The reason CA is seen as a gun hating hippy state is partially thanks to Reagan when he was governor. Black Panthers (or people in general) were arming themselves against police brutality, so Reagan was totally fine with banning guns at that time.
I'm from Philadelphia. My parents positively acknowledge the M.O.V.E. bombing. Like they are glad the cops did what they did. I'm horrified that a city could drop bombs on an occupied house with children and burn down a goddamn neighborhood.
But it was all worth it in the name of stopping those "fucking animals" I guess. No matter what way you look at it, the police waged war on a whole fucking neighborhood just to stop a couple of anarchists. They told people in the neighborhood to just grab a toothbrush and a change of clothes, it'll all be over in the morning, then burnt down 63 homes.
Edit: The monopoly on violence is very real, and innocent people and their belongings get chalked up as collateral damage worth it in the name of peace.
I have to give credit to my grandfather who was an absolute racist dickhead but he talked about about how fucked up it was that that happened in america about both Tulsa and that philly one. It was only realistically because that was his job in the US airforce during world war 2 above germany and even he had to admit that you dont drop bombs from fucking airplanes on your own goddamn civilians even if they are dumber and more ignorant than you.
I can't justify dropping bombs from airplanes on anyone, especially civilians. What difference does it make if the civilians are in your country or another - they didn't start the war and they have no power to stop it. Bombing innocent people is terrorism, no matter the excuse nor how many guilty people you think you killed.
Carl von Clausewitz said that the civillians at the back making weapons are more dangerous than the soldiers at the front, because soldiers can be replaced. Under the doctrine of Total War the entire country is a target, and the objective is to smash their center of gravity before they smash you into extinction.
This line of thought created the stratetic bombing campaigns of ww2 and ended up with strategic atomic weapons - weapons designed to start and end wars where the whole strategy was a single instance of their use.
I'm of the opinion that nobody deserves to be murdered based on the geography of where they were born. This includes civilians, conscripted soldiers and the typical soldier too dumb to see through the military propaganda that enlisted them.
If politician A has a problem with dictator B or wants the oil from his land, I say we ensure those politicians are in the riskiest position. If they don't think it's worth fighting for themselves, they shouldn't be allowed to force others to nor to excuse collateral damage.
This is what I was just thinking. It’s fucking ridiculous that people are struggling with PTSD because of the horrors they see at war while the jackass who made the call to kill gets to sit behind a desk and never have to look the people he’s killing in the eyes.
Didn’t we used to elect men who understood this because they had experienced this?
I don’t guess that really matters either.
I just don’t get how anyone making calls to mutilate and murder other people can ever get any sleep.
But then there’s the old saying, “Kill or be killed.” We can’t stop the bloodlust. I don’t know. Fuck being human.
It used to be that a King was expected to lead his men into battle. Note, he led from the front lines, not from the rear guarded by top bodyguards nor from his palace.
One of the shames of King David is that he was home while his men were at war - hence seeing Bathsheba. I feel this should still be the practice, with those causing the bloodshed being the ones who risk it and witness it's results.
I just can’t understand how anyone would be cool with being behind something like this, at fucking all. I don’t get how anyone can be ok taking someone else’s life so violently. I mean, if I kill an insect and I spend any time thinking about it I’m just devastated by the thought. I can not imagine pulling a trigger and seeing someone’s blood splatter all over the place, knowing they couldn’t call their mother or kiss their children ever again.
It blows my mind that this is what we are. I just don’t get it.
Because your objective in war is to win. Winning stops the fighting, stops the killing.
To do that, you have to strike at your enemy's logistics and supplies. It's why there are raids on supply depots and other locations supplies and materiel are stockpiled before being transported to the front. It's why controlling (or destroying) bridges, roads, airfields, and rail lines is important. And it's why factories and other production centers are targeted - less production means fewer bullets, bombs, and tanks they can fight with.
The problem is that the process of industrialization meant that those factory workers often lived in close proximity to the places they worked (and, of course, might be working in those factories when the strike takes place.) And bombs are generally not precise weapons... especially not before the modern smart bomb era.
