MC_Lovecraft
I review movies over on Letterboxd and Sufficient Velocity.
This isn’t an error. It’s people claiming to have done a thing they did not do and demanding to be added to the count. To be clear, cops don’t stop violence either, most mass-shooters kill themselves in the end, but lone-gunmen are not out here protecting anybody. Guns only and always make confrontation deadlier than it has to be. There is no situation where having a gun makes you safer, whether you possess a license or not, and the statistics on mortality and gun ownership back that up, going back a long, long time.
Agitating for people to go fight the government with fucking handguns and long rifles is effectively carrying water for the people you hate. There are methods of resistance that are far less likely to get young people gunned down en masse, and by leveraging those methods first, the violence that eventually ensues can be reduced and contained as much as possible.
I mean, I simply disagree. Violence is always a failure, either of policy, or of personal behavior. Enabling people to escalate that failure to a deadly one with the twitch of a finger is simply not an acceptable paradigm. An armed society, contrary to the witticism, will never be a polite society, because it makes it stupendously easy for bad actors to cause disproportionate harm, relative to the ability of the community to reasonably prepare for. Removing guns entirely is the only reasonable solution if you actually want a free and peaceful society.
You are already reliant on the state for defense, whether you admit it or not. The very existence of states requires a functional monopoly on violence, and private gun ownership is just a fig leaf to obscure that fact. A fig leaf that leads to massive, unnecessary loss of life. If your definition of freedom is so limited that not owning a gun makes you automatically un-free, you do not actually believe in freedom, you believe in the right to violently interject yourself into the lives of others. That is pretty much the opposite of freedom.
If you are in a situation where needing to barricade your door to prevent your parent’s entry is a regular occurrence, it is probably time to involve child protective services. You don’t need to give details of your situation to strangers on the internet, but I would highly encourage you to go to a trusted friend or family member’s home and contact the authorities.
Okay, but following that logic, getting rid of all of the guns is still the best thing we could do, because it makes it much harder for people to quickly inflict a huge amount of harm. Ensuring that your local community is free of guns would do far more to protect you and your family than bringing a gun into your home, which you have already acknowledged is a highly dangerous thing to do. It’s like arguing that because your neighbor keeps a bear chained up in his yard, you ought to go out and get a bear, to protect yourself from his bear, when the clear answer is just to get the bears out of the neighborhood.
Zelenskiy is the democratically elected head of state, he has as good a mandate as anyone to use force on behalf of his people. The fact that Russia was allowed to invade in the first place, despite security guarantees from both Russia and the US is the failure here. In any case, that argument is a complete non-seqitur to what I actually said. I never said violence was completely preventable, but you absolutely can make it much harder.
