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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Though note, we're not talking about a ban, we're talking about Thanos snapping away every gun and every future gun in private hands, depending on how you word your "wish" that might include anything that acts like a gun. This is magic (of a sort) not law.

As long as the magical wish could also prevent any government agent from having a successful shooting of an innocent, that might work. Of course, it would also lead to police just “firing” into crowds and whoever’s not “innocent” gets shot. All sorts of dystopia come into play there.

In Northern Ireland when the British Army shot into crowds it wasn't stopped by other people with guns (in fact it was soldiers fear of that which often presaged such events), it was stopped by a largely unarmed populaces horror.

The chances of the US nation descending into tyranny in the next say 50 years is in my opinion, very close to zero, no matter which side wins elections.

Magical (or advanced tech indistinguishable from it) aside, the problem with removing guns through banning them, isn't that I think it would make the government more likely to be tyrannical, privately owned guns have a negligible impact on that in my view. Its that criminals would still have them, and that even the attempt of a ban would create (understandable!) widespread instability and violence among legal gun owners which is I think is much more of a risk than government tyranny to long term civilizational stability.

So pragmatically the 2A should remain, at least in my view.

could also prevent any government agent from having a successful shooting of an innocent, that might work.

Rittenhouse is killed by government agents without the gun; they beat him to death with the skateboard. The problem with "gunless utopia" is that it makes mob violence a lot more difficult to resist.

For instance, if you have 30 KKK members coming to drag you off, or 30 Hutus coming to chop you into pieces for shits and giggles, a man with a gun can kill every single one of them given sufficient aim and time. The fact that a potential victim can not only resist, but resist in a way that makes him 30 times as strong on defense (but don't actually make him that much more powerful when attacking), is actually kind of a big deal.

“Might work” only in the limited scope that reply chain was talking about. There are innumerable reasons for private citizens to remain armed, as you’ve enumerated with excellence.