Sandy Hook and Peshawar

We can confine a person who is mentally ill, denying them all sorts of civil liberties. But when they are no longer mentally ill, we release them, and restore those civil liberties. Is there any principled reason not to restore ALL of their civil liberties? Not based, I mean, on animus directed at one of those civil liberties. Which a lot of our polices regarding that particular civil liberty are based on.

US gun laws strike me as deeply idiotic in general, but being what they are .. I can see the logic in the linked judgement. Is it really justified to bar someone from owning firearms for having ‘ a history of mental illness’ ? That’s pretty vague wording so I’m not sure how the law functioned in practice, as ‘a history of mental illness’ is very broad. What was the definition of mental illness ? Which illnesses were covered ? What kind of risk do people with ‘a history of mental illness’ pose compared to other demographics ? Even if the risk was higher, would that justify the prohibition ?

Sounds like history in this case means having been institutionaliced at any timepoint in ones live.

The federal statute bars gun ownership for anyone who has ever been involuntarily committed for mental health reasons for any period of time. Commitment in most states can be based on danger to others, danger to self or grave disability (inability to care for basic needs of health and safety). In many cases, access to in-patient care is practically available only via involuntary commitment unless you have excellent insurance or a lot of money.

In my experience, civil commitment cases have been part of my practice for over 20 years, few clients own firearms and few care about being unable to own them. Where the issue has come up is with people from rural areas who hunt. I’ve had juvenile clients where the parents wanted their child to receive treatment but not be excluded from family hunting trips. In several of those cases the prosecution agreed to delay a hearing on the case, keeping the client in the hospital under a preliminary order (which does not incur a firearm disability) until the underlying problem could be diagnosed and, hopefully, resolved.

The greatest risk for the mentally ill with firearms is suicide. Take an overdose of medication and you have a good chance of survival with medical aid. Not so with guns. People who do survive self-inflicted gunshot wounds often do so with horrible, permanent injury; massive brain damage or paralysis.

America’s problem with gun violence is less the availability of guns than the fetishization of guns as solutions for conflict and as tokens of tribal membership. The right wing exploitation of the 2nd Amendment for financial and political gain is beyond disgraceful. It’s a shame we can’t commit the NRA to secure institutions as dangerous to others.

The main risk of access to a firearm to someone with some degree of mental health is indeed suicide. Bipolar is a very common condition, and one aspect is depression, which can easily lead to suicide.

Now I could see allowing someone with a history to participate in a hunting trip under supervision. Unless he were obviously suffering symptoms, the risk should be minimal. But, unsupervised access regardless of mantal state to a weapon would be produce far more than minimal risk.

>Rather, they reflect deeply ingrained views in the societies from which they emerged.

I don’t think so. Americans are evil, and the white devil’s colonialism is to blame for all the wrongs in Pakistan. Clearly this is a more elegant answer.

“The main risk of access to a firearm to someone with some degree of mental health is indeed suicide.”

But, and this is the key point: Having been involuntarily committed at some distant point in the past DNE having a mental health problem.

“Principle sometimes stands completely at odds with realism and pragmatism. ”

While “realism and pragmatism” are frequently just masks animus wears. By “animus”, I mean that your realistic and pragmatic approach to this civil liberty is rooted in an opposition to the civil liberty’s existence. While opposition to a civil liberty’s existence can be a valid basis for urging its repeal, in a system of laws it can never be a valid guide to enforcing that civil liberty.

#15 BB

But, and this is the key point: Having been involuntarily committed at some distant point in the past DNE having a mental health problem.

We probably need to do something about that.

Like, if someone has had mental health problems, at some point he should request a sanity check. And somebody with official qualifications looks him over and if all goes well declares that he is now a sane citizen.

We don’t have that now. Once your sanity has been in question it is never again unquestioned. If the police get involved with you and perhaps shoot you, the media will report that they shot a “mentally unstable” person who made threatening gestures etc.

There is no way for anybody to be declared officially sane, and I think there ought to be.

American gun laws are like the British monarchy. People who are pretty much entirely sensible and rational in pretty much all respects defend them, despite their complete and utter absurdity. Growing up in the culture creates blind spots. (Of course, plenty of wicked and crazy people defend them too). But given the laws, singling out people with a history of mental illness as people who can’t have guns doesn’t seem sensible. The last thing you want is people with guns avoiding getting treatment for their mental illnesses so that they won’t get their guns taken away.

But I like Rich’s and J Thomas’s comments. I don’t trust anyone with a gun. Every gun owner contributes directly to polluting our social environment in a way that increases risks of violent death for everyone and, whatever the law,s they should be treated as pariahs at least as much as smokers are.

“We don’t have that now.”

We DO have that now. Congress defunded it, so that nobody could have their 2nd amendment rights restored. The process is still there, but can’t be used because it’s illegal for any money to be spent implementing it.

“But now that I think about it some more, if somebody wanted to be declared officially sane so they could get a concealed carry permit, just wanting that would be enough to require a very close look….”

See, you’re motivated by opposition to the right.

Zero familiarity with the legal issue but it seems reasonable to me that if owning guns is a basic right of citizenship then mental illness should not be a reason to forfeit it. A history of violence otoh could be, but anyone who seriously thinks that owning your gun is a basic right in a 21st century democracy in the first place should at least be contemplating a couple of years of analysis imho. Where is Richard Layards army of therapists when you need them?

A history of violence otoh could be

Extrapolating the implications of this concept to the NYPD is left as an exercise to the reader.

For gun ownership, yeah, as JT said, if they want to do it right they should be asking for a mental health evaluation. From everyone or only from the people with a history, at the time of issuing the gun permit or annually, whatever. But ‘history of mental illness’ by itself doesn’t seem like a reasonable rule.

“But now that I think about it some more, if somebody wanted to be declared officially sane so they could get a concealed carry permit, just wanting that would be enough to require a very close look….”

Yep.

MPA @30,

To me, it’s clearly both. The fetishization of the gun, mixed with easy access, is a recipe for disaster. In fact, if someone believes that fetishization is a real problem — and one could add the glorification of guns in our movies, TV, games, books, etc. — that’s all the more reason to limit access.

“To me, it’s clearly both. The fetishization of the gun, mixed with easy access, is a recipe for disaster. In fact, if someone believes that fetishization is a real problem — and one could add the glorification of guns in our movies, TV, games, books, etc. — that’s all the more reason to limit access.”

Sure! Sign me up for limited access and culture change.

Seems to me, you’d rather make a god of 5 members of the Supreme court.

No, it says what it says, and in a country where people get to actually read their constitution, and in regards to a very popular part of the Bill of Rights, your’s is a very dangerous attitude for the judiciary to take.

“No, it says what it says”

Former Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger disagrees:

“The late U.S. Supreme Court chief justice, named to the court by President Richard Nixon in 1969, said after leaving the bench that, contrary to views espoused by gun groups, the Second Amendment “doesn’t guarantee the right to have firearms at all.”

The concept of a citizen’s right to bear arms, Burger said on “The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour” in 1991, “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word ‘fraud’ — on the American public by special interest groups that I have seen in my lifetime.”

Burger was a lifelong Republican. ”

So you know…. sit on it.

it says what it says, and in a country where people get to actually read their constitution, and in regards to a very popular part of the Bill of Rights, your’s is a very dangerous attitude for the judiciary to take.

Goodness, Brett, it would help if you would actually familiarize yourself with that document before you say something like this. In particular, what was at issue in the linked case was the constitutionality of a state law. The Bill of Rights is a restriction on the power of the federal government. Some (but not all) of the rights specified in the Bill of Rights are of such importance that the guaranty of substantive due process in the 14th Amendment prevents state governments from infringing on them. But you don’t like substantive due process, precisely because it is not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution, but is instead judge-made law.

The linked decision is very easy, and need not depend on any supposed 2nd Amendment right. Elementary procedural due process requires giving someone an opportunity to prove that they are not presently mentally ill, despite a 30-year old involuntary commitment. It doesn’t matter that what is at issue here is gun ownership–any restriction on rights or privileges (for example, a rule that no one who was ever involuntarily committed could get a driver’s license) ought to be subject to the same rule.

I thought JQ was headed in another direction other than a thread on the second amendment. I’m going from memory but as the news of the Peshawar massacre broke, Wolf Blitzer (yes, I know) exclaimed something along the lines of “If that’s what they do to people of their own religion, then imagine what they’d do to Americans.” Indeed — a crazy person could burst into a school and kill lots of kids, right here in the US!

Anyway, the point is surely massive blind spots in the respective societies, which occasionally rear their ugly heads, but then everyone just moves on to business as usual after the pundits claimed event X changes everything.

I thought JQ’s point was that in both cases a tragedy has highlighted a problem , and yet policy in both countries continues to exacerbate said problems (in the US by extending access to guns, in Pakistan by extending a shadow war fought through proxies for limited strategic gains with inevitable extensive blowback)
I don’t necessarily find either unusual, there seems to be a lot of path dependance in these things.

Given the readership of this blog, the 2nd Amendment was inevitable.

Well, I did not mean to derail things, but posting a link to a US Court decision rather invites a discussion of the applicable US law, particularly if a certain commentor then goes on being Wrong on the Internet about the matter.

“But that isn’t legal reasoning, it isn’t pricipled, they just want to make an exception because this is a civil liberty they oppose, and would deny anybody if they could.”

Up until a few years ago most legal minds would have disagreed with you. Maybe in 10 or 15 years they well again.

> There is no way for anybody to be declared officially sane, and I think there ought to be.

No; this is superficially reasonable but actually a terrible idea. Recall, people who were sane become insane [and vice-versa], so a declaration of sanity is a declaration of sanity at a particular point in time. Because it’s time-bound, it’s only valid at and for the moment it was made; if you need to know whether they’re sane later you need to reexamine them. The declaration “well, they were sane back them” is useless and the process for creating same is worthless.

There are other problems; sanity is very much a “‘sane’for what purpose?” question, so your sanity declaration would need to say exactly what purposes the person is sane for… which involves a detailed and complex examination that is explicitly hypothetical and may never come into play. Better to leave sanity examinations until you know they’re needed and you know exactly what “sanity” is given the purpose-at-hand.

[the first at least is stuff you should have realised unprompted [‘how would the declarations-of-sanity be used and what would it be used for?’] but the second is OK-ish to have missed]

Personally I sometimes think nobody should be permitted to have firearms at home. I have no “history” of mental illness but looking back there have been a number of times in my life where I am glad there were no easily available guns.

Am I really so different from everyone else?

> Your objections are philosophically sound, but in practice what we have right now is bad too.

It’s bad not because of the rules but because of the machine that follows them; given the problems with the US judicial and law-enforcement and administrative apparatus, no set of laws/rules will give you good outcomes.

“When they think they have entirely the upper hand and they aren’t worried about what you think of them, they will tell you the truth. This is valuable.”

As valuable as me not fearing for my life?

“Am I really so different from everyone else?”

Well, yes. (Or take the word of Pew, institutionally hostile to the right.) Not everyone else, but most other people. And it’s a good sign that you asked the question, instead of taking it for granted that everyone agreed with you. An awful lot of people who hold minority opinions somehow manage to go through their lives convinced that most people agree with them.

“I have taken it upon myself to start a crusade asking what moral reasoning supports a “right” to own a gun.”

Setting aside the legal argument for the moment, the moral argument has a number of facets.

1. I can own a gun without hurting anybody with it. Clearly this is so, because the vast majority of people who own guns go their entire lives without hurting anybody with them.

2. There are circumstances where it is moral to hurt somebody with a gun, such as if they are assaulting you. We needn’t agree on the full list, just that there are such circumstances.

