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Well, if the goal is to get rid of or dramatically curtail violent crime, NSA domestic surveillance is Good, Actually. Having the government spy on my data all of the time is an "invasion of privacy" which hurts me only in a dignitary way, except inasmuch as it can be used to construct a domestic surveillance state in the service of a totalitarian regime. But, since the 4th Amendment hasn't stopped said domestic surveillance either, from your position why shouldn't we bite the bullet the rest of the way and go full panopticon?
The answer of course is that freedom isn't a bright-line binary switch [unless you live in a place with actual chattel slavery], it's a back-and-forth, and just because you're on the backfoot for a decade or two doesn't mean you should throw in the towel and embrace the comparative advantages of TOTALITARIANISM. And in the same way that the 4th Amendment is an (imperfect) protector of American's rights, the 2nd Amendment is also an (imperfect) protector of American's rights. Certainly it has protected American's rights to keep and bear arms!
You act as if this right is purely instrumental, but it is not. The 2nd Amendment is good because it does serve as a bulwark against tyranny, and just because the bulwark isn't perfect doesn't mean we shouldn't get rid of it (imagine if we got rid of checks and balances because they demonstrably fail from time to time!) But it's also good because shooting is fun and a good thing for people to do, and it's the sort of good and fun thing that people want to take away, and it's good that there's a rule saying you can't do that. You can see something similar with the 1st Amendment: it's not merely instrumental, with free speech as a bulwark against "tyranny" – free speech is something that is good to exercise.
The problems, in terms of risk to human life and wellbeing, caused by alcohol, tobacco, and drugs are vastly worse than the problems caused by guns in the United States, and they are probably worse contributors to the violent crime problem, but you rarely see anyone endorse banning the former and a great many people are convinced that banning the latter causes or contributes to a lot of modern ills (including, ironically, violent crime.) If we're going to violate people's rights to achieve Good Ends (we swear for real this time!) then I think the cost/benefit calculus is significantly higher there. But, curiously, there seems to be much more demand for taking people's guns than cigarettes (even though about three times as many Americans own guns.) I think one can conclude from this that the desire to take guns has more to do (on balance, perhaps not in every individual case, including yours) from a dislike of guns than it does a Principled Stance on government action that (ostensibly) is for people's own benefit.
Well, one big difference is that cigarettes only play a very minor role in hurting anyone other than the people who use them, as opposed to guns.
As for the NSA, I am not convinced that it does much that is good to curtail violent crime in the US. What they ostensibly mainly focus on, other than spying on foreign countries, is trying to prevent terrorist attacks in the US. But terrorist attacks in the US are a relatively minor problem compared to random street crime.
Would I support a version of the NSA that spies on everyone and tries to pro-actively prevent wrongthink? No, clearly I don't even support the current version.
I think that there is a lot of space between "do more to prevent random anti-social idiots from getting guns" on the one hand, and totalitarianism on the other.
I question whether the 2nd Amendment in its current form does enough to be a bulwark against tyranny to make it worth while, given that it has also meant that the country is so flooded with guns that it is trivial for any anti-social idiot to get one.
Again, keep in mind that I am not calling to get rid of the 2nd Amendment, just potentially to modify it. I have gone from leaning pro-2nd Amendment in its current form, to leaning anti-2nd Amendment in its current form. I am not calling for getting rid of all privately owned guns, just for a rethink of the 2nd Amendment in its current form.
My new perspective is that maybe there is no good reason to allow citizens in general, with few exceptions, to have guns. Maybe there is a way to keep whatever deterring-the-government force that the 2nd Amendment has without also making it so easy for apolitical, anti-social psychopaths to get guns?
Ben Franklin famously supposedly said "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Ben Franklin also supported a revolution that resulted in large numbers of people who supported the previous government in fleeing the country even though they had done nothing particularly wrong. Where was those people's liberty? My point is that these things are complicated.
