quiet_NaN
16hr ago
I find the pretense of caring about employers a sanewashing exercise
Employing illegals likely also involves financial crimes. After all, they do not have a social security number, so how are you paying social security for them? Even making sure they pay income taxes would create a paper trail most employers would likely avoid.
I would argue that the median case of illegal employment is not the woke Starbucks owner who employs an illegal out of her kindness of heart and spends as much money on him as on her legal employees.
Rather, it is some farmer or hotel owner who systematically employs illegals at wages which would not attract legal workers.
I am enough of a classical leftist to believe that freedom of contract should not be unlimited. There are cases where both parties agree to a transaction, and it is still exploitative. Sex work, selling your kidney, renting your womb, indentured servitude, or working with dangerous machines or chemicals are all fields where governments restrict the freedom of individuals to make contracts (sometimes beyond what is appropriate) with the aim to protect one party, and possibly also to protect society from the negative externalities of the transaction. (For employing illegals, these externalities certainly exist -- if an illegal working as a farmhand in Texas needs urgent medical care, the costs of that will be paid by the US society, not by him or his employer.)
I have read here the argument that tolerating illegals will create an underclass without rights which can be exploited by others, and I find it sound. Of course, the efforts of the Trump administration have not changed this situation for the better, now people being exploited in certain industries will be exempt from deportation while their exploitation continues, which gives their employers more power.
"Form a farmhand union you say? You're fired. Now watch me as I call the DHS tipline to report an illegal not employed in a Sanctuary Industry."
And Trump's abortive attempt to get rid of birthright citizenship can be best described as looking at the status of servitude and thinking "what is wrong with that is that it's not hereditary". I mean, they have not said that they have nothing against illegals as long as they know their place (working masta's fields), but from their priorities this seems to be their revealed preference. The pearl-clutching of "but the Blue cities will not enforce our immigration laws" would be a lot less pathetic if Texas enforced immigration laws consistently.
If your business can not compete with others without relying on illegal exploitation, I have zero sympathy. Sell your business, do something non-evil with your life. I am sure a lot of hard-working Americans lost their sugar cane or cotton businesses after the civil war due to increased labor costs too, and I have little sympathy for them either.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
This failure dilutes the voting power and saps the taxpayer resources from everyone else in the nation.
I do not understand your point. Are you saying that some illegal committing violent crimes in MN will harm the union by making MN less well run, which in turn will lead to them paying less federal taxes? This seems like an extremely indirect effect, and could be used to have the feds crack down on whatever crime they dislike.
I also do not think that the median violent crime changes the voting power of MN relevantly. If there is census fraud happening, that is likely not related to violent crime.
There is strong evidence, illegals aside, the last census was highly fraudulent and sent lots of extra political power to Democrats. There is also lots of evidence illegals compounded that.
NB: the obvious fix for census fraud is to bring back the 3/5th rule to elect the president by popular vote, and assign the number of Representatives based on the people who voted in the last election.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
That is an entirely coherent position. The point I made was entirely against the argument "the people we are deporting are really bad people" made by the DHS and some posters here.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I don't think its total bullshit, they probably are picking up more rapists and murderers than just the general population.
I am not contesting that, in fact, I think I was conceding it explicitly. Naturally they have a higher crime rate than the native population. For the illegal immigrant laborer trying to get hired for anything at Home Depot, the idea "or perhaps I could just spend today stealing smartphones and wallets" sounds a lot more attractive than for someone working as a teller in a bank. Nor do I dispute that lower classes are generally more likely to solve an argument using violence. (In July 2019, the last month for which a detailed record exists on your site, about 2/3 of the deportees were male. That alone is sufficient to get a higher rate of rapists and murderers than the general population.)
A quarter of them have charges and another quarter have convictions (see below).
"ICE classifies an individual as a convicted criminal if they have been convicted of any criminal violation. Violations can range from serious felonies all the way down to a purely immigration violation (such as illegal entry which is a petty offense under the U.S. Code), or a violation which results in only in a fine such as not keeping a dog on a leash, fishing without a permit, driving a vehicle with a tail light out, etc"
They point to the historical data, which shows the most serious conviction for July 2019:
Most Serious Criminal Conviction (MSCC) Total
All 55,654
No Conviction 38,978
Illegal Entry (INA SEC.101(a)(43)(O), 8USC1325 only) 2,938
Driving Under Influence Liquor 1,703
Assault 977
Traffic Offense 858
Larceny 457
Illegal Re-Entry (INA SEC.101(a)(43)(O), 8USC1326 only) 443
Domestic Violence 390
Burglary 382
Drug Trafficking 381
Robbery 279
Sex Assault 246
...