3. There are uses of guns that don’t involve hurting anybody, Sports such as target shooting, hunting.

4. Like any other inanimate object, guns do not have intentions or purposes, what they get used for is up to humans.

So, most people don’t use guns for bad purposes, guns do have good purposes, and whether they get used for good or bad is a function of the person using them. This makes them rather like cars, or pliers, or a can of gasoline.

Or, to quote Cesare Beccaria, favorite criminologist of the founders, “False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.“

“So, have you ever had a gun pointed at you?”

You seem eager to relate this. Were you the pointer, or the pointee? Do tell.

If you had a gun pointed at you would you think “I wish I had a gun”, or would you think “I wish he/she didn’t have a gun”?

#65 Layman

“So, have you ever had a gun pointed at you?”

You seem eager to relate this. Were you the pointer, or the pointee? Do tell.

I’ve never pointed a real gun at anybody, except once when I was young and stupid. I had guns pointed at me, but only in Alabama. When I lived in Texas it was an upscale area and I never saw or heard a gun. Except for the police.

Guns in the home radically increase the likelihood of death for everyone in the family, as well as friends and neighbors. Guns in the home increase the likelihood that a woman is murdered by her spouse by more than 10 times. Guns carried on the street radically increase the likelihood that someone dies, over no gun being carried on the street.

Guns constantly escalate minor altercations into deadly encounters. They endanger the public. Those are the facts.

The entire premise for the gun fetishists is that they won’t misuse them. But time and time again we see that they do. Or their kid finds their gun and kills themselves or their siblings. Or, if they’re older, they go on rampages like Sandy Hook.

It’s time to put public safety ahead of gun nut neuroses and compensation needs.

It was perverse from the start that the “founders” decided to enshrine a right for deadly pieces of metal, but didn’t do so for life’s necessities, like safe water, food, shelter, quality education and health care, etc. etc.

Deadly pieces of metal were more important than lives and quality of lives. Which makes sense in a nation that puts profit above those things as well.

“Which event introduced you to the singular charm of the experience?”

The chance to play the devil’s advocate? J LOVES to do this even it means taking such ridiculous positions as “being threatened with is gun is a good thing.”

Plus when you call him on it he gets to act all hurt and aggrieved. A win win!

But a lot of conservatives feel scared all the time and their guns are like their security blankets.

Most of the problems in politics are essentially medical.

On a slightly more serious note, all the sane people insisting that if gun ownership is a basic right (or civil liberty), then it should be available regardless of mental illness do surely realize that similar reasoning applies to the Pakistan case, yes? I believe david covered this quite well upthread (@8).

“But a lot of conservatives feel scared all the time and their guns are like their security blankets.”

It’s actually more like, the conservatives ask, “Just what have the liberals got planned, that they need me disarmed before they do it?” The usual excuses for disarming everybody are such nonsense, and we assume you must, buried somewhere, have a sensible reason for wanting everybody defenseless. And conclude that you want to do something that will piss off so many people that you don’t dare start on it while they’re still able to shoot you over it.

I think your average conservative would be closer to the mark if they just accepted that the left is perfectly capable of wanting to do something for nonsensical reasons.

“On a slightly more serious note, all the sane people insisting that if gun ownership is a basic right (or civil liberty), then it should be available regardless of mental illness”

ONCE AGAIN, having long ago been involuntarily committed DNE currently having a mental illness. Nobody wants currently crazy people to have guns, but plenty of people want another excuse for denying guns to sane people.

“Almost everyone wants gun ownership to be a privilege. ”

This is clearly false, although it may be based on not understanding the difference between a “right” and a “privilege”.

If something is a right, you don’t need to give a reason or justification for doing it, it is up to you, BUT, rights can be taken away for cause. Voting is a right, but in many states felons can’t vote. But a state can’t simply decide, “We’re not going to let anyone vote anymore.”

If something is a privilege, you may be asked to justify doing it, you can be prohibited from doing it pretty much arbitrarily. The government doesn’t have to let a specific person exercise a privilege, (Though there are prohibited basis for taking privileges away, such as race.) it can decide to let nobody at all exercise it.

When you say you want gun ownership to be a “privilege”, you are saying that you want it to be able to be taken away without cause. You might not mean to say that, but that IS what you’re saying. And, no, most people do not want gun ownership to be a privilege, they want it to be a right.

And, I think we’ll have to disagree on the utility of guns in private hands for deterring tyranny, but it doesn’t matter whether we disagree, so long as you understand that conservatives reason on the basis of THEIR beliefs, not YOUR beliefs. Your conviction that guns in private hands are useless won’t keep conservatives from reasoning on the basis of their being useful, your conviction that gun controller arguments are persuasive won’t cause conservatives to reason as though they found them persuasive.

This is an important point, often forgotten on both sides: It doesn’t matter if you disagree with the other guy’s premises, he’s going to be reasoning on the basis of HIS premises, not yours. If you attribute your premises to him in place of his own, you won’t understand his reasoning.

guns in private hands for deterring tyranny

They certainly did a good job of deterring JFK and Martin Luther King (among others).

I think a lot of politicians support gun control just exactly because they … really wish that they didn’t have to take into account the possibility of making somebody mad enough to shoot them when they made policy.

Arseholes.

“Almost everyone wants gun ownership to be a privilege. “

This is clearly false, although it may be based on not understanding the difference between a “right” and a “privilege”.

If something is a right, you don’t need to give a reason or justification for doing it, it is up to you, BUT, rights can be taken away for cause.

If something is a privilege, you may be asked to justify doing it, you can be prohibited from doing it pretty much arbitrarily.

That sounds reasonable, except that in practice there is not actually any difference.

Here’s the problem. An “inalienable right” is one that can’t be taken from you. But there is a loophole, the government can still take away your rights if you are guilty of a crime.

So all the government needs to do to take away your right to a gun is to make it illegal to own a gun. Then if you own a gun you are a criminal and you don’t have a right to a gun. Well, but maybe the government can’t make it illegal to have a gun because constitution.

So they can declare that you don’t have the right to a gun if you have ever been guilty of getting a parking ticket.

It could be illegal to let anybody anywhere find out that you have a gun. Then you could legally have a gun so long as nobody finds out, but you would be a criminal as soon as the government knows. This would be functionally the same as having guns be illegal all the time — you can have an illegal gun safely as long as nobody knows — but it would preserve your official right to own a gun even while it in practice made that right just as useless as it would be if guns were completely illegal.

Once you allow a loophole, your right is no longer inalienable. I think that at least felons who are off parole should have the same gun rights as everybody else.

For awhile I lived in a particularly poor apartment building. It was beside the freeway and there were lots of mosquitoes, and most of the people there were poor. My downstairs neighbor explained to me how useful it was for me to have him there — the various drunks and crazies knocked on his door instead of mine. Particularly on Saturday night. One time it was a guy looking for his ex-wife’s boyfriend. Another time it was somebody looking for Frank. They usually had guns. A couple of them shot through his door. I saw the bullet holes. He had a routine where he stood beside the door and flung it open while pointing his own gun at them and he’d yell at them asking what they wanted. They figured out that it was the wrong address and they went away. Living where he did, he *needed* that gun. But because he was a felon, he would go back to jail if he ever got caught with it. He had to accept that. His wife and 3 children would suffer, but there was nothing he could do.

I never had any problem because anybody who wanted to bother me had to climb a flight of stairs first. The only problem I had in the 3 months I lived there was somebody lying down groaning on my landing. I asked him why he was there and he groaned. I shook his shoulder and asked him again and he groaned. I called 911 for the EMTs and they talked to him.

Anyway, it’s better that felons be allowed guns just as much as anybody else, and if they get in trouble with them then they’re in trouble. If they live in environments where they really *need* them, it’s wrong to punish them for it.

#86 Plume

“It’s actually more like, the conservatives ask, “Just what have the liberals got planned, that they need me disarmed before they do it?””

This is wrong on so many levels. From the obvious paranoia about “liberals,” to the straw man about wanting everybody defenseless.

But he is accurately reporting how they think.

You want to say they’re crazy to think that way. Yes, but they do think that way and there are a lot of them.

What if it was that way in the utopia you want to have? What if a whole lot of the population believe something crazy? You don’t want to force them to do things your way, but what they want is some crazy thing. You’d let them do it their way if that’s what a whole lot of people wanted, wouldn’t you? Even if it was something crazy?

Something you could mostly live with, that killed fewer than one person in a thousand per year?

“The notion that widespread civilian firearms ownership is some kind of backstop against government tyranny is a right-wing power fantasy, a solution looking for a problem.”

I don’t know, perhaps the notion that it isn’t is a left-wing “Yeah, we can get away with doing wildly unpopular things” power fantasy, where gaining formal power is the only thing that matters, and that you use it to do things a lot of people hate is meaningless because there’s no formal route for them to stop you.

Government is a collective illusion, we call that illusion “legitimacy”, and must always take care not to piss so many people off that they shake off the illusion and decide they don’t care what the government says the rules are. That’s something people who want to do widely unpopular things with government really don’t want to face.

“I never had any problem because anybody who wanted to bother me had to climb a flight of stairs first”
Maybe you should have switched apartments with him to gain access to all the “benefits” of having a gun pointed at you crazy diamond you.

“But he is accurately reporting how they think.”

About how who thinks?

Wow, Brett actually thinks Oklahoma City actually deterred the government? Yeah, just like Brinsley deterred the NYPD.

“Government is a collective illusion, we call that illusion “legitimacy”, and must always take care not to piss so many people off that they shake off the illusion and decide they don’t care what the government says the rules are. That’s something people who want to do widely unpopular things with government really don’t want to face.”

This is all true, but this is exactly why the fantasy individual gun violence protecting your rights is so absurd. Guns only deter the government when used collectively. But, given all the advantages our constitution gives to conservatives, any situation in which the government and liberals are on the same side in oppressing conservatives (no, ACA is not oppression, but note well that all the guns you brought to protests were useless in stopping it anyway) would be one in which liberals have overwhelming popular support. (Note to Ze: what I said above only applied in the context of the possibility of liberal oppression in the U.S.)

@MPAVictoria

Yes! The limits we put on ammo capacity here in Canada are eminently reasonable (though current Canadian regs for .22 rifles would run afoul of Plume’s 6 bullet limit).

And you could be right, that may be what he’s referring to, but why the separate line about ‘detachable ammo containers’. Maybe he meant internal box magazine? That’s the only way I see how a six shooter (Plume @86) would qualify as being acceptable. Of course, six shooters are handguns, and our handgun rules here are much more restrictive than those south of the border (unless you get a hunter and trapper certification and permit you might as well store your handguns at the one designated range where you’re allowed to use them, and better have your local RCMP detachment on speed dial if you even think of transporting your handgun anywhere else).

Anyway, as I said before, the important thing I wanted to get across was that I was glad Plume went to the lengths of providing list of recommendations.

“Anyway, as I said before, the important thing I wanted to get across was that I was glad Plume went to the lengths of providing list of recommendations.”

Indeed. :-)

@Seth Gordon 88 “Insurgencies generally start out with terrorist operations, which do not require guns per se (improvised explosives serve the purpose quite nicely). As they advance from terrorism to guerrilla warfare, one of the first things they do is raid the armories of the occupying power.”

Thanks for the lecture, but is it supposed to prove, somehow, the hypothesis that guns are “absolutely useless”?

Beside, as far as I know the Black Panthers, for example, purchased their shotguns legally. Their activism resulted in a new gun-control law in California, which is exactly a wingnut scenario, usually dismissed by liberals as a fantasy.

“The notion that widespread civilian firearms ownership is some kind of backstop against government tyranny is a right-wing power fantasy, a solution looking for a problem.”

