first Federal gun control measure they didn't support, you need a better analogy, one I can't think of. We've already given up so much I can't think of any "extreme product" that would fit the bill.
This seems like a misinterpretation to me. The NRA draws the line in many places, especially with anything that stinks of military hardware.
Pro-choice advocacy has been on the rope for decades and with recent state laws many abortion access difficult or impossible for poorer women. For example, not is really fighting to overturn the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. NARAL's website concedes with this language, "NARAL Pro-Choice America does not oppose restrictions on abortion after a certain point in the pregnancy as long as there is an exception to protect the woman’s health." I think society is always going to have a discussion on what kinds of abortions are allowed and at what week. NARAL seems to be part of this conversation and doesn't oppose it.
I don't think either group is special and both work with the status quo of advocacy and lobbying.
The NRA draws the line in many places, especially with anything that stinks of military hardware.
The latter turns out not to be the case. Yep, they allowed it for full auto weapons, and AP ammo, but for the first time ever refused to sign off on any and all "assault weapons" bills when that mess started in the late '80s.
Otherwise, yeah, the "compromise" a lot, so much that I'm not a current member and have an alert set for 10 years having passed since they last tried to sell us out. Still has a few years left.
The "assault weapon" label is complete horse-manure. With $100 of aftermarket components and a half hour, you can take a stock Ruger 10-22 and make it "scary" enough to qualify as an assault weapon, then break it down and reassemble it in it's perfectly innocuous hunting configuration.
The pro-choice side has let a lot of things slide without notice. Most notably access is the line in the sand not discouraging hoops.
That said, the NRA has also let a lot of things slide. There pro armor piercing bullets, but not anti-tank rounds. Even if the lack of anti-military hardware makes the second amendment almost pointless.
Assuming you mean "They're", nope, they signed off on the ban of AP ammo that can be shot from a handgun, which means all AP ammo short of, say, .50 BMG, which I'm pretty sure would pulverize anyone's hand, wrist and arm.
As for "the lack of anti-military hardware makes the second amendment almost pointless.", you suffer from a lack of imagination:
The small arms we're all allowed to own everywhere but NYC and D.C. are quite sufficient to procure the heavier stuff.
Being able to reach out and touch someone from 800 yards and more means something serious.
The US has never fought a war without a secure rear area.
There are many, many other things small arms make more achievable. Like making it too expensive to do a lot of things en masse; as Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it in The GULAG Archipelago:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked.
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
I'm afraid Solzhenitsyn is a bit naive in thinking that would've caused the oppression to stop. The authorities would have just moved in the troops and introduced military law, shooting people without hesitation. After all that's what they did in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968.
I think you miss the point. Of course someone with a stick against the NKVD is at a serious disadvantage. Of course Stalin didn't hesitate to murder millions.
The point is the bitter shame at having gone quietly and meekly to the camps. The regret at having not fought to defend oneself.
Pointless? Every war the US has fought since Vietnam has essentially been a matchup of the full might of the US military against rocks and sticks, and the rocks and sticks always win.
Millions of like minded American citizens could certainly make things difficult for the US military in a guerrilla war.
There's some weird cognitive dissonance going on where many of the people that love to point out that the US military can't possibly succeed against guerrilla combatants in the Middle East are the same people that laugh at "gun nuts" for "thinking their small arms would do anything against the military's tanks, artillery, airstrikes, etc."
Also, being sent against the populace is terrible for military morale -- making your guerrilla force slightly more dangerous can end up having really large knock-on effects as soldiers get pushed into things they're not comfortable with.
A lot of people have no problem rounding up a mob, maybe beating them up, and tossing them in jail; a lot of those same people will think twice before saying "We can't go in on the ground... I want to be a part of clearing that mob by bombing it to pulp".
Actually, looking at the demographics of the branches of the military that would be most involved in attempting to suppress a home-grown rebellion of gun-owners, it's more than likely that there would be wide-spread mutiny.
Or else an exodus of the leadership and rank-and-file soldiery on par with the Southerners that resigned in '61.
And the fact that if the military started slaughtering their own citizens with tanks and bombs, um that kinda might not be seen as too positive to the rest of the world.