Homicide 123
...
Various specific kinds of homicide 57
Various manslaughter 47
Generally, homicides are a great anchor in criminology because the dark figure is thought to be rather small compared to the reported cases. Here, I will presume that the US is very unlikely to deport murderers to their countries of origin instead of charging and sentencing them, and that it is unlikely that homicides will have a worse crime on their rep sheet.
(There are nits to be picked in either direction, sure. Some people will commit an involuntary manslaughter and an armed robbery on separate occasions, and thus not show up in the homicide category. And some homicides are rather far from the central example of a homicide. The mother with three kids in her car who is distracted, oversees a red light and gets into an accident in which one of her kids is killed is a homicide, after all. And likely one of the 381 people whose MSCC is drug trafficking is also responsible for some gang-related killing for which he was not caught, just like there are murderers at large in the broader society.)
Still, this means that 0.4% of the deported were homicides, or 1.3% of the deported who were convicted of an offense were homicides. So much for Trump's murderers and rapists -- they are clearly part of the deported, at much higher rates than in the overall population, but still only a tiny fraction.
USC1325 (the most prominent one) for example is a 'duh' charge. Yes, most illegals from Latin America cross the borders illegally rather than overstaying a student visa they would be very unlikely to get.
In the current statistics, "Pending Criminal Charges" is even more wishy-washy. In the unlikely case that you want to deport an immigrant where Thiel's computer systems can not even find a single citation for jaywalking, you can just charge them with a trivial offense. Google AI thinks the statue of limitations for USC1325 is 5 years, so you can try to slap this on anyone who popped up on your radar in the last five years. The other ones likely filled out some form at some point, so you just charge them with some federal petty crime to that affect. The point is not that you would have to make the charges stick before a judge, after all. Just to have something so that you can tick "pending criminal charges", then deport them. You could just charge every one of them with desecrating the corpse of Lincoln, if you wanted.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
At what point is this no longer just people exercising their first amendment rights? At what point is this a conspiracy to undermine the laws of this country resulting in the deaths of two people ?
I am not sure there is a statue against annoying and frustrating law enforcement. Perhaps if they coordinated to prevent the arrest of anyone specific, that could be an obstruction charge.
Looking out for feds and reporting them seems to be covered by 1A. Coordinating protesters also seems fine as long as you have an expectation of them not engaging in violence. (I would argue that for the most part, the protesters do not want to break the bones of ICE agents. This is wise, because ICE carries guns, and getting overwhelmed by a mob would likely cause them to shoot their way out without even the benefits of me calling it excessive force.)
The license plate checkers are clearly abusing their access, but likely providing license plates to them is covered by 1A. Commuters should also be fine, if there was a law against following strangers then a lot of divorce detectives would be out of work.
Medics are fine if they say their role is to provide aid to people who got injured, and leave the question if they were trying to impede anyone open. I can't imagine them going "yes, you were pepper sprayed, but sadly, you did nothing to provoke it. As you did not actively try to impede law enforcement, we will not help you", so I guess they are in the clear. Donors likewise.
I am sure that the Trump administration has access to some competent lawyers, and if there was a nice big federal law all the protesters were breaking, they would get arrested and charged.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I agree, it is uncommon usage.
The normal term would be "lookout". Just like someone is not "sneaking in place", but "hiding".
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The feeling I get from reading acoup (e.g. on "battle pulses") is that there was more of a clash of steel on steel than that.
In many cases, one of the parties is under time pressure (because other conditions are turning to their disadvantage, they are under archery fire, etc). "Stand there and insult your opponent" seems not a good strategy, and and army which can actually coordinate and make contact will outperform one who can not in the long run.
Of course, any infantryman who advances in bloodlust without checking what the rest of the line is doing will unlikely to fight more than one battle.
But I would expect at least the Romans (whose tactics were cutting edge, and whose swords had a reach disadvantage over spears) to be able to advance into reach.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Some grandma staying in the US illegally is very much not a central case of what people think by "criminal" (the directional opposite of "law abiding"), any more than an elderly hippie who grows some pot for personal use is.