Another point of view would be that perhaps it’s a solution preventing some problems (and creating some other problems, of course). I don’t think it’s a fantasy, it creates different dynamics. Clearly, whatever the government is planning to do, widespread civilian firearms ownership would have to enter into the calculations.

I don’t think it’s a fantasy, it creates different dynamics. Clearly, whatever the government is planning to do, widespread civilian firearms ownership would have to enter into the calculations.

If people who are unpopular with both the government and its constituents are heavily armed, the “different dynamics” involve the government giving its agents enough firepower to overwhelm whatever opposition it might face, and apologists for the government using the danger to justify whatever repressive tactics the government uses. This is evident not only from the militarization of police in the US today, but also historical events such as Argentina’s “dirty war”.

Thanks for the lecture, but is it supposed to prove, somehow, the hypothesis that guns are “absolutely useless”?

The hypothesis is that guns are absolutely useless for conservatives in deterring liberals. That’s the scenario Brett was talking about.

No liberal has ever said “we could pass that law, but conservative gun nuts would shoot at us, so better not.”. Many liberals have said “we could pass that law, but conservative gun nuts would vote against us and donate money to our opponents, so better not.”

#103
I had a Mormon friend who told me he was a teenage missionary in Argentina in the late 70’s; I asked him if it wasn’t a terrifying experience, what with the dirty war going on and all.
He said he had no idea what I was talking about; he wandered through the country staying with people, and never experienced any fear or danger.
Then I realized, he moved about exclusively in the company of the upper class, the ones who lived in complete safety and protection.
We sometimes mythologize tyrannical states as being where the government oppresses all people equally without regard to class or ethnicity.
Yet in every one I am aware of, there is always a certain class or ethnic group that supports the tyranny, that is protected by it.

The notion that American citizens with guns will defend themselves from tyranny is a ludicrous fantasy; As we have witnessed here in America, a white man can stalk through the supermarket with an assault rifle, and merely be a curiosity; a black man can hold a toy gun and be shot dead on the spot.
There is, today in America a de facto gun ban in effect for black people, and this ban is created by exactly the climate of fear and chaos that gun enthusiasts are so determined to inflame.

@103 “the “different dynamics” involve the government giving its agents enough firepower to overwhelm whatever opposition it might face”

They can do it, and sometimes they do it, but it’s an expensive high-risk tactic: bad domestic and international publicity, lower morale, problematic in several other ways. That’s why, for example, after a couple of high-profile incidents in early 90s and the retaliation in 1995 in Oklahoma, they changed their tactics, carefully avoiding angering militia groups. 20 years now.

@110, this is irrelevant. I’m talking about the incidents that caused the retaliation in Oklahoma. Okay, I’ll try again. Every time the government intervene somewhere against the sympathies of the local community (think of the case in the late 90s, with the Cuban boy in Miami, for example), they can’t just send two cops on bicycles, they have to send a squad in full military gear, exposing the police state, and creating backlash, bad publicity, etc. It’s a costly thing to do, politically, they have to think twice before doing it. This creates a different dynamic, compared to the situation where they could just send a cop to beat you up with a stick.

That’s why, for example, after a couple of high-profile incidents in early 90s and the retaliation in 1995 in Oklahoma, they changed their tactics, carefully avoiding angering militia groups.

No, no. Do not blur together the “high-profile incidents” and Oklahoma City. The feds changed tactics after Waco. Oklahoma City, on the other hand, was politically useful to Clinton/Reno. If Clinton and Reno were the kind of psychopaths that the militias thought they were, Oklahoma City would have been the perfect excuse to start using those tactics again.

Oklahoma didn’t make the government avoid angering militias, 9/11 didn’t make America avoid angering al Qaeda, Liu and Ramos’s deaths won’t make the NYPD or NYCPBA avoid angering protestors. All of those incidents enhanced the power of the organizations they were aimed at.

All that said, I think what you wrote @111 is basically correct, and therefore I went too far in saying that guns were “absolutely useless” for an American right-wing revolt. Let me put it this way, there may be political utility in Americans carrying guns or even in extreme, unprecedented situations shooting at the feds. But in those extreme situations, the rebel’s cause will actually do better if the feds win the firefight.

I think that an armed insurgency with nothing fancier than rifles and improvised explosives can stymie a superpower even when only a small fraction of the population employs violence.

Depends on how much skin the superpower has in the game. You can’t really say “Screw you guys, I’m going home” when you’re already home. An insurgency in Iraq is very different from a rebellion in America.

I think that if only a tenth of the American right wing went all the way to armed insurgency, that few percent would be enough to tear the country apart.

You’re right, but not because the military couldn’t defeat right-wing civilians. It’s because the right-wing includes a lot of soldiers and cops.

The case study would probably be the British in Northern Ireland. Assuming the US right wing militia movements are as organisationally competent as the main paramilitaries in NI (which I’d assume they’re not) I’d guess the American security services would have it contained pretty quickly, but it’d still end up pointless, drawn out and bloody.
But it’d enable Brett Bellmore make some stupid symbolic political point, so awesome.

I’d be happy to make a deal with right wingers: I’d work to uphold their conception of “2nd amendment rights” as long as they worked to uphold the prevailing left interpretation of the rest of the Bill of Rights. That means no allowing us to be kicked out of protests in public spaces because we’d been there too long, or something like that, and there’s some kind of “been there too long” codicil to the right to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances.

Yes, but probably easier to contain domestically. Much easier to win domestic support, you can use already existing legitimate institutions (police forces, courts, security services), at home you have to ‘win’, internationally you don’t.

I’m not sure it even makes sense to talk about this. But it would make a difference if the ideology of the revolt attracted soldiers. A socialist revolt probably would not. A libertarian revolt in favor of their interpretation of the Constitution, maybe.

Also the goals of the revolt would matter a whole lot. If they were ready to do a whole lot of sabotage in blue states at the beginning, they might paralyze various things. Destroy a city’s water works and the city is not particularly inhabitable. Then you have a Katrina situation and you need to move refugees and there’s lots of confusion. Do that sort of thing to multiple cities, say. And do it to a few cities in red states to give the impression that it isn’t government versus insurgents, but red states versus blue states. That gives the insurgency some legitimacy.

It doesn’t take a lot of people to disorganize things a whole lot if the community isn’t prepared for them.

Of course, that would leave a hupton of bad feeling. Attacking masses of innocent civilians is not going to leave you with friendly neighbors. (I’m assuming the goal is to secede and not to own the whole shebang. If the intention is to occupy a bunch of disgruntled former citizens for a long time, then probably better to get the terror started early. Or if you don’t want to live with them, start the genocide right away.)

So I agree with Consumatopia. The insurgents do better if they don’t look very dangerous. Small numbers of them go out and get themselves killed, every day, for months on end. Increasing numbers of citizens agree with them. How long will you kill them before you agree to some sort of arrangement they can live with?

This would be just as effective, more effective, if they set themselves on fire. They aren’t trying to kill policemen or soldiers or politicians, they’re just making it completely clear that they are absolutely not willing to be governed by the US government. If they were a threat then it would be necessary to fight them to end the threat. But they are no threat, they would rather die than be part of the USA.

“Every time the government intervene somewhere against the sympathies of the local community (think of the case in the late 90s, with the Cuban boy in Miami, for example), they can’t just send two cops on bicycles, they have to send a squad in full military gear, exposing the police state, and creating backlash, bad publicity, etc.”

No – ask the black and (non-Cuan) hispanic communities.

According to the Gun Control Act of 1968, tt shall be unlawful for any person to sell or otherwise dispose of any firearm or ammunition to any person knowing or having reasonable cause to believe that such person—

(1) is under indictment for, or has been convicted in any court of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;

(2) is a fugitive from justice;

(3) is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 802));

(4) has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution;

(5) who, being an alien— (A) is illegally or unlawfully in the United States; or (B) except as provided in subsection (y)(2), has been admitted to the United States under a nonimmigrant visa (as that term is defined in section 101(a)(26) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101 (a)(26)));

(6) who [2] has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions;

(7) who, having been a citizen of the United States, has renounced his citizenship;

(8) is subject to a court order that restrains such person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner of such person or child of such intimate partner or person, or engaging in other conduct that would place an intimate partner in reasonable fear of bodily injury to the partner or child, except that this paragraph shall only apply to a court order that— (A) was issued after a hearing of which such person received actual notice, and at which such person had the opportunity to participate; and (B) (i) includes a finding that such person represents a credible threat to the physical safety of such intimate partner or child; or (ii) by its terms explicitly prohibits the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against such intimate partner or child that would reasonably be expected to cause bodily injury; or

(9) has been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.

I especially like (7).

I think its interesting that we only seem to speak of insurrection in terms of the Neo Confederates.
The very group that is the least oppressed, the most enfranchised, the most politically entrenched in America.

Why is it that the most ardent defenders of gun rights never assure us that the 2nd Amendment is necessary so that black militants can take to the streets and water the tree of liberty with some blood?

The prospect of black people with guns is nearly always the very reason for gun rights. By white people.

On another blog, I was defending the rioters of Ferguson against a commenter who was asserting that the rioting only made things worse. He mentioned that he was Jewish, and said that for marginalized groups, chaos and mob violence has historically never worked out well.

I think there is a lot to that. I notice that it isn’t black or Hispanic people who wax most enthusiastically about revolutionary violence- its almost always the people who don’t have a strong cultural memory of it.

Maybe with one link?

Unreal: MSNBC edits clip of man with gun at Obama rally to support racism narrative

An armed black conservative shows up at a protest, and CNN crops the film so that you can’t see he’s black, and then goes off on a riff about how the white guys showed up armed because of race. And you think, “Why is it that the most ardent defenders of gun rights never assure us that the 2nd Amendment is necessary so that black militants can take to the streets and water the tree of liberty with some blood?”

I can’t explain why people do something they don’t actually do, but I can explain why you have that false belief about them.

Brett, two police officers were deliberately murdered for political reasons by two people with ties to political criminal activity, who had literature urging revolution.

And Fox News quite deliberately kept quiet about this. Of course, this ties in with their Bundy coverage.

Evidence of what, though?
5 years ago a black guy showed up at a conservative rally with a gun and that shows…?
That a rally of hundreds of conservatives can draw 1 black guy? That conservative rallies are 99+% white?

OK, you got me there.

LWA, you’re completely blowing off the point, which is that, “5 years ago a black guy showed up at a conservative rally with a gun”, and CNN edited the footage so you couldn’t see he was black, and pretended he was a white racist.

The point is, that sort of lying propaganda from the MSM has helped form your impression of 2nd amendment activists. Don’t rely on what they’re telling you, is what I’m saying.

Yeah, you really love that narrative, too much to let facts get in the way of it. You don’t care a bit that CNN was willing to lie to you? Maybe you think that was the only time?

Brett, what actual facts do you have?

Do you perhaps have somebody’s estimate of the percentage of NRA membership that’s black? How about an estimate of NRA membership broken down by income? If it turned out that blacks whose income is between $100,000 and $200,000 are just as likely to join the NRA as whites who’s income is between those limits, that would say something interesting.

Maybe a whole lot of what people think is racism, is really just prejudice against poor people. People have some tendency to assume that blacks are poor, so they despise them, but they treat rich blacks just like rich whites and they treat poor blacks just like poor whites. Maybe? Where could we get the data?

Whatever data that matters will not come from a TV show where some protesters tried to showcase a black man (who might have been an actor they hired to play the part), and the news-show TV editors did not bite. Why would you expect infotainment editors to go along with the story you want to present? They’re making up their own story to amuse their viewers.

If you want to find out what’s going on, infotainment is mostly not an adequate way. What it’s important for, is that a whole lot of suckers do pay attention to it, so you need to know what story the editors are trying to push so you can predict how the suckers will respond.