I am still very libertarian when it comes to free speech. But I believe that broadly free speech is essential to the kind of society that I would want to live in, and I am no longer necessarily convinced that the ability of almost anyone to buy a gun is also essential to it.
Current US gun control efforts have no real interest in actually reducing gun violence, they’d rather make life more annoying for legal gun owners because they vote for the other party.
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I challenge you to rethink this framing, both because secondhand smoking is a thing (estimated cost on a Google: upwards of 40K lives per year; somewhere around 3x the total number of gun murders) and because (IIRC) most gun violence victims in the US either shot themselves or (less likely but still statistically significant) were part of an ongoing criminal enterprise. People getting shot and killed in e.g. a random mugging or a school shooting is far from the median case of death by firearm.
Yes, mandatory military/militia service.
Yes, because we don't ask it to. Probably it could if so directed.
This is how many people feel about guns.
How is that deterring the government? One would assume that a government that can force you into military service is the opposite of deterred.
The government can force you into military service if they want, and always has been able to, at least in the United States.
But yes, as IGI-111 says, a strong militia at the state level provides a very potent counterbalance to the capabilities of the federal government. Also, when every single person is either in the military or has military training, it may make your armed forces less reliable for the purposes of tyranny (since you'll have a harder time selecting for loyalists) and it makes the citizenry you'll be looking to oppress considerably more resilient. Interestingly, up to and during the Civil War, the army was actually a very localist organization. Regiments were raised from a certain geographic area, and they selected their own officers democratically – a far cry from the centralized command and control mechanisms that we all assume to be the default today.
But besides this, the reason I floated it is that it actually could be (I think, maybe) a decent mechanism for weeding out legitimately dangerous characters; a dishonorable discharge is the equivalent of a felony and bars people from firearm possession. Maybe, since we're making up stuff in the abstract (Goodguy still being in favor of the Second Amendment in practice) a simple "can you serve your country and community responsibly for a year without committing a felonious offense?" test is a good way of preemptively weeding out the people Goodguy is talking about.
(I'm very much on the fence about this and expect to get at least one comment from someone who served that actually no the psychopaths do fine in military service and then they use their experience to go tip over banks in Chicago or something. But I'd rather be conscripted for a year and then have a free pass to buy whatever gun I used in the service than live under a British shotguns-only permitting regime.)
But I think this comment is a good time to point out something sort of interesting at the heart of American freedom. Today, "freedom" is typically defined as "lack of government coercion" but the American experiment assumed lots of government coercion as part of what made freedom possible. Things like jury service, militia service, and the draft were contemplated and accepted by America's framers as something that would strengthen American freedom. A lot of this was about checks-and-balances, but I think it's worth considering the sort of person they thought such civic participation would make.
Gun ownership is like car ownership: the more you use them, the more exposure to risk you accept, but the more proficient you get at them, the more you lower your risk while using them. (Driving a car for only an hour a year is actually a bad idea!) Today there's so many truisms about "law abiding gun owners" that I think they often obscure the interesting suggestion at the heart of them, which is that unlawful firearms violence is inversely correlated to actual use of firearms. My guess is that people who own firearms to hunt, or as a hobby, get more range time than most murderers.
I don't think that using a firearm makes you a more moral person. But I do think that being part of a culture that teaches you to exercise self-governance (both at the personal level and at the civic level) is more likely to make you into a person who is law abiding and responsible. I wouldn't say we've entirely lost that culture in America, and I'm not confident the schemes people scrape together (mandatory militia service! gun permits! regulation! deregulation!) will be able to return the parts of that culture that have eroded away. But that's the America I want to (and largely do) live in, an America where I can trust my neighbors to vote wisely, serve as just jurors, handle firearms and automobiles with the respect they deserve, and ask if I mind before lighting up a cigarette.
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Those units being explicitly not under the orders of USG may help.
Consider countries like Andorra, which have laws on the books that force you to own a firearm for national defense. Putting that responsibility in the hands of local individuals (what the constitution defines as "the militia") is a way of empowering them, not making them subservient to a government that does national defense on their behalf.
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