I think there are circumstances where 99% would be willing to violate the law of their host country (e.g. if the alternative was to get deported to Afghanistan). I will grant you that there are illegals for whom going back would not be a matter of life and death, but 'merely' an inconvenience.
I also am generally doubtful that Republicans are really as much into obeying the law as they claim they are. Rolling coal seems to be very much a Red Tribe thing, after all.
(Or hypothetically, suppose that a liberal SCOTUS ruled that 2A only applied to weapon designs existing in 1791, and Congress banned all newer guns. "Too bad, but the constitution says what SCOTUS says it says, so I better get all my guns neutered and buy a nice flintlock pistol for home defense. After all, the law is the law, even if I do not agree with it. I certainly would not want to own an illegal firearm, after all!" is what a law-abiding person might think. I think plenty of Republicans would instead break this law or condone others breaking it, and red states would simply decide that enforcing it is not a policing priority.)
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I will add that the whole "ICE is going after criminals" argument for their big operations in Blue cities is absurd.
Legally, states and municipalities have a lot of levers to affect crime rates. Most violent crime is judged under state laws, after all. Some have the death penalty, some don't. Some have strict gun laws, some don't. Some have legalized pot. Some make enforcement of laws against sex work a priority, some don't. Some have three strike laws. Some let well-connected people prostitute minors. Some criminalize abortion.
The basic idea (supported traditionally very much by the Republicans, e.g. in regard to Dobbs) seems to be that state governments are much better at creating a criminal justice system accommodating the preferences of their local population, be they Utah Mormons or California hippies, than a far-away federal government in DC would. Of course there are Federal guard rails (you can't legalize slavery, or raping kids, or hanging Blacks), but for the most part it is the locals who decide if an offender gets probation or a lifelong prison sentence.
Suppose for the sake of the argument that the bleeding heart liberals in Minneapolis do not deport any violent criminals, thereby endangering their local population.
Why should the tax dollars of women living in Amarillo, Texas be spent to keep women in in Minneapolis safe just because their local state and municipal government has (hypothetically) decided not to invest in keeping them safe? How often do illegals get on a greyhound bus and go on a rape trip in the next state, really? If California abolishes all police tomorrow, will Trump send in federal agents to direct the traffic in LA?
There is certainly an argument to be made that immigration is federal policy, and illegals living in one state may affect the union in the long run (due to birthright citizenship, if nothing else).
There is also an argument to be made that getting rid of all of the illegals will also reduce crime rates (no HBD needed, illegals are generally poor, and poor people are more likely to commit violent crimes). (It would also wreck the sectors which are based on illegal's labor, which is why Trump is not doing it.)
But the framing that ICE is busy catching rapists and murderers in MN is bullshit. They are there to fill their quotas. Number go up. Rapists make the number go up. Sick 70yo women make the number go up. 6yo's make the number go up. Trump needs to tell his base that he has deported more people than the Democrats, and the job of the DHS is to make the number he will claim less of an obvious lie.
Of course, whenever the WH issues a press release about an incident, their ERO men were hot on the heels of a violent criminal. But this is about as believable as their claims that anyone their goons shoot is a domestic terrorist.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
If someone is intent to make a snuff video of them murdering ICE, they would spend 24h to acquire a GoPro or a barrel mounted camera for livestreaming from Amazon.
Walking up to ICE while being visibly armed and pre-occupied with a mobile phone does not seem like a very effective way to go about it when you could also climb to a rooftop with a hunting rifle.
Of course, you can add more epicycles to your theory. "He did not just want to shoot ICE and film his murders, he also wanted to make it look like he was acting in self defense."
Or even "his real goal was to trick ice into shooting him, and due to his malicious open carry he managed to deceive poor innocent ICE agents into eliminating him. Truly the perfidy of Antifa knows no bounds!"
Protesting while armed is not illegal in the US. Plenty of people have done so with zero intention of murdering anyone. So far, I have seen zero video evidence that he was drawing his gun.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault
Let us stop right there.
Assault is a crime. (I would have thought that the violence is an inherent part, but I do not know the specifics of MN state law, so maybe I am wrong and 'violent assault' is a thing.)
Also, it is the type of crime typically handled on the state level.
So the DHS is claiming that a MN judge signed off an arrest warrant (or a MN PD decided they wanted him arrested in connection to some assault), and it fell to the DHS to catch him so that he could answer for his crimes in court?