So you can go on YouTube and look for “Ferguson riot” and you’ll get lots of videos of an entirely black crowd shuffling around a gas station, and then the gas station burns down. And some shots of protesters getting tear-gassed. They tend not to show you the white people except for a few with guns who claim that the blacks didn’t burn down their stores because of their machine guns. (They mostly didn’t think to take videos of the blacks deciding not to burn down their stores because of their machine guns, so they talk about it afterward.) Why don’t they show you the whites protesting? Why don’t they show you the whites rioting? Because the pictures they got were the ones they wanted to show.

You and I both know that the media is a stupid way to try to get facts. Why are you harping on this over a silly example, where the “facts” you wanted them to show were no better than the “facts” they did show?

#72:

I don’t want to look up the links now, but there was a survey that asked people whether they had used their guns to get out of dangerous situations without actually shooting them, and assuming the people in the survey were not lying and were representative, it was a couple million incidents a year.

That was probably the National Institute of Justice survey conducted in 1994. At least, that’s the report every gun rights supporter I’ve ever asked for evidence about defensive use sends me to . The NIJ research brief is

The wide variance between the NIJ survey and what other studies report warrants rigorous follow up before it can be generally accepted. Unfortunately, in the 20 years since neither the NIJ or other interested parties like the NRA have attempted to do so.

#142
So when Ralphie tells us he defended his ma and pa from Black Bart with his Red Rider 200 Shot Rangemaster Air Rifle, we should be skeptical?

“Whatever data that matters will not come from a TV show where some protesters tried to showcase a black man (who might have been an actor they hired to play the part), and the news-show TV editors did not bite. ”

Wow, actual desperation to hold onto the narrative, to the point where you’re willing to invent ‘facts’ for which there is no evidence. That’s impressive, in a way. Sad, but impressive.

Look, gun owner here, life member of the NRA, used to have some connections to the Michigan militia. Trust me, 2nd amendment activists don’t need to hire actors to pretend to be black conservative gun owners. They’re around, they’re real, they’re airbrushed out of media coverage.

#146 BB

Wow, actual desperation to hold onto the narrative, to the point where you’re willing to invent ‘facts’ for which there is no evidence.

I don’t claim it as ‘fact’. I pointed out that people are trying to create a narrative and you complain that the media does not cooperate. OK, the media does not cooperate with the story you are trying to get them to tell. So what else is new? They are telling their own story, not the story you want them to tell. When they decide to tell your story instead of their own, they will be the captured Bellmore-owned Bellmore-dominated media.

Seriously, why wouldn’t there be real conservative black gun owners? Is political ideology genetically determined, and linked to skin color? No, of course it isn’t.

Of course. And it’s plausible that conservative black gun owners would be welcome in some NRA groups. Could you get statistics about that? To my way of thinking if it’s only a very few then it doesn’t amount to much. If it’s 13%, that’s impressive! If you look at the wealth profile of NRA members, and you weight blacks by that profile and it matches that — if blacks with some particular wealth levels are as likely to join the NRA as whites of that wealth level I’d find that impressive too.

But you aren’t telling us about that. You’re saying that there are some conservative black gun owners, which is plausible — there are arab Likud members, there were even a few Jewish nazis, there are Republicans on welfare, why not? — and then you’re pointing to the media clownshow and telling us it’s a clownshow, like you hadn’t noticed before.

> He was what he appeared to be.

If he’s what he appears to be then he doesn’t stand as a symbol for other black guys, of course. It’s only if he’s more than he appears to be, it’s only if you take him as standing not just for himself but for all the other black guys that were present but not seen, that would let his presence carry the load you want, here.

This is your problem, Brett: you might enjoy arguing with people, but you’re actually embarrassingly humiliatingly terrible at it.

“don’t sell mr. bellmore short. he is effective enough at creating knots of discord that kleiman and humphreys et al. burned their blog to the ground, destroying all archived comments, ruining their comment system, and worsening their blog to the point that it is of no interest to anyone except themselves primarily because of the power of the bellmore. you minimize his abilities to your peril.”

That’s because the guys at samefacts.com tolerated him.

” it’s only if you take him as standing not just for himself but for all the other black guys that were present but not seen, that would let his presence carry the load you want, here.”

The significance of a journalist lying about something isn’t to be found in the something, but in the lie. Do you really think, “Oh, sure, they tried to pretend that a black guy was a white guy, because his being black got in the way of their “racists protesting Obamacare” narrative, but who cares, they’re relentlessly honest all the rest of the time.”?

The black guy they lied about wasn’t a symbol of anything. He was just a fact they lied about.

Nope, never used a pseudonym. Kleiman called his site “samefacts”, so whenever he cited a “fact” I could document was false, I pointed that out to him. And he kind of went nuts in response. Worst case of cognitive dissonance I ever saw.

Brett @114: No question, the US military could crush the American R-W without raising a sweat, were it located in some South American nation, or maybe somewhere in Africa. Which doesn’t mean that the NRA by it’s lonesome couldn’t render the US ungovernable if sufficiently pissed off, because the NRA isn’t off someplace else, it’s here, where the politicians directing the army live, where the logistics train starts, where the soldiers have NRA relatives.

This is actually backwards.

All else being equal, domestic governments are far more effective at combating insurgencies than foreign governments. The reasons are not difficult to fathom: domestic governments more frequently have enormous intelligence advantages over foreign governments with respect to an insurgency, and domestic governments tend to have greater interest in defeating an insurgency than foreign governments. Moreover, as an institution, the US military is absolutely loyal to the civilian command authority, and anyone who thinks membership in the NRA, or other personal political views, would affect that on a significant level is completely mistaken.

I also have to say that I find the assertion @85 that the OKC bombing caused the US to reduce confrontation with violent “militia” groups or other violently subversive elements to be completely at odds with the facts, as is the implication that the US was carrying out a lawless and violent campaign against tax evaders.

The fact is that 2nd Amendment is an archaic remnant of a time when suspicion of standing armies (inherited from the British – those who think it distinctively American should realize how much of their rhetoric resembles that of the Tories arguing for a naval-centric strategy at the start of the War of the Spanish Succession) was at a peak and when circumstances allowed many to believe that the militia system in place could be effective for both domestic and foreign defense. Those days, and those circumstances, are long gone – but the 2nd Amendment remains in the Constitution, and so courts must continue to pay it heed, even if it serves no useful purpose.

Among other things, what distinguishes the seemingly bizarre US court cases regarding the 2nd Amendment from Pakistan’s relations with the Taliban is that the former are based on a respect for rule of law, while the latter are based on an absence of rule of law.

114 “Which doesn’t mean that the NRA by it’s lonesome couldn’t render the US ungovernable if sufficiently pissed off”

It reminds me of the joke, originated, I believe, in Latin America: why there are no coups in the US? Because it doesn’t have an American Embassy.

So don’t worry, it won’t happen, the NRA will never get sufficiently pissed off.

#160 BB

No, the fact is, during the 90’s, Waco wasn’t alone, it was just the last and the worst in a series of similar incidents. And then the government stopped doing that, found that it WAS capable of ending standoffs without bullet riddled bodies and burnt down buildings.

I don’t much like that it took something like the OK bombing for the feds to decide that slaughtering Americans wasn’t a safe thing to do.

I think your explanation is crazy and wrong. But we’re talking about cause-and-effect. About why things changed. So it’s a matter of opinion about historical events, and there’s no possible way to prove who’s wronger.

But here’s my reasoning, that leads me to believe that you are crazy wrong about this.

Your reasoning goes like this:

1. The Federal government used to try to maintain a monopoly on violence. They let state governments enforce state laws, but the Feds reserved the right to change state laws whenever they wanted so it was still their monopoly. Likewise with local police etc. The Mafia could do some violence provided the government didn’t catch them.

So when they found armed groups that wanted to do whatever-the-hell they wanted, vowing to fight off the government if the government tried to stop them, the government did in fact try to stop them and sometimes found itself killing bunches of them.

2. Then the OK City bombing happened. It happened because people who were upset about Waco etc decided to strike back.

3. The Federal government suddenly realized that they could not win a fight against tens of thousands of crazy armed Americans, so they gave up. They decided to let the armed crazy Americans do whatever-the-hell they wanted. They could rape, murder, blow up buildings, not pay taxes, anything. Because if the government tried to stop them, they would blow up the government buildings with the government workers in them. So the US government surrendered. They didn’t publicly admit it. They did not announce to the press “If you want all the rights of US citizenship with none of the responsibilities, just join a large armed group and we will no longer try to enforce any US, state, or city laws against you. You can do absolutely whatever-the-hell you want.”. It was true, but they didn’t say it was true because as long as some US citizens did not notice, the US government still had some victims who would obey the laws and pay their taxes.

I agree about #1. They did do that.

I maybe agree about #2. Maybe that was the main reason a lone bomber did the bombing, or the main reason a small group of terrorists did it. I think the US government believed it was a lone bomber because if they thought there were more terrorists they would have tried harder to catch them.

I strongly doubt #3. I don’t think the US government would surrender so easily. You are predisposed to believe it, because you *want* to believe that small numbers of armed fanatics can bring the government to its knees. But it doesn’t ring true to me.

My version goes more like this.

3′. Waco caused a whole lot of unfavorable publicity for the US government. So the government tried to work harder at peaceful negotiation. Also, it caused a lot of paranoia among already-crazy armed groups. They might be next! So they made some changes too.

So imagine what happened the next time the government got reports about a crazy cult that abused children. The US government sent a message with minimal demands. They demanded to interview each child alone, and any children who wanted to leave could leave. Any child who wanted to stay could stay. No publicity. If the demands were not met there would be plenty of publicity, and even after the media was through with them they’d be plagued with mentally-unstable volunteers who wanted to join, that they would have to sort out.

The cult looked over the demand. Of course they knew the End Times were coming and they must be prepared for the day they are all killed. But maybe that wasn’t today. This was a demand they could accept. So the government agents started interviewing the children. They found that most of the children said they like what was being done to them. 3 out of 152 children wanted to leave. That’s all the Feds tried to take. The cult thought it over. Did they want to die in flames over 3 children who didn’t want to stay? They agreed to it. No publicity. No massacre. We didn’t hear about it.

Not a surrender. The Feds get better at demanding compliance in ways that get compliance, and the militias, cults, and individual armed lunatics get better at complying. Was it because of the bad publicity over Waco, or OK City, or what? I dunno. Nobody knows. We can only guess. It might have had something to do with something that happened at or after Waco, and before the next atrocity that would have happened but didn’t.

I can’t prove that my reasonable hypothesis is better than your crazy conspiracy theory. It seems saner to me, but that’s just me. You could be right, and it’s possible that someday documents will surface that show some government officials were thinking your way. And it’s possible those documents are not forged and can be proven to not be forged. Then I will be surprised and (I want to think) I will admit that you were at least partly right and I was wrong to say it was crazy.

“and a 1993 incident in which a religious cult killed 4 ATF agents executing a warrant, ”

Wow. What a way to describe a cattle car full of heavily armed government agents conducting an unprovoked violent assault: “Executing a warrant” Just stunning. That’s like describing the MOVE bombing as “a 4th of July celebration”.

After all these years, two decades, the thing that still horrifies me the most about Waco is not what the government did, but the way ‘liberals’ responded. Swallowed the government’s excuses for murder, and asked for more. All you guys need to be ok with the final solution, I think, is to not like who gets marched into the ovens.

No, J, that is not my reasoning.

You had a federal government which was increasingly hostile to the exercise of a basic, explicitly guaranteed civil liberty. The government agency charged with infringing that civil liberty was becoming increasingly abusive. And gun controllers were claiming, absurdly, that the right of the people could only be exercised in a militia.

