Oddbean

1. If belief A and B are the same, then it isn’t a stretch. To believe in gun control is to explicitly believe in the state monopoly on gun violence and to support their direct violent use against its citizens. It’s even in their actual words most of the time, they project whatever hate and anger they have against some murderer onto every innocent person who owns a gun, and some of the shit they openly say “should be done to gun owners” is horrifying. When someone tells you who they are, believe them. 2. If you think guns don’t play a part in the state vs citizen power dynamic then I believe you’ve made a massive miscalculation. People are the same as they’ve always been. The *difference* in power is exactly what causes arrogant tyrants to become more bold and reinforces their worldview that the weak citizens are subjects of the state, not sovereign individuals. The overwhelming violence that follows gun control is something that builds very slowly for a long time, and then explodes all at once. If you are looking at the “very slowly” era and saying things are different, you are just like millions before you in history who made the same mistake. This would not even slightly be the first time people said “it’s different now, we don’t need guns because the state is on our side.” To the contrary this is said EVERY time with the same predictable results. If they didn’t think that, then it wouldn’t have happened. To the contrary, regardless of how much conflict happens over information and perception, its entire purpose is to control what people allow for direct violence. It doesn’t obsolete guns, it decides who gets to use them with the benefit of appearing like they are “the good guys.” An armed population remains an irreplaceable deterrent of aggressive, direct state violence against the people. And no, this time is not different.

On #2: The very people saying that the U.S. needed gun control were demanding we use our taxpayer money to give guns to citizens of Ukraine to defend themselves against invasion. Just because your political party has the same name as the tyrannical "leader" doesn't mean you should demand to limit the rights guaranteed by the constitution. The defense of 2A has been rather successful, which is a positive. 10A needs to be vigorously defended, or challenged and re-instated and then we can start to work on paring down the federal monster. Send it all back to the states, like Dobbs did with Roe vs. Wade.

Can you give any examples of countries that had a functioning democracy, instituted gun control and then ceased to have a functioning democracy because the state exercised its monopoly on gun violence? I’m generally open to having my mind changed on things but having grown up and lived in several countries where guns are very rare I find it hard to get on board with the argument that guns are needed to keep a government in check. My lived experience just tells me that isn’t true.

responding to #2 I should clarify that I'm not in favor of government mandatory disarmament. my point is more that having guns does not stop the governments or violence oriented state-like institutions from oppressing the people. there are many areas of Brasil where guns are everywhere with militias and organized crime, and violence is rampant, with an actual parallel state kind of rule of law. people are exploited both by the government that claims to work for their benefit, while streaming away their property over time with inflation and the heavily armed police, and by these parallel institutions that claim to protect them from the police. guns cannot protect these people. and there are ways of fighting government oppression that are far more likely to produce change than picking up weapons. in my view, the violence I described, for which weapons are useful, and the emergence of parallel state-like institutions, is a symptom of a failing state, not the vehicle for revolution. replacing a violent state with another one is not a real revolution. it's in that sense that I'm anti-guns.