Comment by matheusmoreira
10 months ago
That approach is going to get people killed.
If you're not ready, able and willing to whip out a pistol and instantly put two bullets right between the eyes of each one of those criminals, you're probably better off pulling out your phone and covertly dialing 911... After you have gotten as far away from those people as possible.
> the solution is citizens becoming at least as brutal themselves
Becoming a brutal, violent person capable of ending another human being's life is a long process. It's not a switch that people just flip. Especially civilized people from developed countries where it is likely they will go their entire lives without experiencing violence.
Even if they do manage it, they'll have to pay the price. There are professional soldiers out there who are traumatized by the lives they have taken. Normal citizens will have it that much worse... And that's if they don't screw it up and end up going to prison for excessive use of force which can easily turn self-defense into cold-blooded murder.
> In any shithole society
I'm brazilian. I live in exactly that kind of shithole society. You should see the hilariously violent liveleak videos this country produces. Way too many of them are the result of people trying to fight their way out of a robbery, or intervening in a crime in progress. I remember this particularly cartoonish video where a child is running away from something, pistol in hand, and some guy randomly decides to trip him up. He gets up, shoots the guy dead and resumes his escape as though absolutely nothing had just happened.
This is a country where the population is prone to brutally lynching criminals, by the way. Ironically, the drug traffickers are the most effective at it. They routinely dispense brutal violence against the lesser criminals who hurt their drug trade by scaring off potential customers. It's gotten to the point they have formed parallel governments, complete with laws, tribunals and taxes.
I get it. The sheer audacity of criminals is offensive and the impunity is truly soul crushing. This sense of impunity permeates the life of every brazilian. It feels like there's no justice. I'm just saying that if you aim to fight this impunity, you need a far more sophisticated approach than telling random bystanders to be "fit" and "stubborn". That sort of thing will accomplish nothing but the eventual deaths of well meaning people.
Yes I assumed you were Brazilian, which is where most of the "off duty cop" shooting videos come from - sounds like a Mad Max state. But in other countries, people don't get executed for standing up to crooks.
Of course, if you ever get a Bukele in power all the leftists will be out in force crying about the poor criminal's human rights etc - always a good reminder that these situations are intentionally inflicted from above.
> But in other countries, people don't get executed for standing up to crooks.
That belief will get people killed. A simple web search yields numerous results. For instance:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/home-depot-worker-fatally-shot-ca...
> if you ever get a Bukele in power all the leftists will be out in force crying about the poor criminal's human rights etc
Current president of Brazil literally makes excuses for them. "I'm so tired of watching people die just because they robbed a phone", he says. "It was just to buy some beer", as though crime was an actual legitimate profession. That is the absolute state of this country. Mad Max would be an improvement over this shithole. In the Mad Max universe it's literally kill or be killed but you don't have leftists worshipping the criminals and shitting all over the "fascist" police defending them.
Police is powerless to stop it. If they try, they are tried and imprisoned by the same government that hired them to do it. It is already common knowledge that military police is one of the worst career choices you can make. The country is losing police officers at a rate of thousands per year. Not enough people are signing up for this shit. Meanwhile, drug gangs dominate over a quarter of our territory. The current speculation is that they finance judges and politicians. In other words, it is not only possible but probable that this is a literal narcostate.
At some point, it becomes war. The criminals are sufficiently organized that they should be treated as enemy combatants and gunned down on sight. Trump ordering US ships to nuke drug boats out of existence is the correct course of action. The only problem is the "civilized" people who cry about it instead of thanking him for his service and thanking god they have people willing to commit extreme violence against others in order to protect them from the evils of this world. That is a luxury I would love to have myself. Instead I live in a extremely leftist country where drug traffickers spray paint threats on people's homes, giving them 24 hours to leave on pain of death.
Sadly the power of drug gangs in Latin America and Brazil can be traced as much to the war on drugs itself as the lack of war on drugs.
I do believe your assertion is correct that literal war would probably be better than the status quo, but regulating powerful drugs as basically "sell to adults and it needs to meet some sort of purity standard" would bring the drug trafficking portion of gangs into looking more like Petrobas than Comando Vermelho.
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Find a way out then man.
Believe me, there are a large number of countries where, if someone was shot for standing up to a crime, it would be national news for months. Not in the Americas, obviously, but they exist.
The drug war is the stupidest thing humans have ever done. It literally fuels the criminals, and even entire criminal states like north Korea. State illegalisaion (mostly the US) of drugs is to put guns right into the hands of gangs and create competing states. Drugs should both be 100% legal - so they cost the same as sugar, gutting the money that empowers the gangs - and simultaneously drug users should be pushed to the edges of society with wide open discrimination.