So people started forming militias. The government could have dealt with this quite simply by appointing officers for those militias, the Constitution certainly gave them the power to do so. Instead, the government decided to treat these people as a horrible threat. And, by doing so, fed their fears.

About that time the government was getting increasingly violent in the way it dealt with political dissidents. A long series of incidents, of which Ruby Ridge and Waco were only the most public, made it seem quite reasonable to those militia types that the government really was ramping up to become a tyranny.

And at Waco, a government agency suffering from bad press killed a bunch of people in an effort to get some good publicity, (Operation showtime they called it, an effort to make Congress forget they’d been caught selling “Nigger hunting licenses” at the Good ole boy roundup.) and the only result was white washes until a building got blown up.

Wow. What a way to describe a cattle car full of heavily armed government agents conducting an unprovoked violent assault: “Executing a warrant” Just stunning. That’s like describing the MOVE bombing as “a 4th of July celebration”.

It similarly takes some doing to describe lawbreaking kooks as political dissidents.

#163 BB

No, J, that is not my reasoning.

Sorry, Brett. From what you wrote before, and from what you wrote this last time, I still don’t see a difference between what you said and what I thought you said.

Could you please explain the difference again?

I love how Brett keep throwing MOVE into the mix as a form of ju-jitsu, as if a) that was a federal matter, which it wasn’t, b) to the extent that it represented any reflection of federal power or policy, it happened under the auspices of St. Ronnie Reagan, and c) he and his right-wing pals didn’t cheer every charred African-American body they pulled from that apartment block.

js.: “An Andrew F./Brett Bellmore fight is one of the most surreally awesome things to have happened on these threads in a while.”

George H.W. Bush resigned his lifetime membership in the NRA over the same conflict. First paragraph of his resignation letter:

I was outraged when, even in the wake of the Oklahoma City tragedy, Mr. Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of N.R.A., defended his attack on federal agents as “jack-booted thugs.” To attack Secret Service agents or A.T.F. people or any government law enforcement people as “wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms” wanting to “attack law abiding citizens” is a vicious slander on good people.

Ha. I like the Andrew F./Bush Sr. axis. (Also, fuck. I’d forgotten that that LaPierre asshole has been around for that long.)

“The Philadelphia police burned down a house full of black militants, and that inspired the militia movement. ”

It wouldn’t have inspired the militia movement that lives in liberals’ heads, but the militia movement that existed outside their heads did indeed consider that an outrage.

“Sorry, Brett. From what you wrote before, and from what you wrote this last time, I still don’t see a difference between what you said and what I thought you said.”

Well, since I get the impression that you really try to understand the other side, sure.

“Your reasoning goes like this:

So when they found armed groups that wanted to do whatever-the-hell they wanted, vowing to fight off the government if the government tried to stop them, the government did in fact try to stop them and sometimes found itself killing bunches of them.”

Ok, first off, I’d never reason from that “monopoly on violence” basis, because the Weberian definition of the state is alien to American political/constitutional traditions. We’re based here on the notion that sovereignty is inherent in the people, who partially and contingently delegate some of it to the government, and never gave up a lot of it. Such as the right to use violence in self defense. The Weberian definition of the state is exactly the sort of thing our “New order for the ages” was supposed to reject, for all that it was formalized afterwards.

Secondly, the militia groups did not want to do “whatever-the-hell they wanted”. They wanted to exercise an explicit constitutional right in an organized fashion. They vowed to fight the government if it became a tyranny, a threat no government not aspiring to become a tyranny, or at least test the limits, should be concerned about.

Generally speaking, the militia groups were just a bunch of guys who liked guns, and liked playing out in the woods, and found a way to combine their likes. It was actually going mainstream, because it had gotten larger than the supply of crazies. Which is why, for instance, McVeigh got kicked out when he tried to join.

“2. Then the OK City bombing happened. It happened because people who were upset about Waco etc decided to strike back.”

To be specific, it happened because several people who were extremely upset both about Waco et all, AND upset that politicians who’d gotten elected promising to do something about it conducted a white-wash. Expressly, they wanted to demonstrate to the government, and specifically the BATF, that it wasn’t immune to recieving what it was dishing out.

“3. The Federal government suddenly realized that they could not win a fight against tens of thousands of crazy armed Americans, so they gave up. They decided to let the armed crazy Americans do whatever-the-hell they wanted. They could rape, murder, blow up buildings, not pay taxes, anything. Because if the government tried to stop them, they would blow up the government buildings with the government workers in them. So the US government surrendered. They didn’t publicly admit it. They did not announce to the press “If you want all the rights of US citizenship with none of the responsibilities, just join a large armed group and we will no longer try to enforce any US, state, or city laws against you. You can do absolutely whatever-the-hell you want.”. It was true, but they didn’t say it was true because as long as some US citizens did not notice, the US government still had some victims who would obey the laws and pay their taxes.”

Not so much a realization that they couldn’t win, as a realization at the top that they weren’t playing toy soldier, that their own personal hides were on the line, too.

“They could rape, murder, blow up buildings, not pay taxes, anything.” Now, surely you must know that I wouldn’t so characterize the militia movement, having had an inside view of it, rather than getting all my impressions of it from the movement’s enemies.

“So the US government surrendered.” The US government saw the stakes were high enough that they had to stop needlessly pissing people off. The government doesn’t fix even easy to fix mistakes, if the cost isn’t personal. There were a lot of problems with the SOP the government was using, which were unnecessarily escalating situations. Like shooting dogs. Like not negociating in good faith. Like not waiting people out. Like using inceninary tear gas on flamable buildings. (Well, they still do that if they want a fire, see the Dorner standoff.)

They didn’t stop having standoffs after Waco. They stopped resolving them with mass slaughters.

It wouldn’t have inspired the militia movement that lives in liberals’ heads, but the militia movement that existed outside their heads did indeed consider that an outrage.

Leaving aside the climbdown from “it inspired them” to “they considered it an outrage,” is there evidence for this? Were there mentions of Osage Avenue in the same context as Ruby Ridge or Waco?

Yes, the NRA does occasionally expel members, and I’d assume that they give you a refund if you bought a life membership.

Here’s a general rule: If a politician buys a life membership in the NRA after deciding to run for President as a Republican, the only thing it tells you about him is that he thinks NRA members vote.

#175 BB

Ok, first off, I’d never reason from that “monopoly on violence” basis, because the Weberian definition of the state is alien to American political/constitutional traditions. We’re based here on the notion that sovereignty is inherent in the people, who partially and contingently delegate some of it to the government, and never gave up a lot of it. Such as the right to use violence in self defense. The Weberian definition of the state is exactly the sort of thing our “New order for the ages” was supposed to reject, for all that it was formalized afterwards.

That makes sense. I was thinking of it from the government point of view, that *they* would think they had a monopoly on violence. But I should have paid more attention to *your* point of view, which says the people don’t grant them that.

Secondly, the militia groups did not want to do “whatever-the-hell they wanted”. They wanted to exercise an explicit constitutional right in an organized fashion. They vowed to fight the government if it became a tyranny, a threat no government not aspiring to become a tyranny, or at least test the limits, should be concerned about.

Again I was looking at it from a government point of view and not yours. As far as the government is concerned, if an armed group resists government authority and the government is scared to stop them, then the government is letting them do whatever-the-hell they want. Because the government is backing down, not enforcing its rules, and if it does that because it’s scared to fight then it’s surrendering to whatever the winner wants.

But your own point of view is that the people who challenged the government had only limited, reasonable desires to protect their inalienable rights.

It looks like I got you mostly right about why the OK city bombing happened. At that point I was looking at what the militias wanted.

“So the US government surrendered.” The US government saw the stakes were high enough that they had to stop needlessly pissing people off. The government doesn’t fix even easy to fix mistakes, if the cost isn’t personal. There were a lot of problems with the SOP the government was using, which were unnecessarily escalating situations. Like shooting dogs. Like not negociating in good faith. Like not waiting people out. Like using inceninary tear gas on flamable buildings. (Well, they still do that if they want a fire, see the Dorner standoff.)

I think the central disagreement you and I have about this, is about the effect of the OK city bombing. I think that the bad publicity they got from Waco was the main reason for the change, and it was personal to politicians and to the high-level bureaucrats who got blamed and others who saw they could be blamed if they repeated the actions. Waco was a PR disaster.

You attribute it to OK, which was if anything a PR victory for the government and a PR disaster for the militias, though they almost-successfully denied any involvement.

Where we disagree is particularly about how the government reacted. I think that my view of how government agents thought about it, and about how they thought of militias, probably fits the reality better than yours — though I base that on personal experience and reasoning and such, and it might not be right. But I was wrong to describe my view of how government officials were thinking as if it came from you.

They didn’t stop having standoffs after Waco. They stopped resolving them with mass slaughters.

Yes. So we agree that it wasn’t the government actually backing down. They still try to enforce their laws even against armed fanatic groups, but their manner has changed to increase compliance.

Suppose for a moment that part of what they were doing before was training. They wanted to be sure their people were trained to do intensive civilian control, and they wanted to make sure the training was correct. And maybe they found flaws in the training, and maybe they fixed them.

But more recently they don’t need that kind of live-fire exercise, because the military has practiced it thoroughly in Iraq etc, and we have lots of veterans on police forces and in the reserves etc who have plenty of experience. If they found it necessary to do it here, they know exactly how.

I apologize for misrepresenting you. I let my own thinking about what the government side was like, get in the way of describing what I thought that you thought the government was like.

You do have a point. Some people claim that the IRA got much better concessions after they bombed Thatcher — she would have been killed if she had been using the bathroom in her hotel suite at the time. It’s unclear to me how true that is. She had been planning concessions before, and claimed after the bombing that they would have to go slow so people wouldn’t think it was because of the bombing. But there was an agreement just a year later. Maybe the claims that they were already planning any concessions were lies and the documents forged, to make it look like the bombing was not successful when it was. The bombing, and Thatcher’s public response to it, did greatly increase her popularity in Britain.

Similarly it has been claimed that the Black Panthers and various efforts at armed resistance were more effective at ending segregation than MLK and his attempts toward a peaceful transition.

Your ideas have a long history, and I don’t know how to prove which times they’re more right versus more wrong.

You’ll find the MOVE bombing discussed in the book “No More Wacos”, for instance.

Once, with a couple of footnotes, according to GoogleBooks. Neither MOVE nor Philadelphia shows up in the word cloud.

And that was from 1997. It’s not entirely inconceivable that by then the militia movement realized it had a perception problem–specifically, that lots of people took the movement’s basic principle to be “It’s wrong to treat white people that way”–and went back to find one (but no more than one) recent instance where black people were also treated that way.

This ought to blow your mind: Black NRA member mentions MOVE bombing. Guy must not exist, violating that many liberal assumptions about gun owners.

My mind seems to be intact so far. I even know that the mayor of Philadelphia in 1985 was black. WHOOOAAAA

Yes, people are complicated. Here’s a cookie.

#184 Plume

Scratch someone in the American militia movement, and you all too often get a right-wing, racist, xenophobic paranoid nutcase.

No, wait a minute. We have an example right here to test your theory. Scratch Brett Bellmore, and you get — Brett Bellmore.

“Scratch Brett Bellmore, and you get — Brett Bellmore.”

Who is?

Brett, surely you cannot say some of these things without some underlying sense of doubt as to their veracity. They don’t pass the smell test.

Brett @163: Wow. What a way to describe a cattle car full of heavily armed government agents conducting an unprovoked violent assault: “Executing a warrant” Just stunning. That’s like describing the MOVE bombing as “a 4th of July celebration”.

76 federal agents with search and arrest warrants executed a plan relying upon a fast, forced entry with the objectives of securing the Davidians’ large cache of weapons and arresting Koresh and others before the Davidians could mount armed resistance.