Anyone believing that is also likely to believe that Trump will send them their tariff dividend check really soon now.
At least when the leadership of the left lies, they are subtle. Not breaking the truth where bending and distorting it will suffice, spinning narratives, framing events, etc.
When the Trump administration lies, it feels like something an IQ 100 conman might come up with to fool an IQ 80 mark. No need to worry about keeping your lies straight, your mark will not remember them in a day anyhow.
Less charitably, their objective is the destruction of what Arendt calls the distinction between fact and fiction. If your side is disadvantaged in the jungle, you use agent orange to destroy the jungle to create a more favorable battlefield. If your side is disadvantaged in logical debate, you destroy the concept of a coherent object reality and face them on the more advantageous battlefield of name-calling.
I mean, it could be that DHS was looking for a specific illegal who was a high priority because he had served for violent crimes before, and acted on new intel. I can't rule it out, their mandate is to get rid of all of the illegals (except for the ones Trump needs to keep the economy running), which includes both hardened criminals and six year olds. (A nice thing about the motte is that the right wingers here are pretty open about that.)
But likely ICE was just fishing for illegals by IDing random people in the street, or going after a target without a violent past, and lied about that part just like they lied about the 200 rioters and all the other stuff.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
This is an oversimplification. Are there supporters who downplay the role of Antifa? Sure. Are many of them denying that the label Antifa (or antifaschistische Aktion) refers to anything in the real world at all? Doubtful, though the strategy of calling the sky pink when it suits your needs has recently had some success, and the left might borrow it.
I would argue that it is normal to make a big deal of the mainstream-unappealing fringes of your enemy while downplaying the importance of your own fringes. So Antifa is not a big deal, but White supremacists are, or vice versa.
That some unsavory connection gets downplayed does not in itself tell you how important it is. A supporter of Gazan Palestinians would certainly downplay Hamas when trying to convince normies (even though they were kinda important), and a MAGA supporter would downplay the right-wingers who sometimes shoot up synagogues as isolated crazies (which seems pretty correct from what I can tell).
If you believe that anyone who downplays the importance of an organization $X is secretly a supporter of $X, it will reliably lead to a trapped prior. "Even the FBI, the CIA and CNN are not talking about the lizard people. This thing must be big!"
quiet_NaN
3d ago
"right-wingers think Antifa is like ISIS, whereas in fact Antifa is more like Jihadis in general"
While this seems very true, it is even messier. At least international Jihadi terrorists roughly agree on the acceptable means (killing infidels in countries which mess with Muslim countries) and broad ideological world view, even if they differ on concrete strategy and priorities.
Within the left, you would be hard-pressed to find two people who agree on the political theory. Some are anarchists, communists, others are likely more moderate. And SJ did not make that any simpler.
Basically, anyone who subscribes to "fascism should be violently resisted where required" can adopt the label Antifa. (Indeed, I myself subscribe to that, though I do not consider myself Antifa. I just do not see any fascism which could be effectively neutered by me violently resisting anyone.)
The devil is in the details. What counts as fascism, now that Hitler and Mussolini are dead? Paleoconservatives? MAGA? Nethanyahu? Putin? Any Western capitalist society? Neo-Nazis?
And what violence is required? Smashing the state to bring about a communist utopia or stop the colonial exploitation? Beating up a few Neo-Nazis? Celebrating the traditional riots on the first of May in Kreuzberg? Spraying ACAB on a cop car, or a wall?
A lot of it is armchair activism. Certainly subject to the usual signaling spirals. You don't convince anyone that you are the hot shit by being a moderate on the internet. There is probably three to five OOMs more people willing to endorse deadly violence in memes and comments than there people willing to even commit property damage personally. Still, it can give the odd homicidal member the impression that the community endorses their violence. Which it does, verbally, just not by revealed preference.
The other group identity one might liken Antifa to is Anonymous. Both are very much grass root things. There is no Antifa pope who consecrates or excommunicates bishops (who then consecrate priests (who then baptize believers into Antifa)).
Exploit some shitty website, post about it on 4chan using the Anonymous logo: congratulations, you are now Anonymous. Buy a button with the red and black flag, go to a protest wearing a black hoodie, or commit some petty property crime and upload a picture on indymedia (or whatever kids use this century): congratulations, you are now Antifa.
It is more a category than a group, really.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
There is a lot of behavior which is a Bad Idea which might get you killed but still no excuse for murder.