That's another good bit of cognitive dissonance. I'd wager that many of these same people are aware of and support movements like #BlackLivesMatter, that use social media to spread awareness of instances of police brutality to massive audiences. Yet they never stop to consider how effective those same tactics could be in a theoretical armed resistance. Imagine someone recording a group of teenaged American rebels being slaughtered by the military, the media running with it and getting statements from the bereaved families, further polarizing would-be rebels while sparking dissent amongst the other side, growing lack of respect with the military, etc.
"the media running with it and getting statements from the bereaved families"
I wouldn't hold my breath expecting, say, MSNBC to give extensive sympathetic coverage to domestic "insurgents" who don't share their political views. The vast majority of the Tea Party did nothing more than yell at congressmen and hold rallies where they got all the official permits and cleaned up after themselves, and yet they were uniformly regarded in the news media as the second coming of Timothy McVeigh. Imagine how the media would treat them if they did anything more with their guns than the occasional dumb open carry stunt in Texas.
I don't think the average liberal underestimates the effectiveness of social media, least of all when it comes to publicising the slaughter of American teenagers.
It's just the incidences of slaughter they - perhaps optimistically given the US status quo - believe may be reduced through gun controls are actually happening on a not infrequent basis, whereas the Second Civil War scenarios are wildly unlikely fantasy.
People believe social media campaigns might work precisely because they don't think that the only thing keeping the US from turning into a fascist police state is consumer weaponry.
>It's just the incidences of slaughter they - perhaps optimistically given the US status quo - believe may be reduced through gun controls are actually happening on a not infrequent basis, whereas the Second Civil War scenarios are wildly unlikely fantasy.
That's a reasonable opinion, but one I disagree with. A second secession movement and full-blown Civil War will probably never happen, but martial law ordered in response to protest or active resistance of a law is not unthinkable. The risk of death by gun violence in the United States is dwarfed by the risk of death by automobile accident, heart disease, and so on. I would absolutely rather live in a country of ~320 million with a few thousand deaths per year due to gun violence, than in one with no weapons to deter martial law. I'll take a small (blown out of proportion by the media) threat over an existential threat any day.
And that's even assuming that you could make gun violence disappear entirely overnight. Revoking access to registered firearms could very well reduce the number of spree shootings, but would do little to affect the black market supply used by criminals in robberies and turf wars, and probably increase the amount of gun violence used in robberies (as criminals would then be sure that no one would be able to resist them).
And that's also overstating the fictitious "gun violence", which is conflating public shootings with suicides. Factor that out, and police shootings of felons, and you find auto deaths dwarf shootings, accidental or otherwise
The troubles in northern Ireland suggest you can have a long term insurgency without losing a country. Of note it was not defeated with military power, but it was also failed in it's long term goals.
As such there is no cognitive dissonance as propping up a country is different from crushing all opposition.
Indeed. These people who seem to want violent insurgency as a political right should take a look at how that works out in situations other than the US war of independence. It's usually indecisive with a lot of people getting killed more or less at random.
Mind you, last time I ran the numbers, it was safer to be in Belfast during the troubles than in Detroit over the same period.
Personally I don't see any cognitive dissonance in thinking that a messy decades-long guerrilla war would represent both a failure to "export democracy" when taking place overseas and a failure to "defend democracy" if taking place in one's own neighbourhood.
Uncle Ho was prepared to throw any number of people under the bus for a unified Vietnam. Our senior command just didn't understand this or couldn't deal with it.
Estimates are a million Vietnamese died between 1950 and 1975.
And you understand that the entire plot of "Apocolypse Now" ( which was fiction ) was that Kurtz was prepared to use any means to win, and that this is why he was targeted for assassination? "His methods were... unsound."
This led to the Powell Doctrine. In the early-90s Gulf War I, the objective was actually met, although the resulting equilibrium was not stable.
Open-ended foreign entanglements are generally bad practice.
Uncle Ho was prepared to throw any number of people under the bus for a unified Vietnam.
Case in point: they had a policy of regularly making battalion strength night attacks on our fixed positions, deliberately sacrificing about a company's worth of men. It worked because it made our commanders unreasonably afraid of venturing outside at night.
It's still hard to come to grips with even just as an exercise.
We had similar difficulties in the Pacific in WWII with the Bushido Code. The reaction there was, shall we say, less restrained. Grim business, founded in a vehement racism as a central operating principle.
