IMO he makes a compelling argument, i don't expect most to agree with it, but it articulates pretty well the way muricans views guns and their necessity in society.
It's less an argument than a worldview, really. Some people believe we should all live on communes and eat off the land and crap in a bucket.
Some people think social order is more toxic than the law of the personal gun and would prefer to live in a might-makes-right Hobbesian world.
He wants society to “lock up the crazies”, whatever that means, while at the same time ensuring everyone has a gun. I guess he thinks we can just Minority Report everyone or have predictive analytics or AI to predict who is going to lose their shit one day? That sounds like a recipe for success if you ask me.
This guy writes like he wants to shoot up the capitol building.
Locking up the crazies is a good one. And not just because it's what Reagan reversed, and not just because he's advocating for people to arbitrarily take civil rights away, and it's not because not all shooters are "crazies".
It's the notion that there is some absolute judgement of what's crazy and what isn't. And without a state to intervene with laws, protections, and standards, we're back again at the law of the gun. Which means crazy is irrelevant. My gun or your gun decides what is crazy and what isn't.
I understand his point.
But the idea of a functioning democracy is that there is someone who has brute force: the government. And the government, that's us. We don't need guns, because we have capable people using guns for us, if need be.
And also, if the lunatic next door doesn't have a gun in the first place, I don't need a gun to protect myself from him.
I understand this is a fascination Americans have. And it's not like the theory at least makes zero sense. But pretty much all Western European countries are a perfect counterexample.
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America has this individualism pride, which is also what makes child care impossible and social loneliness and a replacement with digital facsimiles off the charts. Guns come very handy in that mentality, because you're independent of police, judge, and jury.
Some of us believe that human civilization enabled a better quality of life for citizens to agree to common laws and behaviors that are acceptable vs unacceptable. The benefit being that you're less likely to have to spend your energy fortifying your Montana wilderness compound to fire rifles and throw grenades at any stranger that walks through the nearby forest. And by enabling that, you allow people to engage in business, in culture and the arts, in education, in sharing collective building and collective risk-taking. Without constant fear of murder, rape, and kidnapping.
But for some people, life is about always worrying about murder, rape, and kidnapping. And that Hobbesian way is a better way to live, because you can be independent and in control of your own fate. Even if the ultimate likelihood is you won't live past 35 with a bullet in your neck.
Yep that's exactly the root of the argument: the position of govt vis a vis the citizenry.
Even packs of wolves have better sense of the benefits of social governance than this guy. If you want to live with impunity, you have to accept dying with impunity.