We do not let the guy who kills his ex get off the hook because her decision to date a guy with a criminal record and anger management issues.
In this case, if the body cam of the cop (which was clearly on, right?) shows that from his perspective, it looked like the suspect was going to reach for his gun, then I will file this under "sometimes people do risky things and tragedy ensues". If it does not show that, I would be inclined to convict on murder 2 from the videos I saw.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I will grant you the Kirk shooter being a leftist (a trans activist, though raised as a Mormon (and gun enthusiast), IIRC).
Calling the Trump shooter a leftist is a bit of a stretch. As he had made bomb threats before I would rather categorize him as "crazy" than "central leftist".
These are the same people who rioted in 2020.
My feeling was that the rioting was mostly done by various opportunistic criminals, while the SJ activists mostly stood on the sidelines and celebrated their empowerment or something. I would be extremely surprised if either of two people recently killed by ICE was credibly implicated in committing felonies during the BLM riots.
The most strategic thing Trump could do would be to get the ring leaders locked up.
I think you are confused. There is no Antifa version of Bin Laden who decided that agent Crooks should go forward with trying to shoot Trump, or who assigned Goods to "hampering ICE" duty on the day she was shot.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
-I think conservatives should use incidents like this to raise attention to the fact that the media, and the left (but I repeat myself a bit), comparatively give so little attention to the victims of illegal immigrants and recidivist criminals out on the streets from liberal policies.
The typical victim of an illegal immigrant might be killed by an illegal the Democrats did not deport after he served some sentence for a crime (not sure what their exact policies were).
Note that the Biden admin generally did not use federal taxes to buy guns for illegals and paid them a federal salary to engage in behavior where they were somewhat likely to shoot people, so we might want to hold Trump's ICE to slightly higher standards.
The people getting into incidents with ICE are much less "innocent" than the random victims of recidivist criminal nutjobs or illegal immigrants let out on the streets by liberal policies.
Is that so? The central case of an illegal murdering someone is not a serial killer murdering some random women. It is likely either an acquaintance or romantic partner of the criminal or a member of a rival narcotics gang. Also, we do not generally rank murders by how innocent their victim was, so we do not need to get into discussing if a woman who elects to date a man who previously committed violent crime is more or less innocent than a woman who tries to hamper ICE through nonviolent means. A judge might be a bit more lenient when a murderer kills the rapist of his sister in revenge than when he guns down a random stranger in the streets, but at the end of the day either is murder. "He was a bad person, the world is better off without him" is not an argument we let anyone make in court, and I see no reason why we should let ICE make it.
-Conservatives tend to get into the weeds about whether or not a shooting was "justified", instead of simply pointing out that almost all of the unwanted tragic incidents that relate to politics are mainly committed by the groups which are the chief recipients of liberal sympathies.
I would not euphemize killings as "unwanted tragic incidents".
Furthermore, I think "killings that relate to politics", which I imagine you imagine as "killings by illegals, prior offenders whom liberals released, and killings related to political protests" is unfortunately a bit broader. In 2019 (the latest year for which the FBI has data), there were 13,927 homicides. Of these, 10,258, or some 73.6%, were committed using firearms. The degree how easily firearms should be available is clearly political as much as which offenders should be released. I am sure that somewhere in the 13927 murders, there is one which it totally non-political, not touching illegals, prior offenders, narcotics, firearms, sex work, domestic violence, housing policy and so forth, but for practical purposes it seems simpler to assume that most murders will touch policy somewhere.
(Your point technically stands, Blacks commit disproportionally many murders (mostly on other Blacks), and are certainly recipients of liberal sympathies. As most of the Blacks in the US are not recent immigrants, it just does little to motivate the removal of illegals.)
-I think the jobs quota needs to be portrayed as universal protection for every ideology. And to emphasize that free speech is completely protected, I think quotas should be proportional to the ideology of the audience.
I think you would need a new SCOTUS for that. Citizens United clearly established that companies enjoyed free speech. Seems kinda hard to exempt media companies from that.
To be honest, "X% of the NYT readers are conservative, therefore the NYT should have X% conservative commentators", seems rather un-American to my European ears. Are you sure you are on my side of the pond? In fact, it seems slightly worse than just extending affirmative action to political ideology, because it would incentivize consuming media to neuter them. Imagine millions of liberal college students hate-watching Fox News so that they can force them to carry their viewpoints.
