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So? It would be absurd to suggest never taking any action on one cause of an ill just because it happened not to be the most important cause. As long as it's a significant factor it's worth doing something about.
I don't think he was saying the action of secession was pro-tyranny, merely that rebellions can incidentally also be 'pro-tyranny', which is hard to dispute in the case of the U.S. Civil War, given what was being fought over.
If it's not the most significant factor, then almost by definition you shouldn't be prioritizing it.
My position is that there are at least a couple more significant factors that are studiously ignored when it comes to this issue.
I don't think there was any stated intention for the Confederate States to extend their authority over any other nations, so hard to claim they were 'tyrannical' with regards to the North, nor that they were somehow flouting the actual laws of the country at the time.
And to the extent they were tyrannizing their own people, well you're hardly going to suggest that slaves enjoyed expansive gun rights, are you?
i.e., my point, that tyrannical powers generally prefer disarmed populaces.
This circles back to our comments above on tractability.
No but the point is that an armed population, if they are ever able to resist the state, will not always be doing so to benefit of the population. As another commentor has observed, the latter and post-Reconstruction era South would have been a much freer place were the entire population disarmed.
Maybe true, but I don't think it holds any lessons for modern day America.
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If we are looking for a US example of pro-tyranny armed citizens rebelling against the government, then the first Klan and the Redeemers (my history is not good enough to know to what extent these were meaningfully different groups) are a more clear-cut example than the Confederacy.
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But surely if it is the culture's perception of violence which has the greatest impact you should put more work into that? If we rework America into a more conservative culture like Japan we could solve the issue and keep gun owners happy, then everyone wins.
Well not really because gun control is, at least from a policy perspective, relatively tractable, and from a political perspective many good measures are well inside the Overton window. 'Reworking America into a more conservative culture' will never happen, at least not whole cloth and not in a way where the results will be easily predictable and definitely translate into a more stable society.
This is an interesting position to take given that we can literally look at Japan and see that they have something resembling a 'more conservative culture' and attendant low rates of violence.
So we are now facing a question: WHY can it never happen in the U.S.?
If it is in-principle possible, why is it dismissed out of hand?
Well if you think that side of things is tractable, what plausible policy responses do you think would meaningfully move us in that direction that actually have a chance of being implemented?
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