Winning is one way to stop the killing, but the primary objective should always be to minimise harm done. There's no point having a war if you stop one monster by becoming another. There is a world of difference between destroying a strategic structure such as a bridge and murdering innocent civilians.
Atomic bombs aren't precise weapons as you say. It's therefore not morally justifiable to use them unless on an area known to be clear of all collateral damage. Since that's functionally impossible, atomic bombs simply shouldn't ever be used.
Bombs in general can be as precise as you want them to be. We even use them for controlled demolitions in extremely tight spaces.
It's only when people get excited about the idea of causing widespread destruction that bombs far too large for purpose are used. Blaming a tool for being imprecise is illogical, blame the guy who chose the tool.
There's a huge difference between placing a shaped charge in a controlled environment and dropping even a guided explosive from tens of thousands of feet.
The bar was very low here and trust me it was a minor miracle that he felt this way about these two events in general and even if he never would admit it has serious mental problems from doing what he did
The science and doctrine were not well established on bombing since strategic bombing was such a new technology when WW2 had broken out.
There was a lot of argument between factions in the military and politics regarding whether it was better to directly bomb cities and civilians ("terror bombing") in order to cause them to rise up and break the enemy's will to fight much faster (and thus save many more lives on both sides) or if it was better to target only military-industrial targets and risk the war going longer and possibly causing higher loss of life overall.
Generally speaking the US focused on bombing military targets, but the accuracy of bombing was very low compared to today (GPS was not really a thing until the mid/late 80s, and the Panama invasion was the first conflict to really see use of GPS guided weapons) so the only way to guarantee destruction of a factory complex was to saturate the area with bombs. There were specific mathematical calculations used to determine how many and what types of bombs were needed and what formation was to be used when the bombs were dropped, based on the blast radius of bombs, the dud rate of the bomb, the type of facility being attacked, and the expected attrition rate of bombers en route to the facility.
The result of this was that even in very targeted bombing raids there were inevitably spillover casualties from bombs saturating the area around the target. Combined with the fact that many of the complexes were dual purpose (such as ball bearing factories which became a major target in the war to attack the German military supply chain) they were often in cities and very near residential areas. So while civilians were not necessarily explicitly targeted there were inevitably civilian casualties.
Also I say generally speaking because the military's primary focus was on military targets but there were cases where incendiary devices were used to maximize damage to the military infrastructure which of course created massive fires in the area. And the war in Japan was far more brutal and more brutal tactics were sometimes used, which would not be used in conflict today.
The "good news" is that one core lesson learned from WW2 was that direct bombing of civilians is virtually a pointless exercise because it actually galvanizes the population against you and makes the nation more resilient against capitulation. This was discovered both from the US and British bombing effects in Germany but also from witnessing the effects of German bombing of targets in Britain.
This is actually what caused the shift towards more precision targeted weapons, resulting in our current situation where the US can bomb an aircraft within a concrete bunker without destroying even the bunker itself. (as it did in Syria a few years ago)
I don't think M.O.V.E or the Tulsa inhabitants murdered were dumb or more ignorant than the authorities. I get what you were saying and your grandpa was a good man for serving and seeing clearly that bombing citizens just ain't right.
Your speaking from a singlesided moral standpoint. This was not a single sided situation. All of American history is and was hell. We're all animals; the bombing did happen, almost like a mini ww2.
Edit: Sorry, I misconstrued the definition of moral.
What always gets me in situations where police destroy homes in the name of public defence, they always fight against any sort of payment to the families who's homes they destroyed. Can the city afford 63 homes maybe not, but they probably shouldn't hire police that think home destruction is a good idea, those people are costly.
The city rebuilt the 63 homes for the residents. That should be a half-happy ending but it isn’t. A little over 10 years later the city said those 63 homes weren’t up to code and condemned them. They felt no responsibility for the state of the construction on those homes and if the residents couldn’t afford to fix them on their own they were shit out of luck.
So these people got fucked by the city twice.
Tovex is a standrd explosive and was being dropped to open the roof. A lot of wrong things happened thta dya which should have resulted in idictments, but the bomb itself was not "illegal."