Quite frankly, in human history, it has never been easier to broadcast your viewpoint than it is today. You have social media companies run by people with very different political leanings. Anyone can open a blog or substack or video channel. MAGA-adjacent billionaires are spending billions to acquire platforms to get political clot. Big Tech has kissed the ring of the Donald and seems unlikely to offend him by shadowbanning MAGA content. Crying that CNN would not hire you seems as petty as some pink-haired liberal crying that Fox News would not hire them. There are a ton of other options, and the audience only reachable by traditional TV is growing smaller every year.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I am not saying that there were no media trying to fan the flames, but what did end up riling the BLM protests was videos of what a jury would later rule was a cop murdering a Black suspect over minutes, while his cop buddies prevented onlookers from interfering.
Against a setting of COVID lockdowns, this was clearly enough to start race riots. The parts of the media itching for blood did not have to do a lot of spinning, distributing the video via the usual platforms (which is their job) was quite sufficient.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Another random thought.
I remember when gun control laws limiting the ownership of AR-15s were dubbed "scary gun laws". The implication being these laws simply ban weapons guns the left thinks look scary. I am sure that some of the laws were focusing on the wrong characteristics, like Clinton's Federal assault weapon ban focusing on flash suppressors.
Still, looking at the Uvalde timeline, it is very apparent that pink haired leftists who have never held a gun in their lives are not the only ones who consider AR-15s "scary guns":
He's got an AR-15. He's shot a lot ... we don't have firepower right now ... It's all pistols
It seems to me that this was a major factor in the cops being reluctant to open/breach the door and engage the shooter.
I am not a gun expert, but I think there are some points which make a semiautomatic assault-style rifle much scarier than a handgun in a firefight. The 5.56x45mm is likely a lot more capable of defeating body armor than 9x19mm. If you are wearing body armor while facing a handgun, you can reasonably hope your opponent is shooting common JHPs, no such hope with an assault rifle. A rifle will enable a shooter to fire accurate shots in quicker succession than with a pistol. The magazine size is less likely to be a tactical limitation than for a handgun.
Sure, the cops will have AR-15s which fire bursts (once they fetch them from their vehicles), while civilians are restricted to semiautomatic versions, but it does not seem that this is a big difference in deadliness.
The primary purpose of an AR-15 seems to be to take out a guy in a firefight who dressed for the occasion. (Secondary purposes like sports shooting have been invented, but these seem like an excuse to own a cool gun to me. If you allowed Texans to own hand grenades, they would invent a 'sport' involving their use as well.) For home defense, they seem overkill -- the central example of a criminal home invader is some junkie carrying a stolen handgun, not a close quarter combat team in body armor.
So the point of civilian ownership would be that it is a rifle near the cutting edge of current military technology which will enable civilians to effectively engage government forces. Some consider this beneficial in itself. I think it is a bit of an odd place to set the border between prohibited and allowed technology, though.
An AR-15 might be used to effectively engage police departments. But any government (tyrannic or otherwise) faced with an insurgency (e.g. anti-government forces openly carrying long arms) will not rely on police departments to combat them. Against an infantry armed with small arms only, any commander would use armored vehicles (which are impervious to AR-15s) and helicopters (which are at least very hard to shoot down using rifles). Luckily, there are relatively cheap weapon systems which enable infantry to combat either effectively: RPGs and MPADSs. Any infantry force faced with even a third-rate military would want either. Simply having a credible threat against vehicles and aircrafts will limit the use your enemy gets out of his tens-of-million-dollar toys.
Of course, either could also do a lot of damage in the hands of someone bent on killing a lot of civilians, e.g. by shooting down an airliner, and legalizing them would by necessity also legalize high explosives. Still would be a more logical place to draw the line than at semi assault style rifles, IMO.
(Realistically, an US insurgency powered by 2A weapons would stick to the cities, hiding among a civil population a federal government might be reluctant to bomb. I just don't think AR-15s would play a big role. They are not very concealable, for one thing.)
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I could take rhetorical cheapshots and point to its history of laws.
Come on. Two (small!!1) World Wars, one reference-class-defining genocide and now we are the bad guys forever?! Most of us were not even born back then, and the ones who were had absolutely no idea what that guy and a handful of his followers were (allegedly!) doing, should we be really blaming a whole people for a few bad actors, etc.