It'd be even worse most likely, as US troops are gonna act much differently domestically and would almost certainly be much more reserved. Gonna be much harder to shoot potential enemies when they literally are your friends (taking a looser, FB-ish value of friendship).
Better for the world would just be splitting up the US, like AT&T was. Perhaps 3 or 4 ways? Then you'd have much smaller countries to deal with, easier to make changes and reflect citizens' desires. Plus it'd create some competition, for trade and so on.
> It'd be even worse most likely, as US troops are gonna act much differently domestically and would almost certainly be much more reserved.
That's highly optimistic. I would say that history does not generally support the idea that militaries in general, or the US military in particular, are more reserved when dealing with a perceived internal existential threat than they are fighting overseas.
> Gonna be much harder to shoot potential enemies when they literally are your friends (taking a looser, FB-ish value of friendship).
That's one view. Another view is that its a lot easier to see the enemy as an intolerable foe against whom any means are justified when you don't see them as "loyally fighting for their country" the same as you, just on a different side, but instead as potentially fatally betraying your country.
I'd say the history of domestic armed conflicts (including the US Civil War) suggests that the latter effect is often at least as strong as the former.
>That's highly optimistic. I would say that history does not generally support the idea that militaries in general, or the US military in particular, are more reserved when dealing with a perceived internal existential threat than they are fighting overseas.
That's... Not exactly true. History has actually shown the contrary, WASP are usually very soft on other WASP while bloody on everybody else. Examples:
-The US civil war is a perfect sample. I don't think you could find another battle in history but Gettysburg were opposing armies of many tens of thousands fought with just one civil casualty (and an accident, this one). Usually, after a battle is won there is this period of pillaging, raping and general dead and destruction. If you want to see how a real after-civil-war-repression looks like, look at what Cromwell did in Ireland, it's the stuff of nightmares. (Which also supports my argument, because he was very soft on his British opponents).
-There is also the anglo-american war of 1812. The British "sacked" Washington, with, again, only 1 (ONE!) casualty. I mean, come on, it's like they weren't even trying. For contrast, look at what a real British occupation looked like at the time with the suppression of the rebellion of the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka in 1818.
My point: If the US start killing each other seriously, that would be a new in history.
be much harder to shoot potential enemies when they literally are your friends
If this were the case, the US wouldn't be notorious for high numbers of police shootings. It's far more likely that if there is some kind of US civil war it would be race-based, like the previous civil war and the Indian wars.
You're assuming the police and the military attract the same sort of people, keep them under the same sort of discipline (or lack thereof for the police), etc. That's not my impression at all.
In fact, there tend to be two different types of militaries, the expeditionary type, which is ours, and the internally focused type, which our increasingly paramilitarized police seem to be becoming. The latter suck when they're asked to fight a "real war", and one advantage we in the US have right now is that their numbers are quite small compared to the size of the nation or our formal military, something less than a million total.
They would simply bring in UN "peacekeeping" force. Problem solve. Foreign military on US soil shooting citizens. I don't know if you have seen UN vehicles staged at various bases around the US, I've seen them at a National Guard staging area. The system is already in place. There have been sightings of UN troop movements along the US/Canada border.
That would just make target identification utterly trivial. And the UN finds it very difficult to find competent troops for much less hostile environments, what country would sign up for this sort of debacle?
>Even if the lack of anti-military hardware makes the second amendment almost pointless.
The British military thought the same about a bunch of hicks with a few rifles living on the east coast of America. America's military thought the same thing about a bunch of tribal shepherds in Afghanistan. The point is, you don't need to match a military on hardware to defeat them.
Read some history. I would suggest starting with US civil war which notably failed.
The 'US' revolution was losing the war prior to significant aid from France. And this was vs. an oversea enemy using 1700's era weapons and armaments. Vietnam involved some direct military engagements vs. jets and other modern weaponry.
There are a few successful uprising in modern history, and lots of crushed attempts vs. far worse military's than the modern US war machine.
Depends on what you mean by equivalent. Honestly, if the south had the technology and manufacturing advantage it probably would have won as the overall military's started out fairly equivalent.
The most famous of these guns, the Spencer carbine, could fire seven shots in 30 seconds.
Like many other Civil War technologies, these weapons were available to Northern troops but not Southern ones: Southern factories had neither the equipment nor the know-how to produce them.
I just have never seen this - the NRA arguing that full automatic weapons should not be licensed. Do you have a citation? I'd be genuinely interested to read up on it.