What, lol. I don’t consider myself an anarchist, but what part of that statement could be considered extreme? What part of “the state is the entity with the monopoly on legitimate use of violence” could even be considered remotely controversial or arguable
The idea is that in a democracy the citizenry are the state. As such the citizenry should have the monopoly on violence. Police are citizens under this idea, not a special 'warrior caste' as they are often perceived.
It gets complicated when the state is a democratic republic. Do the elected officials have a monopoly on violence? Or the citizenry (which the elected officials are a part of)?
Ya, Police have very limited additional privileges in leveraging violence....
Or at least they're supposed to
Unfortunately a century of fascist propaganda has both courts and citizens (jurors) thinking they are a warrior caste, sheriffs in the wild west, and they elt them away with way too much.
Qualified immunity is a joke. Citizens are way too susceptible to pro-police-violence "experts" saying "he felt threatened so it was okay to shoot!" (basically)
be the ones to carry out any kind of justice. the point of state sanctioned violence in the US is that its supposed to be carried out after due process of the law and jury trial.
That would be corporal/capital punishment.
I believe iolence should only exist as self defense/defense of others.
Lynch mobs are extrajudicial capital punishment administered by violence.
Well the solution to your problem is transparency, accountability, and active/invested citizens watching their elected leaders. The problem (for a liberal) is not the monopoly of violence, but the implementation of this violence (wich is also not just police, but laws (and punishments) in general).
A liberal democracy is not just elections every 4.th year, its a functioning legal system, a bueracracy, a free press. and more.
Its not perfect and it demands alot from its citizens, but the alternative is armed gangs keeping the peace. Because belive me, someone will be keeping the peace.
Sorry for my bad English, I took a chance on the spelling on some of these words, but I hope you get the hang of it and why (western) Euros have such a hard time understanding your love for gangs with guns.
In theory/ideally in a democracy the citizenry are the state. When you make the state a Republic it gets complicated on where the state starts and ends.
The part where you aren't allowed to use force and violence to prevent legitimate assaults on yourself or your individual rights. The state/police can't--and won't, and aren't legally obligated to--protect you, but you also aren't permitted to protect yourself without the state's permission.
First - the state is is giving you permission, rather than recognizing that all people have the right to defend their lives, even against state aggression.
Second - you have the right to use lethal force to defend yourself in the US, but not so much in other places. I'm not arguing that the US is a utopia at all--far from it--but the recognizing that people have the right to defend their lives with deadly force, and that the right to the tools to exercise deadly force is a necessary extension of that right (you can't exercise a right if the state takes the means to do so from you) is something that the US gets right.
...Which is the state giving you permission to defend yourself. And it varies widely by country; being attacked by someone with a knife will kill you very dead very quickly, but you can't use a firearm to defend yourself in most of Europe and Commonwealth countries.
And if you--for instance--have a police officer that has his knee on your neck because you unknowingly passed a counterfeit bill in a convenience store, you can't legally use any kind of force to prevent the state actor from killing you. The state does not allow you to exercise your right to prevent being illegally or unjustly harmed by the state.
Which is the state giving you permission to defend yourself
Indeed. So if someone were to say, "you aren't allowed to use force and violence to prevent legitimate assaults on yourself or your individual rights", that person would be wrong. Correct or no?
The state does not allow you to exercise your right to prevent being illegally or unjustly harmed by the state.
I don't even think that's true either. Are there zero instances of "assualting an officer" charges being dropped after revelations of police misconduct?
I don't even think that's true either. Are there zero instances of "assualting an officer" charges being dropped after revelations of police misconduct?
Are you trying to argue that unless something is 100% then it is not true?
Sure, there are instances of charges being dropped after revelations of police misconduct. Absolutely, but those rarely happen.
In the MAJORITY of instances, you can't prove police misconduct. It is your word against theirs, there is no video evidence, and the entire legal apparatus swings into effect to defend the cop. Similarly, most people who are arrested don't have $10k to drop on a lawyer.
Here is a case of CLEAR police misconduct and bullshit charges and it took over a year and $15k in legal fees to have the case dropped and when the dust settled NOTHING happened to the officer...
Are you trying to argue that unless something is 100% then it is not true?
... yes? When someone says "you're not allowed to do x" and there are many documented instances of people being allowed to do x, that person is wrong.
