> How about we fire someone for this. There have to be consequences or the system doesn't work.
Why do you think people are protesting or rioting? There are a ton of people who feel like their desire to change "the system" is falling on deaf ears.
Elections and lawsuits are really the only meaningful power the average person has over those in power. Other than that, it's up to people in power to check others in power via "checks and balances".
> The citizens of the united states of america have a 2nd amendment.
The 2A's only role in US society is to allow some people to buy some small arms some of the time and otherwise doesn't have any place in America until the country falls (at which point all of the laws/amendments are not relevant). It's not like you can use your weapon on a government official and claim under the 2A you were protecting yourself against the government. You still get prosecuted for murder; only jury nullification would save you at that point.
> if they were armed the way americans are
You forget that our military is the largest in the world with lots of recent experience in {counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and psychological operations}. They also have some of the best tools for identifying where most people are and are capable of shutting off most mass communications within the US if they needed to.
In the end, the political polarization is such that those who own lots of guns tend to be the same demographics who revere police/military/order and are currently in the camp that overlooks / detests the protesters, saying their complaints are overblown. I'm pretty sure that's largely due to a sustained PR effort by the post-WW2 Defense Department including sponsorships of sporting events that are more likely to attract those same demographics.
> In the end, the political polarization is such that those who own lots of guns tend to be the same demographics who revere police/military/order and are currently in the camp that overlooks / detests the protesters, saying their complaints are overblown.
I'm steeped deep in gun culture in Texas, most of my friends online are in gun culture. We are all universally outraged by what happened to George Floyd and to others. The majority of us do not support looting and pillaging, but we do support the message of the protests. In fact, the gun community has been advocating for something to be done about police militarization and the negative side effects of the War on Drugs for decades.
It is this weird thing how political divisions work, because so many people on the Left in this country assume "gun owner" == "racist white man, thin blue line, thank you for your service".
The reality is a sizable proportion of gun owners in America are lumped into a generic "conservative" bucket because of some specific issue viewpoints, which have nothing to do with actual worldview. By and large, gun owners tend to be more Libertarian than conservative, and as such view the government and the police with distrust. They view people breaking the law with even more distrust, which is why they may often support the police, but they do not support police brutality and they have deep concerns about policing in America.
It was the Libertarian think-tank The Cato Institute that spent years collating every single failed no-knock raid in America and mapping them. It's Libertarian writers like Radley Balko who've published multiple books on police misconduct. These groups and people who are opposed to police misconduct on the grounds of preserving liberty are part of gun culture.
It's really weird to me being in the tech industry as I see it's shift Leftward politically and being inundated with utterly ridiculous caricatures of people who hold similar viewpoints to me. Gun owners aren't a homogenous group, and by and large your caricature of a racist Elmer Fudd is grossly inaccurate. I have most of my teeth, am educated, work in a knowledge field, am politically active in causes which matter to me, most of which align with the positions of the Left somewhat ironically, and yes I own guns.
The real reason gun owners aren't starting an insurrection is because we have too much to lose and very little to gain. The reason CHL holders are the demographic with the lowest crime rate in the US, and why most gun owners own many guns (which are expensive, by the way) is because as a cohort we are people who uphold order, make prudent financial and life decisions, and take our responsibilities seriously (because of course, we regularly handle deadly weapons). Insurrection has a nearly incalculable cost in human lives, has no guarantee of the end result being a better system, and essentially ends every positive thing that currently exists in your life in the blink of an eye. As you said, the 2A isn't an affirmative defense in court if you go around shooting government employees, so only people who are so thoroughly radicalized that they've effectively already distanced themselves out of society and thrown their lives away are willing to be the one to fire the first shot.
It has basically nothing to do with political affiliations and everything to do with common sense and basic prudence.
>The reason CHL holders are the demographic with the lowest crime rate in the US, and why most gun owners own many guns (which are expensive, by the way) is because as a cohort we are people who uphold order, make prudent financial and life decisions, and take our responsibilities seriously (because of course, we regularly handle deadly weapons).
I agree with almost everything you said. Just one small point - I suspect the reason why CHL holders are the demographic with the lowest crime rate in the US is because it’s the only demographic that actively screens for past crimes before allowing you to be a member.
In many states the only criteria is "can legally own a gun" (so not a felon). I think it's more a matter of contientiousness; people who bother getting the permit (where required) are affirmatively demonstrating the wish to follow the law.
Thanks for the long, nuanced post! I like HN especially because of these.
I'm also from small town TX and I consider myself more of a libertarian-lite than a "lefty" or a "righty" in the US political spectrum, so we have some things in common. I realize I tend to look down on "those who own lots of guns" (I'm not talking about just 1-2 per family) because I consider them to be my outgroup.
I decided not to post a lot of response-per-quote after a few drafts, but I'll just say: thanks for this.
- Eliminate civil forfeiture, an archaic part of the policing process
- Remove the sentencing discrepancies between crack and powdered cocaine, which needlessly exacerbate the racial welfare gap (Biden erote this law btw)
- Ensure all cops wear bodycams at all time so that their integrity can never be called into question without evidence.
- Implement a UBI so that impoverished minorities can claw themselves out of a dead end system.
Things we did do!
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- Burned Target
It's the Occupy Wall Street idiocy all over again. If you're going to protest, you need to have S.M.A.R.T. goals in mind and make sure you don't lose public goodwill to fringe radical followers (looters).
It isn’t an either or. We can do both. That being said, I think firing bad cops isn’t enough. There must be criminal charges and convictions.
Personally, I’m amazed that we don’t keep publicly accessible logs of every time a police patrol car turns its lights and/or sirens on.
Firing bad cops should be swift and purposeful. I think any police officer who leaves their reflective vest on the dashboard of a private car or otherwise signals that the car belongs to a police officer, should be fired immediately with no pension. I don’t think we can do that today because the police unions are just too powerful.
You can't convince the half of the country that thinks those are tools needed to be "tough on crime" to unilaterally disarm. There has to be some concession.
I don't think there is enough political will to rally peacefully for real structural change. The average person does not want to rock the boat, they just want to go about their daily lives even if it is harder than normal, or if their kin are only "randomly" targeted as bad as that may sound.
I've seen it happening in a country that has actually, super explicit structural racist policies and laws against a minority group, and the minority just does not do anything because they're "kinda okay". They don't riot, or have any large-scale protests. They barely do protests, and even then it's rare.
I also grew up in a another country that crumbled under an authoritarian government. The government meddled with elections, caused election violence, was instigating for youth-brigade members to cause violence, seized private property, the economy exploded with thousand digit inflation, people went for weeks with barely intermittent water or electricity, etc. And still, the best people could muster was to either "leave" whilst those that stayed did their utmost best to help each-other out to make life barely not miserable.