I'm not aware they argued that even in 1934, when they were focused on removing handguns from the NFA's licencing and prohibitive tax, $3,500 in 2015 dollars (and that in a period where the Depression had gotten truly Great).
I think there is a sign bit inverted here - the NRA would be in the position of opposing "gun prohibition". Volstead-Act style prohibition of guns would result in gunrunning, which is arguably the nastiest form of organized crime.
I am sure that propaganda tropes would be highly common between the Wayne Wheeler continuum and the NRA - there are not that many forms of propaganda.
I've thought the same way recently, in fact the anti-gun "zero compromise scorched earth policy" is part of the reason why I've grown to like the right to bear arms. Amongst other ideas that would be considered conservative.
Did you see Hillary a couple of days ago saying it would be worth it to look into a mandatory gun-buyback program like they did in Australia?
Gun control has always been the appetizer for gun confiscation.
EDIT: for those who think I'm misinterpreting:
Clinton made the comments during a campaign stop in Keene, N.H., when an attendee asked about Australia’s 1996 and 2003 buy-back programs that collected roughly 700,000 banned semi-automatic rifles and other firearms.
"I think it would be worth considering doing it on the national level, if that could be arranged," Clinton responded.
dublinben, please show me how I'm misinterpreting what she said rather than just accusing me of doing so.
""I think it would be worth considering doing it on the national level if that could be arranged," she said in response to a question about Australia's nationwide buyback initiative that began in 1996."
Unlike the voluntary buybacks in the United States, Australian buybacks of 1996 and 2003 were compulsory, compensated surrenders of particular types of firearms made illegal by new gun laws.
The financial compensation was paltry; that for being converted from a citizen to a subject...?
Your comment leads me to believe you're taking issue with the fact that weapons are made illegal, not with the actual buyback? If you agree that weapon category X (for argument's sake, let's say grenade launchers) should be made illegal, what reason would you have for opposing mandatory buyback of these now-illegal weapons? (The financial compensation in question was on average ~$550 per gun.)
Yes, of course. If no coercion is involved and someone is stupid enough to exchange a valuable item for a pittance, who am I to stand in their way?
One reason for the general failure of gun buybacks in the US is two responses from the gun savvy:
1) Go back a bit from the front of the line, and if you see a valuable weapon held by a noob (vs. a likely crime weapon), buy it on the spot for a lot more than what's being offered.
2) Gather up clunker weapons with values much less than the $100 or whatever they're offering and make out like a bandit.
As far as the feds are concerned, as long as you're not "in the business", you're OK, and these buybacks tend to be rare and one offs. In practice and from their viewpoint, the first case of valuable guns is OK because there don't tend to be too many of them and there can be many different people doing this for any one buyback, in the latter case it tends to be FFLs who play that game since they can easily have a collection of junker guns they've bought but that didn't sell.
I obviously strongly disagree. If you're disarmed, you're barely better than a serf, you are most certainly "subject" to anything your armed government cares to now impose on you.
The truth may be ugly, but it does no one any good to pretend it doesn't exist.
The truth is neither ugly nor what you describe. Owning a gun, or even a bunch of guns, doesn't free you from the obligations that come with being a citizen of a nation or state.
At best (e.g. the land-use fee scammer Cliven Bundy situation in Nevada) you can delay enforcement of your obligations, but that doesn't make you "free," it just means you're reneging on your part of the citizenship bargain wherever you live.
Why that's considered a good thing, I have no idea. I certainly don't want to live in a might-makes-right world. I'd rather live in one consisting of a democratically-enacted rule of law.
As with centuries of civilizations before us - there are people who think their current government is non-corrupt, flawless, serving in the citizens' best interests at all times, and would never use force or brutality against a population to get what they want simply because they can against an unarmed population. That there are no outside forces capable of harming the population, even if the government comes to their defense, and we're "past all that" because we've lived in a blink-of-an-eye overall "peaceful" time. If you ignore all the wars going on as we speak.
Same people, different generation, different government.
I'm not sure what government you're talking about, but where I live (the U.S.), I think of the government as made up of people largely like me, and I'm neither wealthy nor well-connected.