Given that the Davidians were stockpiling hundreds of weapons and training for doomsday, and given the evident mental instability of the cult leader, one can understand the rationale behind the manner in which the warrants were to be executed.

Koresh, having received advance notice of the raid, distributed weapons and ammunition, and prepared to meet the federal agents with armed resistance.

Two hours later after the agents attempted to gain entry and met with heavy resistance, 4 agents were dead and 16 were wounded by gunfire from the Davidians. There was zero justification for the actions of the Davidians, regardless of the tactical merits or deficiencies of the plan and execution.

Needless to say, the 70+ deaths, many children, that were the outcome of the 51 day standoff that followed were deeply tragic.

Following this horrific outcome, the ATF conducted a sharply critical internal review, resulting in the modification of training, doctrine, and procedures, most particularly in the order that “dynamic entries” in such cases were to be a last resort. Reviews from other agencies followed, which reached the same conclusions. A later independent report from 1999 found some discrepancies and obstruction by agents involved, but for all significant questions also found the same answers.

Just to be clear: Waco was viewed as a horrific failure by the federal government, and by itself motivated an adjustment in training, doctrine, and procedures. The same, incidentally, is true of Ruby Ridge. These views were in place, and those changes occurred, before the OKC bombing.

Brett @163: And at Waco, a government agency suffering from bad press killed a bunch of people in an effort to get some good publicity,

There are two ways to interpret this claim.

One, the most charitable, is to read this as claiming that PR considerations drove an ill-considered government raid that unintentionally resulted in an extended firefight, a 51 day standoff, and the eventual deaths of so many people. Though the guilt rests completely with the Davidians, the government’s imprudence contributed.

Two, less charitably, is to read this as bizarrely claiming that the government intended to kill lots of people in Waco as a PR effort.

If you mean one, then this is hardly evidence of a government tending towards tyranny. It’s evidence of needed improvement in enforcing the law (as J Thomas argues). And if you mean two… I’d start to harbor doubt that we’re on the same planet.

Brett @175: Not so much a realization that they couldn’t win, as a realization at the top that they weren’t playing toy soldier, that their own personal hides were on the line, too.

I see. Law enforcement officials whose agencies routinely investigate, infiltrate, infuriate, and arrest violent criminals of the organized and unorganized variety suddenly realized after OKC that “gee, someone might put a truck bomb outside my office next, or do something else to hurt me, so I better be extra careful not to let another Ruby Ridge or Waco happen.”

That scenario seems more likely to you than federal law enforcement thinking to itself: this was not a rational or justifiable act, and as with any other violent criminals or violent criminal organizations, there will be no compromise and no reprieve, but rather intensified investigations, arrests, and preventive measures?

Really?

And by the way, as to gun rights, the interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is an arguable affair. It’s unlikely that everyone will ever agree as to the “correct” interpretation of it, to the extent one exists at all. But even if one’s favored view loses in the courts, and in consequence ordinary laws are passed that one believes to violate the “correct” interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, this is not a matter of sufficient consequence, nor any interpretation of which I am aware sufficiently unreasonable, to seek to impose upon the government by individual violence what one could not by argument in the courts or by votes in the ballot box.

Put differently, I regard violence, or the threat of violence, against those who would pass or those who would enforce gun control laws to be no more legitimate than that violence used by the Taliban to resist what they view as unjust laws or policies by the Pakistani Government.

“Put differently, I regard violence, or the threat of violence, against those who would pass or those who would enforce gun control laws to be no more legitimate than that violence used by the Taliban to resist what they view as unjust laws or policies by the Pakistani Government.”

100% Right. 0% Wrong.

Andrew F. 12.30.14 at 12:03 am
“Brett, surely you cannot say some of these things without some underlying sense of doubt as to their veracity. They don’t pass the smell test.”

Brett @163: “Wow. What a way to describe a cattle car full of heavily armed government agents conducting an unprovoked violent assault: “Executing a warrant” Just stunning. That’s like describing the MOVE bombing as “a 4th of July celebration”.”

Andrew F.: “76 federal agents with search and arrest warrants executed a plan relying upon a fast, forced entry with the objectives of securing the Davidians’ large cache of weapons and arresting Koresh and others before the Davidians could mount armed resistance.”

Note – the fact that Koresh took long walks alone meant that he could be arrested easily, but that would presumably have p*ssed off his followers.

I want to point something out – the reaction of the right when the police kill blacks, hispanics or liberal whites has been 100% ‘they deserved it’, ‘the police keep order’, ‘resisting arrest’, ‘shiny metallic object’, ‘made a furtive move’, et cetera ad nauseum.

Brett @190: n order to arrest a man who regularly went for long walks alone.

No, that was not the only purpose.We can discuss the tactical merits and deficiencies of the plan, ranging from the decision to make a rapid forced entry to the errors in the ATF’s understanding of how the Davidians, as a religious cult focused on the end of days, would interpret and react to both the initial plan of operation and to the tactics used during the standoff that followed. But they’re not relevant to the ultimate point.

Given that “stockpiling hundreds of weapons” is LEGAL, particularly for gun dealers, this was no basis for any police action.

This is irrelevant Brett. A judge found probable cause to believe that the hundreds of weapons were being illegally modified and issued proper warrants on that basis. The proper place to challenge a warrant is the courtroom. Firing upon agents serving that warrant, however much one suspects it to be deficient, is frowned upon in our legal system.

“Koresh, having received advance notice of the raid”

Invited the agents over to peacefully search the Davidians’ property, and the response was accelerating plans for the armed assault

Deployed his followers with weapons and ammunition to defend by force any attempt to enter the compound by federal agents. And that is what they did for nearly two months.

Right, zero justification for defending themselves when fired on unprovoked. They should have just stood there and let themselves be gunned down, they would have been dead, but you would have granted them the moral high ground, depending on what cover story the BATF invented afterwards, of course.

Sorry, you think that the ATF was going to shoot all of them? Just the adults, or the children too?

Are you giving me the narrative as believed by certain portions of the militia groups, or the view from inside the minds of the Davidians?

Is it possible that both of those views are at odds with reality?

My not particularly charitable view is that the BATF stupidly expected the Davidians to roll over and play dead in response to suddenly being attacked,

“Being attacked.” Again, while you may be rightly alarmed or angered by law enforcement kicking down your door with a proper warrant, the appropriate way to contest the matter is in a court of law, not by responding with force.

Returning to the point, this operation was viewed as a horrific failure from within the federal government prior to the OKC bombing. And changes were made in light of that failure prior to the OKC bombing.

So the causal narrative that:

-> federal agents use violence indiscriminately against ‘political dissidents’ ->
-> OKC bombing scares federal agents ->
-> federal agents use violence more carefully to avoid provoking 2nd OKC bombing

is false. I think the first part of the causal chain is clearly false on an examination of the facts, but I don’t want to debate the details of Waco in this thread (though I could). There is no evidence at all of the second or third claims. People were furious after OKC – and indeed, no doubt aware of that fact, one defense mounted by the more paranoia-inclined of the militia groups was that OKC was actually a false-flag operation committed by the USG. And, again, changes in training, procedures, and doctrine were made prior to OKC. After OKC, investigation and infiltration actually became much more aggressive and thorough.

Let me ask you a related question. Do you think that after 9/11, NYPD was especially careful to avoid upsetting radical Islamists for fear of additional attacks, or do you think that they were much less restrained? How about the FBI, or the USG in general?

#196 BB

And despite what a lot of people on the left think, you actually are entitled to defend yourself against the police, if they are attempting to murder you.

Are you saying that there’s a law that describes circumstances when you can legally shoot at the police during what they say is an attempted arrest?

Or are you saying that regardless how the law actually works, you are morally entitled to shoot at police who are already trying to kill you?

There are a long line of court decisions confirming that you are entitled to self-defense against police, if they are unlawfully attempting an arrest. Where “unlawfully” can refer either to the basis for the arrest, or the manner in which it is carried out. See, for instance, John Bad Elk vs US

Is it just me who keeps on reading it as “Dravidians”?

#199 BB

There are a long line of court decisions confirming that you are entitled to self-defense against police, if they are unlawfully attempting an arrest. Where “unlawfully” can refer either to the basis for the arrest, or the manner in which it is carried out.

I don’t like that.

It ought to be set up so that when there is a legal dispute you have the responsibility to handle it. You shouldn’t have the right to kill people instead of getting arrested. But if you are wrongly arrested then you have the right to compensation.

I think the right approach is not fully practical. The police have too much power; if they have you in custody they can intimidate you into giving up your rights. But also I think that we need to find ways to make the right way practical, not give up what’s right because we have a structure set up which doesn’t work right.

I notice that in the case you quoted the US Supreme Court said because the police did not tell him what he was being arrested for, apparently did not know what they were arresting him for, and did not have a warrant, he should not be tried for murder but for manslaughter. Of course it’s better to be convicted for manslaughter than murder, but that’s nothing like saying that he had the right to kill fellow policemen because they were doing it wrong.

“The ATF did use aggressive tactics against groups who were likely to resist the rule of law violently.”

There are places where the rule of law will get you stoned for adultery, and that is perceived as perfectly normal by most people there. In other places this sort of thing is considered barbaric. Similarly the manner of serving a warrant, that you defend here, is not without controversy, you see. Needless to say, you and those who condone stoning certainly have the right to an opinion.

#206 BB

Here’s the way it works, J: A police officer is not legally omnipotent. He can conduct a search with a warrant, or under limited exceptions which have not yet swallowed that rule entirely. But he’s not entitled to just waltz into your home, and raid your refrigerator. He can arrest you, but he can’t just up and murder you as the most convenient way of arresting you, or under the pretext of arresting you.

Yes, I agree with all that.

And, if he goes beyond the limits of what he’s legally entitled to do, he is a criminal, just as much as if somebody who isn’t wearing a badge broke into your home and assaulted you.

Yes, agreed.

Ideally, when the police do something wrong while arresting you, they will take you in and charge you with whatever crime they are wrongly charging you with, and you simultaneously charge them with their crimes, and the courts will sort it out. This is one of the advantages of having a court system. Instead of just killing each other we can let the courts sort out who’s wrong.

We ought to be better off when people who have disputes can sort out their disputes through the courts, rather than some of them kill each other and then tell their stories about what the dead guy did to deserve it.

In practice there are various reasons why it doesn’t work that way. The courts are expensive. Your public defender will recommend a plea bargain and ignore police crimes against you. While you’re waiting trial the police can do lots of things to intimidate you into going along with whatever they say.

I claim all that needs to be fixed. The proper fix is not to decide that it’s OK to kill the police when you believe they are in error. Similarly, in almost every case the police should do their very best to bring suspects in alive for trial, rather than kill them.

I thought of an alternative, though I haven’t spent time working out all the bugs. It starts from this analogy: We used to have small loan companies that evaluated each client for honesty. When a client didn’t pay, the company lost money. Evaluating clients was a black art. We replaced that whole thing with credit card companies. They give credit cards to practically anybody. But if you stiff them you get bad credit and society may punish you in various ways for the rest of your life. It isn’t their problem to evaluate your honesty, it’s your problem to maintain your credit rating.

Suppose we hired a bunch of warrant servers. They don’t need full police skills and don’t deserve full police pay. They go out unarmed and serve warrants. The body cam shows that the warrant has been served and provides evidence if they get killed. They have no responsibility to bring in suspects, only to inform them that they need to be ready to win at court.

Suspects are only expected to show up for detention if they appear to be dangerous to society. No need for them to go to jail and get bail otherwise.

But in either case, people who don’t show up for trial are then in deep shit. They can get a message in apologizing and explaining and asking for another chance, or they can accept that they are now outlaws. In particular, violent suspects need to call in and arrange a peaceful way to surrender themselves, or else accept whatever happens when they are found.