(I jest. As a left-leaning German, I am perfectly fine with Germany firstly being known for being crazy genocidal for the next 10 billion years or so. I would slightly prefer for us to be known for having been crazy genocidal but become civilized (and strongly prefer for that distinction to continue to hold, naturally), but I will take what I can get.)
Or I could point to the heresy laws that are on its books now.
Nasty old § 166 (warning: Kraut WP), yes. Some 15 convictions a year, apparently. Should we get rid of it? Totally. Does it mean that German law, or the French/Continental tradition of law in general, is ipso facto not a standard for civilized people and not worth more moral regard than the mutilation rites of some cannibal tribe? I think not.
Driving a truck is not inaction, come now. This isn't hard.
Physically speaking, it is. Well, not going up to speed. But if you let go of the gas once you see the kid, you should be in the clear. In your frame of reference, you are at rest, and the kid is recklessly approaching you at 100km/h. Not applying any force and having your truck follow Newton's first law of motion seems like a textbook example of inaction.
The thing is, society restricts the use of trucks. Once you have started up a truck, you are obliged to take further action to keep it from harming bystanders, a process known as driving. While driving, you can and will go to prison for mere omissions of action.
Likewise, there is a widespread understanding that ending up in charge of a baby (either through your or your partner giving birth to one and not giving it up for adoption or through adopting one) will force you to take some actions on pain of imprisonment. "Oh, I simply did not feed her, can't punish me for not doing something" will not convince anyone.
Or in countries which do have a draft (which includes god's own country, in theory), you can take a young man and make him perform all sorts of dangerous and morally questionable actions on pain of imprisonment. (I'm not personally a fan of that one, but it is widespread.)
Or consider the Kindergarden teacher who goes on record "yes, I saw Kevin play with a fork in the power socket, but to be honest he was the single most annoying kid in the class, so I merely watched and made sure that none of the other kids were touching him. Smelled terrible, though. Anyhow, good thing we don't punish omissions, right?"
quiet_NaN
4d ago
To be fair, according to the timeline there were only 19 of them, sitting on their backsides for the better part of an hour while kids were bleeding out. And there were multiple border patrol agents, per official reports.
It seems that Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District (UCISD) Chief Arredondo was in charge for most of the situation, until the CBP breached protocol by going in and saving the remaining kids.
If their is a villain in this story apart from the shooter, it seems that guy is it.
Now, I know nothing about how schools in Uvalde work, but I would be surprised if that guy was actually the one with the most tactical experience in gunfights. A protocol where a school cop is in charge seems bad. (Funny side note: Germany (and Europe in general, I think) does not have police units for schools. Even large universities do not have their own police units. Instead, we rely on municipal police departments.)
But also, it means that 18 of the 19 cops were following procedures in so far as they were obeying the orders of their commanding officer.
This is not a case like the Floyd murder, where Chauvin's colleagues were convicted of abetting manslaughter. Arredondo was not obviously engaging in a criminal act. Ideally, the other officers would have voiced their disagreement with his tactical decisions, but at the end of the day, a police operation is not a democracy where cops vote on what they feel their next tactical step should be.
Even if they were all telling him "that guy has an AR-15, don't make us go in there", that makes them cowards, but there is generally no law against that.
OTOH, from the timeline, it seems like Arredondo belongs in prison. Oh, and if the acting UPD chief did have the authority to overrule him he should join him.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
the pacific theater of WWII
I am not an expert, but I am dubious. I mean, it certainly was existential for the US territory of Hawaii, but losing control of Hawaii (or even Alaska) would not have placed the US in an existential crisis. Did imperial Japan really have the manpower to take even California, never mind fight their way towards the East Coast at the end of a very precarious logistics trail?
quiet_NaN
4d ago
An air traffic controller who fails to stop two planes from colliding will merely have failed to act.
A teacher who keeps his mouth shut about the sexual abuse of a kid merely fails to act.
A doctor who does not render assistance merely fails to act.
A lifeguard who falls asleep and lets a kid drown merely fails to act.
A truck driver who fails to hit the brakes when someone is standing in front of him merely fails to act.
In Germany, we have a general duty to rescue. If on my way home, I see a car crashed into a tree, and decide that I will not miss the start of the Tatort for some stranger, I could go to prison for up to a year for that. I can report that I do not feel very enslaved by that rule.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I see roughly three levels of response for professionals. You can fail to do your duty. You can do your duty. You can be heroic. I will admit that the lines are not always very clear.