Is it perfect? No, but nothing human is. Is it accessible? Oh yes. Is it something I, and everyone else, can work to be a part of and make better for all citizens? Of course. Do guns play any role at all in that work? Not a one. This--the discussion of the role of government in a democratic society--is a place for words and ideas, not weapons.
We are past the might-makes-right attitude of "I have guns so I'm OK". Now we talk.
First you should ask the presidents and politicians of the world to give up their guns and their security guards' guns. Then you might have a case to be made to the citizens.
While attempting to do that you might realize that you in fact do live in a world where might-makes-right and that the "democratically-enacted rule of law" paradise they sold you through your TV is just that.
You might also realize that you are wrong in thinking that the US government is made up largely of people like you, neither wealthy nor well-connected. This is the epitome of naivete, to think US politicians aren't wealthy and their careers aren't a game of who-knows-who.
I think you and I must live in very different worlds.
You said that the democratically-enacted rule of law "paraside" is something that TV sold me.
I don't own a TV set, and I spend the occasional evening and weekend being part of that democratic process. I engage with the other folkspeople in my community, and with our elected officials, some of whom I'm already on a first-name basis with. We talk about stuff, upcoming new regulations, the state of the city and neighborhoods.
I get that you feel pretty disempowered, but I can't really think that that's anything but your choice. I also get the sense that guns give you back that sense of being empowered, like "even if no one listens to me, at least I have a gun." That's not any meaningful sense of power, though, you're not going to persuade people to come around to your point of view with a gun. A gun in your pocket just doesn't give you any democratic legitimacy.
Which, it's funny, buying your way into a false sense of power, while relinquishing your own actual legitimate political power, that's the sad thing.
Oh, but I'm naive. Yeah, getting out there and engaging politically is hard. I'll just go buy my way into a meaningless sense of power, and stay at home instead. King of my castle, while democratic society passes me by.
On a small scale, guns allow your LEO to enforce the law of the land. The individual is not in a position to fight against the state and that's a good thing so long as the majority of the population is content and willing. However, if the majority of the population wishes to enact a new government - they'll need to have more power than the government. Rest assured - the government will fight back to remain in power. This is where the importance of an armed population comes from.
This justification is how the U.S argued for its independence - the "Right of Revolution" [0]. Which has since been codified as illegal in US law [1] yet remains protected under many state constitutions [2]. I'm not sure how the conflict is resolved.
On a larger scale - look at your countries' history - look at your current influence on the world - look at how many military bases you have around various points in the world. Your country has the largest military spending in the world by a large amount [3].
The U.S of A is the living, breathing definition of "might makes right". It won its independence by might-makes-right. It became a global superpower by might-makes-right. It enacts treaties and forces embargoes because might-makes-right. It aids in overthrowing foreign governments to prop up agreeable leaders for their own benefit - and they can do this because might-makes-right.
Rest assured that "might makes right" is how things are done to this day. It's just that nobody tries to overpower the USA, so you don't notice it as often as the countries the USA plows through.
Practically speaking, even armed you're a subject. The government is free to impose its will on you any time it likes unless you're in the business of shooting police offices who pull you over.
> They're still citizens; that kind of talk is emotion-laden hyperbole, and has no place in this kind of discussion forum.
You're wrong, because—without hyperbole—historically the difference between a citizen and a slave has often been arms-bearing. The ceremony for manumission of a slave in some areas included a gift of a weapon.
Ah, yes, I'd forgotten that detail. The right/obligation to bear arms in defense of your polity has often been the dividing line between citizen and something less. And the Right to Keep and Bear Arms came up in several places in the Dred Scott decision.
Related, I was just reading something about the history of the fall of the Roman Republic, about a threshold where a class of men without significant economic means were allowed to enlist, which lead to them being dependent on their general's largess, and developing allegiance to him instead of the Republic.
"There was the incredible advocacy campaign from the Anti-Saloon League, whose anti-alcohol messaging looks like a more fervent version of the National Rifle Association's gun rights messaging today."
In a decade we will look back and think "how could we be so stupid for decades".
And I'm looking forward when "harder" drugs like cocaine, meth and heroin are legalized or at least tolerated - no more drug turf wars, no more shadow states in Latin America, and especially far fewer deaths and medical issues from contaminated drugs.
Drugs are actually pretty safe, what makes them so incredibly dangerous is the contamination happening in the supply chain, from unclean manufacturing over normal degradation due to improper handling to stretching at the dealer level.