Comment by miroljub
2 days ago
> So media control, regulation by enforcement, and institutional control becomes the focus of effort.
You forgot gun control. That's the first thing they took away. Thereafter, freedom after freedom has been made optional by the government [1].
When government becomes overreaching, and you don't have the means to protect yourself and your rights, that's where it goes.
[1] I said "government", but probably "regime" would be a more suitable term here.
The guns in the US don't seem to be helping people avoid getting shot by ICE.
(to the extent that armed revolution worked in the UK, the IRA were helped only slightly by US-backed supplies of Armalite rifles, and much more by a large supply of Libyan high explosives. Guns are a much less effective political weapon than the car or truck or hotel bomb)
Guns only help somewhat nebulously against tyranny. You need societal consensus to get to society using guns against the government, and there is no such consensus regarding ICE, which is why you're not going to see guns used against ICE. Many many people who hate ICE are armed to the teeth, and they are not using those guns because they know that currently that would lose them thee battle and the war.
But in general the better armed states in the U.S. had less restrictive covid rules. So perhaps there is a link between how armed the population is and how well it resists restrictions it doesn't like.
>The guns in the US don't seem to be helping people avoid getting shot by ICE.
I don't see ICE prowling "the cops don't come serve a warrant here with anything less than a SWAT team" parts of New Orleans or St. Louis.
Stop thinking about this based on indoctrinated emotion and politics. Think about it in terms of an all out war and "how do I force my enemy to expend resources not toward his goals".
Personal ability to credibly threaten lethal violence (note: I did not say "firearms") acts much like an AGTM or MANPADS for an infantry squad. Making any potential target substantially more prickly to a potentially superior force and doing so for little cost is a huge boon for the little guy. A firearm is a force multiplier same as a bomb carrying drone or a cell phone that records things the government does not like or a media platform that puts those things in front of the eyes of the masses.
The idea that any cranky old man or mentally on the edge person might just snap and put a bullet in your favorite bespoke enforcer (i.e. not a cop but someone who hands out state backed fines all the same) puts a huge damper on your ability to deploy those people for example. The risk that your informants might get clapped increases the cost of your informants for like results, etc, etc. And when you game it out to it's ends what it comes down to is that the population doing the subjugating might simply not be rich enough or motivated enough to have or be willing to allocate the resources needed to do the job.
This is a large part of why drugs won the war on drugs. There were enough glawk fawtys wit da switch kicking around on the "wrong" side of the law that the cops needed to adopt militarized tactics, the public didn't wanna pay for that shit (monetarily or politically) over weed, and thus drugs won the war on drugs. If they could've rolled up on just about anyone "cheaply" with just a couple cops it would've gone on way longer.
>(to the extent that armed revolution worked in the UK, the IRA were helped only slightly by US-backed supplies of Armalite rifles, and much more by a large supply of Libyan high explosives. Guns are a much less effective political weapon than the car or truck or hotel bomb)
The semtex wouldn't have gotten anywhere useful if the Brits could just walk into wherever all willy nilly chasing down every lead in search of it. Bringing enough credible threat of violence to force their enemy to actually behave like a proper occupying force burning money and political credibility as a result limited the Brit's ability engage (at the right price) in the kind of police action they needed to catch the bombs.
If they could've just sent pairs of cops after every lead in an "oi you got a license for that meme" manner they'd have dredged up all the semtex and none of it would've made it to London.
>The guns in the US don't seem to be helping people avoid getting shot by ICE.
The woman who was shot was a democrat without any guns, maybe if she'd had a gun she wouldn't have been shot.
> maybe if she'd had a gun she wouldn't have been shot
And how do you imagine that, exactly? You think that cop was fine shooting her for driving away in panic, but would patiently wait for her to grab a gun? And what would you like a person in her situation to do with the gun? Shoot him? The fact is, pulling a weapon in front of a US cop is begging to be killed on the spot. A common point of advice is that if you're stopped in the US by police, you should never look like you're reaching for anything, because the worst-case penalty for that is death. It instantly escalates the situation to life-or-death for a group of people that is largely already itching to pull the trigger.
Maybe if he didn't have a gun she wouldn't have been shot.
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I still don't know what's so important about guns and how it's a metric for freedom.
Predators are less likely to attack someone who can defend themselves, it's quite simple.
The empirical evidence from the US does not bear that out. Compare murder rates between the US and any peer country with more gun control.
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Yes, for the US with their unique historical and cultural differences, but it doesn't make it an international metric.
Everyone in the US agrees with the inequalities and segregation and find it acceptable that an individual has to become a predator to survive because they don't find it acceptable to help each other on a governmental scale.
Some countries have worse inequalities than the US but they don't think they need guns to have freedom in their daily lives.
As Mao said, political power grows from the barrel of the gun. In the past decade freedom of speech and internet freedom has being dramatically curtailed in pretty much every western country where the citizen are unarmed.
These guns didn't stop the CLOUD act.
i’m absolutely, concretely and overwhelmingly fine with the concept of gun control here as a uk citizen.
i say this as someone who did target rifle shooting as a kid. so, i’ve been around weapons in a positive way.
the controls are a good thing.
> i’m absolutely, concretely and overwhelmingly fine with the concept of gun control here as a uk citizen.
That... speaks volumes of the citizens of the said country.