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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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I am not convinced that the ability of the tiniest sliver of the population to fuck things up is a net positive.

The way a militia envisioned by the framers would work is that it would unite the bulk of men in a country with similar ideas on how their country should be run. If 99% think that life under British rule is great, and 1% wants to fight for independence, then the 99% would simply arrest the 1% and extradite them to the Brits. Political power grows from the barrel of a gun, so if the guns are equally distributed throughout the population, the majority will be in charge.

If anyone who owns an AR15 gets de-facto veto powers over the federal government, this will not make a country more democratic, but less democratic.

For what it is worth, I agree with @Capital_Room that assassinations are unlikely to change the fundamental character of a political system. If you killed Hitler in 1924, this would not turn the NSDAP or their voters into democrats. But also, if someone had shot Biden in 2020, the US would not have said "well, our democratically elected president is dead, so democracy has failed and we should build a Fuehrerstaat."