Rule of law. Make sure that each suspect knows he needs to defend himself in court, without threatening him at that time. If he shows up to defend himself in court, there’s no need for violence. If he knows about his legal obligation and he does not honor it, *then* the rules have broken down.

If someone does false arrest, breaks into his house, etc etc etc, and he knows who they are (which he will know if it is official government agents pretending to act in an official capacity, and not government agents pretending to be kidnappers or burglars etc), then let him collect evidence and take them to court. He does not have the right to kill them, but he does have the right to get them in trouble and to demand compensation.

#208 BB

I agree that killing a cop who is trying to murder you is not a “fix”. That doesn’t mean that you aren’t entitled to do it. As I said, in order to go to court, you first have to survive.

When there are witnesses, you are more likely to survive if you are unarmed and you surrender.

The police have a whole lot less explaining to do if you were shooting at them when they killed you. But as the Wilson case shows, being unarmed is not nearly enough defense. But then, Wilson has lost his job and suffered considerable harrassment for his kill. If he had intended ahead of time to do it, and had gotten other police to do some of the shooting and serve as expert respected witnesses afterward, he probably would have had a lot less trouble.

And that was the position the Davidians found themselves in that day. They had no chance to fix the system as dozens of heavily armed men charged at them, filling the air with lead.

It’s hard to be sure what would have happened if things were different. But imagine they had been unarmed. It would be hard for the authorities, with lots of witnesses, kill more than a few of them. It was 4 government agents getting killed that gave the government side some legitimacy.

And if the government had killed, say, 12 people while suffering no resistance, they would have looked real bad. That would still be a massacre and not in any way a good outcome for the Davidians, but a lot better than how it actually turned out.

But then there’s what the government does when there’s no publicity. If you can’t find a way to get publicity, you’re probably screwed. Say you’re much better armed and trained than they expect, you might be able to kill the first team they send after you. Unlikely you can kill the second team.

Your only real defense against the government comes in a public court of law. Maybe you can win a little bit in the court of public opinion, depending on the mass media, but not that likely.

Brett @196: Andrew, to reach a court of law, you first have to survive. It would be nice if there were some kind of adversary process to challenge a rubber stamped fraudulently obtained warrant *before* your front door is starting to look like swiss cheese, but there isn’t.

This is such nonsense Brett. You can claim that the ATF was concerned to garner some good publicity, or you can claim that they were assaulting a compound uncaring as to whether they pointlessly killed unresisting men and women, but you can’t claim both while being logically consistent or without attributing an implausibly bizarre sense of PR to the ATF.

The wrongful death suits brought later, alleging that the ATF fired first, and that fire was returned in self-defense, were lost. The exhaustive 1999 Danforth study concluded that the Davidians fired first upon the ATF.

Look, why were the Davidians armed and placed in positions from which to fire upon ATF agents when they arrived?

Why did they continue to hold out for 51 days?

Could the fact that they were a religious cult with certain beliefs have played any role in their response?

You’re so locked into a narrative of government oppression that you’re ignoring the most salient facts about this. I have no doubt that, right now, your mind is reaching to stories about “lost doors” with bullet holes and recorded flickers on infrared scopes (both examined by Danforth, and during the lawsuit, and neither found to support what you wish) – but you’re blithely dismissing the overarching facts in weighing different possible explanations of the facts.

It frankly reminds me of what I’ve been reading on here in some of the comment threads about Wilson and Brown.

And let’s remember that the point here is that what happened at Ruby Ridge and Waco were perceived and judged as gross failures by the federal government, and that those failures motivated changes to training, doctrine, and procedures to reduce the probability of anything like them from occurring ever again.

I want to stress that as the point not only to avoid becoming lost in the morass of myth and controversy that has sprung up around those incidents, but also to stress that criminal violence has not been effective, is not effective, and will not be effective in altering the laws or policies of this country.

And despite what a lot of people on the left think, you actually are entitled to defend yourself against the police, if they are attempting to murder you. It’s generally imprudent unless the alternative is certain death, because the police tend to go berserk and do everything they can to assure your death if you do, but it’s still legally permitted.

If an officer is attempting to murder you – in the sense of intentionally and unlawfully attempting to kill you – then certainly you are permitted to use deadly force in self-defense.

However if you think you are being arrested on the basis of a flawed warrant, or if you think that the search warrant under which authority the police is searching your property was not properly issued, then you do not have a right to physically resist, though of course you may later contest the matter in court.

We do not live in a society where every group with a strong opinion and a collection of weapons gets to exercise their own idiosyncratic veto over the law. We have a legitimate government, and a legitimate process for making law.

And let me add one more point, to bring this back to the OP.

If a given practice ultimately becomes perceived to be too costly by enough of society, then by the momentum of episodes that dramatically exceed the tolerance of society for such costs, measures drastically curtailing that practice will be enacted – and that curtailment will be more drastic than it might have been had the adherents and proponents of the practice acted earlier, and more reasonably, to limit those costs and to defuse a growing call for such measures.

To speak less abstractly, the ultimate result of an unreasonable resistance to quite reasonable forms of gun control will eventually be the passage of laws far more restrictive than might have otherwise been the case.

I speak as someone who understands and respects the value of a firearm as a tool (whether in self-defense or other endeavors) and as part of recreation. But I also speak as someone who knows that volumes of weapons move, in unconscionable magnitude, from large-scale purchases on the legal market to illegal trafficking and sales on the black market – and in particular from large-scale purchases in states with more relaxed gun control laws to eventual illegal sales in cities like NY.

Were the volume of weapons into the black market better controlled, and were legal possession better able to be verified and reasonably limited, on a necessarily national level, I am persuaded that there would be less growing insistence on more stringent forms of gun control, and indeed that even cities such as NYC could allow greater scope for the ownership of firearms.

The more radical elements of the gun-rights movement fail to understand that though they may win temporary victories as a result of special interest lobbying and sympathetic judges, they are ultimately placing themselves in an untenable policy and political position, the collapse of which will result in greater losses – from their perspective – than they would have sustained had they adopted a more melioristic position.

Put differently, their tactical success is blinding them to the poverty of their strategy. And tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

” but you can’t claim both while being logically consistent or without attributing an implausibly bizarre sense of PR to the ATF.”

Of course I can. They planned to create footage of the BATF heroically taking down the evil cultists. They would then frame them for something. The court case might have fallen apart afterwards, or not, depending on how good the frame was, but that would have been enough for them to get past the Congressional hearings.

And, yes, they did frame people back then. Remember Ruby Ridge? Weaver got off because the press got in and photographed things before the federal forensics team falsified the evidence, and Weaver’s lawyer was able to prove in court using press photos that the feds’ evidence against Weaver was faked. Deliberately faked.

In fact, that was the cause of the Waco standoff going on so long. The one negotiating point the Davidians and the feds could never agree on, was the Davidians’ demand that 3rd party photographers be allowed in ahead of the feds to photograph all the evidence before the feds got a chance to destroy it. Like the front door full of inward pointing bullet holes that the Texas rangers said survived the fire, but which magically disappeared when the feds took control.

I think the fundamental sticking point here, is that you’re reasoning on the presumption that the BATF is a honest agency operating in good faith, but making mistakes. And that is not a presumption any well informed gun owner would take seriously. They had at the time a well publicized track record of abusive behavior, faking evidence, perjured testimony in court,(Massively inaccurate records they always testified under oath were 100% accurate.) even extra-judicial executions.

Yes, perjured testimony. All they had to do to frame the Davidians was to lose the records of some of the Davidians having legally registered fully automatic firearms, and then testify they were unregistered. Pathetically easy. And they’re still routinely perjuring themselves in court, and in warrant applications.

You look at them and see a government agency. We look at them, and see the military arm of the gun control movement, and we are the people they victimize. They piss on us, and you demand we call it rain. Not going to happen.

I love Brett’s incredibly flexible attitude. Feds are evil, and shouldn’t be trusted. Local PD’s have full rights of ‘cutting off the head and walking away’. Right-wingers with guns shooting blacks – same thing.

#216 BB

I’m trying to explain why, when the BATF turns down an offer to come by peacefully to conduct their search, and instead shows up conducting a military assault on your home, opening fire on you without provocation, you don’t assume that if you just let them do what they want, everything will work out in the end. Because they’re not the good guys, and you KNOW they’re not the good guys, and if you let them have their way, you’re screwed, and maybe dead.

Agreed. And then when you do shoot back at them (not to mention if you shoot first) then you’re also screwed and probably dead. It looks like a no-win situation. Like it is for a lot of black people.

“Similarly with government records, like gun registration data. If we can’t make it public (we ought to make it public, but that would require society to adapt too much to reality) then we should at least make it very hard for the people who use the data to change it without a “paper trail”. “

Alternative suggestion: Gun ownership is a civil right. Maybe you don’t like that, but it is. Do we keep church membership registration records? Printing press registrations? No, we do not.

The government keeps lots of data. Some of it can come up in court as evidence against you, and it should be hard to alter, in case there are people in government who want to persecute you. If they want to change the data there should be a record of what it was before, who changed it, and when.

If we keep gun registration data then it needs to be hard to falsify. Agreed on that much?

I don’t have a strong opinion about whether the government should have gun registration, but they do keep automobile registration and drivers license stuff, and airplane registration and pilots licenses, etc. I’d have to think pretty hard before I concluded that all the licenses and registrations should be removed. Guns are a special case which might fit in with the others and might not. I don’t want to argue about gun registration right now.

But I agree that we need to hold police to a high standard for evidence, and we can’t necessarily depend on them not to falsify stuff when there is nothing to stop them. So we should do what we can with modern technology to make it harder for them to falsify data.

Also, as much as possible we should arrange to get arrest warrants out without creating situations where people expect shootouts. When people get all tensed up and somebody sees somebody else’s hand moving toward their armpit or waist or ankle or someplace they might have a deadly weapon, and feel the need to shoot immediately to keep from being killed, that’s just a bad situation. As much as possible we should try to avoid that. Where possible, give identified suspects an incentive to come in on their own, without requiring the police to drag them in by force — until after they have proven they intend not to cooperate.

#218 BB

” It looks like a no-win situation. Like it is for a lot of black people.”

You yourself provided that link, IIRC, to The Toxoplasma of Rage, which noted that Brown didn’t get picked as a cause célèbre because his shooting was a clear cut injustice, but rather because it wasn’t. The left doesn’t talk about him because they want us to unite against police abuses, but because his case won’t unite us.

Sure, but aren’t there plenty of examples that are clear cut injustices?

Waco was similarly an example where the victims were not all that sympathetic. They were religious fanatics who kept guns partly to prepare for some sort of End Times, who were reputed to be abusing their children, etc. If they had been a bunch of quakers who wore colonial clothes like the Quaker Oats guy and believed fully in nonviolence who got killed, it would likely have blown over a lot faster because hardly anybody would believe the government was justified.

Lots of black people and some gun owners get victimized. We need to find ways to stop it.

“If we keep gun registration data then it needs to be hard to falsify. Agreed on that much?”

But, if we don’t need to keep gun registration data, because it is highly subject to abuse, and almost perfectly lacking in legitimate uses, then we need to stop keeping it, not make sure that those who’d abuse it have a complete record of potential victims to go after.

Agreed, if we don’t need it then we don’t need it.

Gun registration is, quite simply, an artifact of the push to violate the right to keep and bear arms. That’s why we don’t register printing presses, because there’s no big push to take them away, that needs a database of who has them.

That could be. But we don’t register automobiles because there’s a big push to take them away. Are guns more like printing presses or more like automobiles?