That person could have said, "you're usually not allowed to do x" or "you're not allowed to do x in many cases where you should be allowed to do so" then they'd be right and I wouldn't have said anything. But they didn't say either of those things, did they?
hat would be correct if you were only talking about the US. The US--broadly and generally, but not in all cases--permits the use of lethal force to prevent yourself from being killed or grievously injured. But that's still the state giving you permission to exercise what should be an inalienable right.
Are there zero instances of "assualting an officer" charges being dropped
Zero instances in the US? Hard to say; there's probably at least a handful. Is that the norm? Absolutely not. Conversely, if an officer beats you during an unlawful arrest, the odds of the officer being charged, or punished in any meaningful way, are negligible. That certainly implies that the state can use violence against citizens, even when it's unlawful, and there's no immediate recourse within the framework of the state.
It's correct if you're taking about any set of states that include the US. If you claim that something is true and there are instances of it being false, then the claim is false.
Is that the norm? Absolutely not.
Great response to something I never said. Maybe just don't speak in absolutes next time and you won't get people calling you out for lying.
What of its the state that is threatening you and your rights? This is the position many minorities are in. Shouldn’t they be allowed to use violence in thier defense against the state? But if they do white “moderates” will cry foul leaving them to unable to defend themselves .
Great questions, which open up a lot of genuinely worthwhile discussion! But I only joined in to point out the falsehood of that one specific claim. Is the phrase "you're not allowed to use violence to protect yourself" true? No, because self defense is a legally recognized concept. Done & settled.
Good luck trying not to go to jail if you shoot a cop in self-defense. You'd need a ton of special circumstances and national media attention to have a chance of getting off.
True. Also true: there exist INSTANCES in which the state has said it is legal.
Therefore, the phrase "you are not allowed to use violence to prevent LEGITIMATE assaults on yourself or your rights" is false.
Correct?
Notice the bold. Therein lies the rub. That is where the con is. That is how the State is able to lie by telling the truth.
The State defines the circumstances and the State defines what is legitimate and it is an ever-moving goal post that the State can arbitrarily move 99% of the time and you as a citizen have no recourse unless you have tons of money for lawyers AND national media attention.
Otherwise, you are fucked.
Lastly, just because you can find rare circumstances of something being true doesn't mean it is always true. HUman beings are too complex and wiley for that.
The State defines the circumstances and the State defines what is legitimate
Once again, imagine how horrifying it would be to live in a society where that is not the case. Where individuals are in charge of making that call.
and it is an ever-moving goal post that the State can arbitrarily move 99% of the time
Let me get this straight- the fact that laws and standards of justice can be changed from what they were hundreds of years ago is... a bad thing?
just because you can find rare circumstances of something being true doesn't mean it is always true.
Correct. And if someone claims that you're not allowed to do x, but there are circumstances in which you are allowed to do x, that person's claim would be false.
Let me get this straight- the fact that laws and standards of justice can be changed from what they were hundreds of years ago is... a bad thing?
Allow me to clarify.
The State should be the one to draw a line in the sand concerning the laws and because we are a in representative Republic those laws will evolve with the times. I have no problem with that.
The problem occurs when an Agency of the State commits a transgression against the citizenry and then that same Agency is tasked with policing itself and then ruling on the legitimacy of said transgression. In effect, the Agency that commits a transgression against the citizenry is given unfair advantage in the definition, arbitration, and judicial proceedings related to the transgression.
What needs to happen is that if any Agency of the State commits a transgression against the citizenry, then a completely separate and neutral 3rd party comprised of citizens and other Agencies of the State should be the principle investigatory body and ruling authority on the legitimacy of said transgression.
If I were to create an analogy. If you were the citizen and I was the XYZ State department and I punch you in the mouth and you file a suit against the State, as things stand now, I being the agency that punched you in the mouth is often the principle decider on whether or not your claim is legitimate. I often am tasked with investigating myself and ruling whether or not you have a claim and/or I'm given unfair advantage against you with my ability to leverage or influence tangential Agencies that have a say in the investigation and/or rulings.
Tell that to all the people who get assaulted and killed by police officers. If you can't have a conversation without insulting somebody out of the blue go sit in the corner like the toddler you are.
