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You get at the heart of why I ask about being willing to carry out violence. Someone is going to take on that psychological burden. Its easy to forget that when its not you. My level of experience with violence is pretty similar to yours, except I do have some decent marksmanship. I think I'd be able to pull the trigger and execute people, but I am also decently certain that it would eventually break me as a functioning member of society. Its a big mind-shift to see people as fleshy bodies that can easily be blown apart with a few rounds, and that is what I think I'd come to see other people as. And I have a cold temper that never manifests as screaming in people's faces, but certainly does manifest as logically thinking of ways I can maximally hurt someone. Having the 'murder' option readily available in my mental toolbox would be very bad for me.
Basically I wouldn't be happy to have myself as a neighbor that carries out executions. It is similar reasons that make me a libertarian. I'm pretty certain I would abuse power if I were in a powerful position, so I tend to not trust others in those positions.
Your interaction with a bum is something I'd like in a neighbor. I might have found your particular approach too risky for my taste. Unless I had a few other neighbors standing there with me.
Japan and Singapore mostly don't execute that many people. Maybe a dozen a year. I'm not worried about the spillover effects of that level of capital punishment. Certain cities of Texas might have a higher per capita execution rate.
There are currently about a half million homeless people in the US. I don't think you'd need to kill all of them. But conservatively maybe 10% of them are hopeless about getting out of their situation and would end up on the chopping block. Fifty Thousand executions. That is an unprecedented number in not just the Western world, but the entire world.
I went and looked it up and Iran apparently executed the most people in 2023, about 850 people. I think their society is already far more violent than I'd ever like to experience. Its not just the people carrying out the executions, its a support structure, and a society willing to say "yeah thats fine, go murder those people".
This is basically my belief as well. As I said above, getting rid of violence often requires violence. But executing about 50k people would not be trying to minimize violence. It would be a society wide escalation. There are only about 20k murders a year in the US. This just doesn't seem like "carefully targeted" violence at all.
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