Meanwhile, gun registration data is not the only abusable data the government holds. All of the government data that can be tampered with to hurt somebody legally, needs to be maintained in a way that makes it hard to tamper with. All of it. Because if we can’t trust government employees not to tamper with their data to get people in trouble, then we need as much as we can to apply a technological fix to make it harder for them to do that. Also it might help cut down on data-tampering for bribes, corruption, etc.

Okay.

Brett @213: Of course I can. They planned to create footage of the BATF heroically taking down the evil cultists. They would then frame them for something. The court case might have fallen apart afterwards, or not, depending on how good the frame was, but that would have been enough for them to get past the Congressional hearings.

Do you realize how bizarrely and outlandishly RISKY this plot would be from the perspective of a bureaucrat?

How the hell do you imagine the conversation going? Listen, George, we’ve been getting a lot of bad press lately, and I’m concerned about the scrutiny we’re going to receive by Congressional committees with investigative and subpoena powers. So here’s what I propose. Let’s mount a huge operation, involving lots of agents, and requiring cooperation from different agencies (even the military to get some equipment). There’s a lack of actual criminals for us to target – I know, I was surprised too – but I’ve dug up this cult in Waco, Texas. They’re this apocalyptic bunch who’ve been stocking up on hundreds of semiautomatic weapons, and probably converting them to automatic weapons. So what I’m thinking is this. We’ll get a search warrant – sure, we’ll have to lie to get it, and maybe an arrest warrant too – and then we’ll conduct a massive raid on their fortified compound. Will we shoot first? Definitely. We’ll have the agents mark their blood-types somewhere visible on themselves, since some of them may get shot or killed. Okay, then we’ll fabricate evidence that these cult members were actually committing crimes. We can’t lose!

Seriously, WTF? Your bullshit detector should have exceeded its operating limits about three claims into this story.

And, yes, they did frame people back then. Remember Ruby Ridge? Weaver got off because the press got in and photographed things before the federal forensics team falsified the evidence, and Weaver’s lawyer was able to prove in court using press photos that the feds’ evidence against Weaver was faked. Deliberately faked.

Sure, framing people was federal policy back then. But after OKC, that all changed. Hey George, we better knock off this framing business, or we could get blown up!

In fact, that was the cause of the Waco standoff going on so long. The one negotiating point the Davidians and the feds could never agree on, was the Davidians’ demand that 3rd party photographers be allowed in ahead of the feds to photograph all the evidence before the feds got a chance to destroy it. Like the front door full of inward pointing bullet holes that the Texas rangers said survived the fire, but which magically disappeared when the feds took control.

Yup, that was the problem all right. The Davidians were so worried that the federal government was going to destroy evidence that they set the place on fire.

I think the fundamental sticking point here, is that you’re reasoning on the presumption that the BATF is a honest agency operating in good faith, but making mistakes.

Except the initial firefight at Ruby Ridge involved US Marshals, and the FBI assumed command of the site thereafter. Except that the FBI also assumed command of the site at Waco after ATF’s initial raid. So I guess the conspiracy just extends way beyond the ATF eh? How do you envision the FBI’s thinking here at Waco? Listen, Bob, I’ve been talking to George over at ATF. He had this great plan, but things all went sideways on him. Not his fault. So, although we have all this national media attention, and the President himself is monitoring things, let’s do George a favor and follow through with the whole fabrication of evidence thing, if we can. I mean, what are the odds that something like this would ever get looked at closely by anyone? And George is a good guy, really, once you get past a few minor flaws in his moral compass. I think we owe him this.

And that is not a presumption any well informed gun owner would take seriously. They had at the time a well publicized track record of abusive behavior, faking evidence, perjured testimony in court,(Massively inaccurate records they always testified under oath were 100% accurate.) even extra-judicial executions.

I’m pretty well informed Brett. You want to cherry-pick the incredibly unusual situations that were Ruby Ridge and Waco, go for it. But if you think the FBI routinely falsifies evidence and seeks to persecute law-abiding citizens, then I’m concerned you’ve fallen into an all-cherry diet, and that’s just not healthy. Add some fiber to get things moving.

The fact is that the ROE at Ruby Ridge were controversial even among the personnel present at the site, and the fact is that there were strong arguments within the FBI as to how to bring the standoff at Waco to a resolution. Both incidents strengthened the positions of those who had advocated for different approaches.

Hell, I’m still in shock that you think OKC motivated the federal government to relax its approach to any groups or individuals possibly motivated to undertake terrorist acts. It’s not the way anyone in law enforcement would think or feel. Without denying that, as in any large bureaucracy, there will be mistakes, there will be stupidity, and there will be instances of malfeasance, in general reasonably healthy law enforcement agencies will escalate their game in response to challenges, especially if they’re targeted. And by that I don’t mean that they’ll simply escalate the use of force.

Yes, perjured testimony. All they had to do to frame the Davidians was to lose the records of some of the Davidians having legally registered fully automatic firearms, and then testify they were unregistered. Pathetically easy. And they’re still routinely perjuring themselves in court, and in warrant applications.

None of the Davidians were licensed to own or create fully automatic weapons. Incidentally, if you are so licensed, you are required to maintain a copy of that license for inspection. “Routinely perjuring themselves” is a silly and baseless accusation.

You look at them and see a government agency. We look at them, and see the military arm of the gun control movement, and we are the people they victimize.

Which is a ridiculous narrative pushed by fringe elements of firearm owners and organizations co-opted by those fringe elements. And if you bothered to research the matter outside the reverently repeated assertions of Kopel’s articles, you’d see as much.

#220 Plume

Guns are a public health hazard. We the people have a right to be protected from that health hazard. We the people shouldn’t have to live in a society where people can walk around with loaded weapons as they please, thus risking all of our lives.

In theory I mostly agree with you. But we also have to be practical.

Like, license, register, insure and train all gun owners.
Make all guns smart guns
Limit all guns to internal chambers, and limit those to six bullets max. No gun with detachable ammo containers should be legal, and all detachable ammo containers should be illegal as well.
Make it illegal to buy, sell, import, export, trade, manufacture or possess any guns that don’t meet the six shot, internal chamber rule.

I think you’re on the verge of an idea here. You want the guns to be basicly a ritual weapon, like wearing ritual swords that people can have set duels with. If you’re going to duel with them then it makes sense they should be basicly the same and designed to reduce accidents.

In that context there’s a charming custom I noticed in the deep south. Say you’re talking about politics or religion or sex or something, and somebody pulls out his clasp knife and puts it closed on the table. He’s saying he’s ready to commit violence over what you’ve said, but he is giving you a chance to back down first. The clasp knife is closed, you don’t have to make a sudden pre-emptive attack. He isn’t even holding it. It’s only a clasp knife, though of course those can kill. It’s a fine civilized way to threaten to damage or kill people.

Currently guns are a part of some people’s culture. They think of it as a sort of cultural imperialism to try to get rid of them. It’s like telling muslim women they can’t cover their heads, or christian women they can’t cover their breasts. It generates turmoil out of all proportion to the benefits. After all, not that many people get shot and wounded each year, less than one in a thousand. And just in the nature of things, people who carry guns are more likely to get shot than people who don’t. The bigger part of the costs are paid by the subculture that claims the benefit.

So I suggest we focus on more important issues while the thinking about this one evolves. It is a side issue.

If you want to reduce gun problems, maybe you could see how much you can get gun enthusiasts to agree that precision weapons are better. People mostly agree that we shouldn’t be walking around with grenades or flamethrowers. Those tend to affect everybody in an area, when we should prefer weapons that are good at taking out individual bad guys. Similarly, automatic weapons and shotguns are not as good for urban defense. Good citizens would practice with precision weapons enough to hit bad guys precisely while not killing innocents.

Of course in the very short run you can expect no compromise at all from gun enthusiasts, but in the long run you might try for something like the following — let anybody at all own a couple of single-shot weapons. But the better a person tests at accuracy in target-shooting, the larger the magazine he could legally carry. People who were reasonably accurate could have six shots, people who were good could have 20, and real expert marksmen could have say 50. So the better you can demonstrate that you will shoot only the people you intend to shoot, the bigger your status symbol.

We might as well allow people single-shot weapons because as I understand it, it’s already possible to build a single-shot low-accuracy handgun with a 3D printer. So it will be very hard to keep people from having those, anyway.

“None of the Davidians were licensed to own or create fully automatic weapons.”

You know what? I checked, and you were right, my memory was faulty. One for you. Several of the Davidians owned “Hellfire triggers”, a device which can legally make a firearm simulate full auto operation. It’s perfectly legal, in fact they’re sold with a copy of a letter from the BATF admitting that they are.

““Routinely perjuring themselves” is a silly and baseless accusation.”

Ah, if only it were. Did you bother following that link? For many years, the BATF has known that its record keeping system was lousy, and knowing that, has directed its agents to testify in court that its record keeping system was 100% accurate. That is perjury. And they’re still committing perjury on a routine basis.

J, I don’t think you should expect much in the compromise from gun owners. Why should we compromise? Everything you can do with a gun that’s actually bad is already illegal, and owning them is a civil liberty. And we’re dealing with people we already know want that civil liberty destroyed. Might as well expect the NAACP to compromise with the KKK.

You want a gun? OK. You want a better gun? Prove you can handle it.

Oops, typo with the tags.

J, I’m searching your suggestion in vain for what the OTHER side gives up in this “compromise”. Which means to me it isn’t actually a “compromise” you’re proposing, just incremental surrender by my side.

Why would we engage in incremental surrender when we’re winning?

Don’t think we’re anywhere near that. Fact is, we’re still recapturing territory that the gun control movement invaded over the course of the 20th century, and I see no reason to think we’re anything like over-extended.

Nope, I see no reason to start retreating when we’re winning. Though I can see why somebody else might want us to.

#229 BB

J, I’m searching your suggestion in vain for what the OTHER side gives up in this “compromise”. Which means to me it isn’t actually a “compromise” you’re proposing, just incremental surrender by my side.

Of course it would look that way to you. And so you are not a good candidate for me to discuss this with.

The people who run the NRA etc want to have a strong movement going that tries to make guns 100% illegal, that they can barely stop at the last minute over and over, year after year. The more the NRA wins, the less important they are and the less money they get. So whenever they start to win too much they must look at ways to sabotage themselves to bring it more into balance.

I am talking about the possibility at some future time of cutting the fanatics on both sides out of the limelight and getting a deal that the 95% of people in the center can live with. We would not be discussing taking guns away from the US public, because only a small minority insists on that and a whole lot of people are opposed. We would not be discussing personal firearms that citizens can use to overthrow the US government if those citizens decide it has become a tyranny. Only a small minority believes in that, and a whole lot of people are opposed.

We would be looking at ways that people who want guns could have them, and also we would want to minimize the destruction.

As it is, gun registration and carry licenses are only a nuisance to the people who are required to have them. The paperwork might benefit somebody, but mostly not them. (And if the government ever agreed to take the guns away it would help *the government*. Not that that will happen.)

So we need a way for gun licenses to directly benefit the people who get them. My first thought is that the licenses should document gun competence. An official stamp of approval that says you really do know what you’re doing. Also, the more competent you are the more destructive the gun you can carry. Anybody can carry a popgun with one shot. If you’re real good then you can carry a big magazine. Carrying it is visual evidence that you’re good. I want gun users to put effort into being competent, because that reduces the danger to the public.

Why would we engage in incremental surrender when we’re winning?

You won’t make any concessions whatsoever when you’re winning, obviously. And you won’t make any concessions whatsoever when you’re losing either. Making concessions against a stronger enemy only helps them win faster. You will stand your ground and never make any concessions whatsoever no matter what, ever.

At some point you will be brushed aside by a large majority that wants to get something workable. They will be able to ignore you. But not this year.