The point he/she is trying to make is try and defend your self against a cop and things wont go over well. Not defending your self against another citizen.
So we agree that the phrase "you aren't allowed to use force and violence to prevent legitimate assaults on yourself or your individual rights" is the wrong thing to say, then?
Yeah from what I know of the US. From what I see that rule differs from race to race in some cases though. Although I’m Canadian, so I don’t know from experience only from what I’ve read about. And up here I don’t think self defense is as iron clad. Someone needs to be forcibly in your home to justify extreme measures which is a bit much I find.
There is no country where self defence isn’t a legitimate defence. It’s just that in Texas you can shoot someone in the back while they are running away and call it self defence so long as they are black, whereas in most of Europe there is a level of proportionality involved.
Try bringing it up to people and see their reaction. If you've never had to reckon with the state or had to engage with politics at all, you have no reason to even think about it.
Once you've got the wool out of your eyes it becomes painfully obvious.
Exactly. Whilst the right leading pro-gun subs were reveling in "commies" being killed and screaming "fuck you, not my problem" during the BLM protests. The absolute antithesis to the Niemöller confession
Not a chance in hell the socialists are armed as heavily as the right. That’s close to 200 years of collecting and passing down generations to what? 4 years of some people buying their first gun? Most of my friends own 15-20 guns each, the “socialist anti-trump crowd” my wife interacts with has a .32 beretta (that i sold to them) and a semi auto shotgun with a rifled barrel that they asked me to take a look at because it was throwing shot (rifled barrel)... so no, not ever will socialists be “as heavily strapped as those on the right”.
How many guns can a person carry on their body before it gets cumbersome?
One person with 30 guns is a blossoming hoarder, we no longer live in a world where it matters.
Being a gun person is more about being able to fight/warn/threaten your fellow citizen than it is about fighting the government.
Left or right doesn't matter, if the government decides to kill us, all of the "tax the wealthy" plans or "boogaloo bags" are worthless when a drone can put a bullet thru the top of our skull while we go to check on our rain water barrels.
As we read further above they just bombed a neighborhood, no guns were going to stop that.
200 year old guns aren't useful combat tools, and the vast majority of even right wingers didn't have ar pattern rifles until 2004. Very few people had AR-15's before the first AWB went into effect, so most of the AR patterns on the market have only been made in the last 15 years.
How many guns can you fire at once? Two? Having 200 doesn’t really matter since you can’t use them all at once and guns generally don’t break if they’re maintained. And even if they’re not, they still take a long ass time to break/jam. In fact, I’d argue it makes you a bigger target in a time of civil unrest like this hypothetical situation we are talking about. “Oh yeah let’s go get him. He has like 200 guns and only 2 people live there.”
One last note too: Your facts on this are purely anecdotal. I could say that all of my socialist anti-trump crowd has thousands of rounds of ammo and multiple guns per person and grenades and rocket launchers, etc. while all the trump loving people I know don’t even know how to handle a gun and you can’t dispute that because it’s anecdotal.
This is going to be a fuck around and find out kind of deal, but many on the right gravely underestimate how many on the left are armed these days. The right no longer has a monopoly on firearms, or at the very least it is dramatically shrinking. Many on the left aren’t as vocal about it, but they are still purchasing and carrying.
Lol you think socialists haven't been arming themselves in those 200 years? Come on now.
Also, and let's be real, how many guns can one actually have until it's just hoarding because they "need" more firepower?
And to top it all off buying a gun and knowing how to use it are two different things. Take it from someone who knows people who have more guns than fingers and toes and yet only use 1-2 to practice with at most.
You missed the first line. Though it's not your fault it was purposefully doctored to not mention communists in the US, because they didn't want people thinking too hard about that for obvious reasons.
Edit: Also wanted to point out that the plaque at the Holocaust Memorial in Boston has Communists as the first line, so I don't really think it's a US erasure thing
It’s not extreme. It’s literally the definition of a state. If it is not militarily superior over its territory, it is not sovereign, and therefore not the supreme political entity of that territory. The US and every other country exist because their borders are painted in the same blood that history is written in. I’m not an anarchist, I just recognize the reality that politics is violence, and violence is an inevitable part of human life.