It is easiest to recognize clearly heroic actions. The unarmed street vendor who rushed that Australian beach shooter. The civilian running into a burning house without protective gear to save another.
But there is no clear line separating heroism from doing one's duty. If you abandon your MG nest because the enemy is firing rifles towards your trench line, that might be seen as a dereliction of duty by most -- a soldier who curls up behind cover any time there is lead in the air is not very useful, after all. If you get hit, I would personally consider your duty to man your post discharged, and consider a decision to continue to fire (and likely learn how many more shots it will take to disable you really soon) as going beyond what can be expected. (If I would consider it as 'heroic' depends on the specifics, most warfare conduct being roughly zero sum.)
Of course, different cultures have different expectations there, and some did and do expect people to have a duty to engage in suicide missions.
And in the military, where most state-sponsored gun use tends to take place, a failure to do your duty is generally seen as worthy of criminal punishment. Historically, pretty harsh too, especially when your self-preservation instinct got a lot of the wrong people killed.
I will grant you that cops are not soldiers and we actually require them to have a vast skill set to employ outside of Rambo violence, and that even most militaries today are very reluctant to actually hang someone for cowardice even if they caused deaths on the wrong side (though I would imagine that Ukraine would be a lot more willing to do so than the US in GWB's oversea wars).
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Even given SCOTUS precedent in Castle Rock, "This decision affirmed the controversial principle that state and local government officials have no affirmative duty to protect the public from harm it did not create" (WP), I think there are legal workarounds. My parsing of that sentence is that they have no implied legal duty. You could just add a law to the books that a police officer who fails to stop a victim from getting hurt because he deviates from standard police protocol without sufficient excuse will get punished. We do punish air traffic controllers who fail to prevent planes from colliding (even if they did not set the planes on a collision path), or teachers who fail to report sexual abuse of kids.
Even if the ruling applied more broadly, e.g. that no official could ever be held responsible for stopping a harm they did not create, and any law to such an effect was void (which would severely limit what tasks we could trust officials with, e.g. an EPA chemist might decide to just affirm that all measurements are below thresholds instead of actually running his measurements -- he did not create the harm, after all), I think there would be some workarounds.
A city could only hire cops who are also willing to work as civilian guards concurrently, and give them the obligation to protect people in their capacity as civilian contractors. Or you could try some legal trickery to make them national guards and place them under the UCMJ (or state level equivalent), then issue them a general order to follow standard procedures to keep civilians safe. § 892 is very broad in what punishments you can get, after all.
But also, the fact that there is no affirmative duty for cops to protect you is not in itself very relevant. The relevant question is, when you call 911 to report an intruder in your home, what is the probability that the cops will respond "not now, baseball is on"? Them getting in trouble over failing to act will not resurrect you.
If the probability of a grossly unprofessional response is high, then that is indeed a reason to rely more on self-defense. Just the fact that it would be legal (but still involve professional repercussions, the Uvalde officers will probably not find a PD willing to employ them again) is not particularly relevant.
For example, I do not know if an EMT who decided they can make a quick detour to McDonald's while responding to a medical emergency would face criminal charges. Knowing the answer to that question is not very relevant to the amount of first aid I would want to learn. OTOH, if I knew that ambulances were notoriously unreliable, that would certainly motivate me to learn more first aid and keep more supplies ready.
In the end, it is a numbers game. You have to weigh the probability that you will use a handgun to defend yourself (which is certainly related to the competence of your local PD) against the probability that it is used to kill an innocent, either because your toddler finds it, a tinder date who is a lot crazier than you thought finds it, you use it recklessly while dead drunk, etc. Looking at statistics, gun deaths from accidents and civilian self-defense are actually quite rare, and the likeliest use a non-criminal will find for a gun is suicide. (Which might be an argument for or against gun ownership depending on your other beliefs.)
I was just going to link that in reply to your post. Happy 27th January.
Of course, Niemoeller is hardly the closest friend of the regime the Nazis murdered, that dubious honor likely falls to the SA leadership around Ernst Roehm, whose loyalty to the cause only bought them a quick death.
Nor is it uniquely the Nazis, power accumulated through violence has a tendency to not stay contained. The median victim of Robespierre was not an aristocrat or royalist, but (I think) a proponent of the revolution who simply was a bit more moderate, or a commoner who just got picked up by his goons when they were looking for an enemy to behead.
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