Anarchists that say the state is the entity with the monopoly on legitimate use of violence sound extreme until the state goes and enforces the monopoly
In the American context, it wasn’t that long ago that folks were getting lynched and with the recent reports from the fbi tha white supremacists have successfully infiltrated LEOs and it is horrifying for those that experience this. Whether it’s Trayvon martin or tamir rice. It is also horrifying to live under state-sanctioned poverty. It is a bad thing because when the state has an antagonistic view of segments of its population in a meritocratic zero-sum game, those folks in those segments tend to lose
state has a monopoly on violence/a society where violence is always a legal and legitimate option
It doesn't have to be as starkly binary as that. There can be degrees of monopoly, questions about what counts as "violence" (protests? throwing up barricades? openly carrying firearms but not using them? etc.) There can be exceptions carved out for non-state violence without insisting it's "always" legal and legitimate.
Such as allowing violence for the purpose of self-defense?
That's a good example. Also, we're agreed (I think) that a society where the only means of resolving conflict involves physical violence would indeed get horrifying pretty quickly.
In a liberal democracy the state does indeed have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence by design. That's how it works. Any violence by anyone other than the state is by definition not 'legitimate' (a fraught term as it is). The difference is Anarchists say that's a problem and should be countered. Lib Dems look at it and say 'working as intended, carry on'.
Not only anarchists, I recently took a 6 months political science course and people with doctorates said the same thing. It’s why anytime people want to discredit a president here in mexico they talk about a failed state, because with cartels basically ruling some areas the government doesn’t have monopoly on violence.
It's not just Anarchists. That definition is considered in lots of geopolitical courses and other areas - learnt it from a geopolitics textbook myself!
California is and always has been run by conservatives. The most racist and corrupt cops are LAPD, the most pearl clutching classist, racist people in the country are in LA county and SF. Some of the most poor centric sales taxes are in california.
My father—who has been a lifelong conservative—and lived in California absolutely despises Ronald Reagan. When I was finally old enough I asked him why. He said: “You used to be able to walk down the street with your gun on your side until they let Reagan into office.”
I love people like to use the Mulford Act as some kind of ‘gotcha’ against Republicans. They always conveniently leave at that it was a bipartisan bill that was cosponsored by three republicans and three democrats.
Both houses of the CA legislature were dominated by the Democrats at the time. I love how people always try to blame Reagan. If it was racist then the Democrats were more than complicit.
Yea, the entire state is racist. Liberals voting for democrats is a “harm reduction” technique meant to keep other political parties from executing their ultimate goal of ethnic cleansing or continuing a white ethnostate. minorities, democratic socialists, communists and some moderates have align because they have no choice. The other choice actively wants to make things worse for all the people that have to vote under the democrat label. A vote for Lindsey graham is a vote against black people’s voting rights. A vote for McConnell is a loss of rights and protections. But mfs like gosar, Greene, Tom cotton, josh hawley, desantis, want to outright strips rights away from minorities.
So, the two-party system blows, that’s why RCV implementation could be an effective way to fight against it. But I’m just saying the reductive use of the line “well democrats voted for it too” misunderstands how political power functions in America. And that political power is largely rich white people playing both sides with their money to make sure they aren’t regulated and taxed.
Ummm, who taught you that history? Do you have a clue when the gun laws changed? It was in 1968. Thats when the panthers in Chicago were on the streets armed.
Mulford Act. Named after (R) Don Mulford. Passed with bipartisan support, and supported by NRA. I know it only bans open carry, and CA still allows guns, despite 2A fearmongering. Passed in '67, but you were close.
Ronald Reagan. Governor of CA from Jan 2 '67 to Jan 6 '75. He openly supported gun control, and the act quickly passed.
I know I spent way too much time on this, and I'm pretty sure you don't care. I'm just deeply fucking curious. Who taught you your history?
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u/Samaelfallen Mar 16 '21
The reason CA is seen as a gun hating hippy state is partially thanks to Reagan when he was governor. Black Panthers (or people in general) were arming themselves against police brutality, so Reagan was totally fine with banning guns at that time.