Would Philando Castile still be alive...

[inthesomeday]

Well, I don't - entirely - agree with that proposition. For example, if Philando Castile had fired at the cop first, my guess is that other cops would then have found and summarily executed him.

Cop killers get trials too, I think they would've been pressured to follow the law after the media attention generated. I think his chances of survival would've been higher if he just approached the situation with a gun out rather than disarmed.

But the larger point here is the same argument I make when people claim that guns are needed for self-defense.

Now I understand what follows is a statistical argument, but before we go to that let's establish the common-sense basis first.

If somebody with a gun is trying to hurt you, and you do not have a gun, they are going to hurt you. If somebody with a gun is trying to hurt you, and you do have a gun, they may hurt you. That makes sense, right?

Also, you've demonstrated an acceptance that the US government has become fascistic in nature, especially towards communities of color, as well as an acceptance that force is absolutely necessary to combat fascism. So why weaken the ability of the people to apply force? Now I'll level with you-- I know that white folks currently have more access to guns than a lot of people of color, but Philando is an example of a person of color with a gun, and his situation exemplifies the uncertain usefulness of docility and submission.

The possibility space where a gun is going to 'save' you is smaller than the possibility space of your own gun putting you in danger. The research bears this out. A gun is more likely to be used for suicide than anything else, but even leaving that aside the epidemiological evidence was unambiguous that gun ownership is correlated with being a victim of gun violence.

Your problem is that you think about guns in the context of domestic capitalist life. I mean, I'll be honest-- I don't own a gun, and I agree it's unrealistic to expect revolution tomorrow or whatever, and I don't even exactly advocate gun ownership among everyone everywhere right now, but the political gun is something to discuss in the same way as anything else in politics. Obviously if we're trying to solve a problem in the "liberal democracy" of the US we have to limit our discussion immensely and come to one of the two acceptable conclusions on it. The interesting thing, actually, the real contradiction, is not in that a leftist is able to look to the potential of the gun, but that a leftist like yourself is unable to.

You've discussed race, environment, and electoral strategy outside of the realm of today, and with a lot of the same points I agree with. The types of ways we want to resolve these issues aren't overnight, and they can't be voted on or entrusted to government. When it comes to guns though, you start coming up with the same types of statistics in the context of poverty as might be used to justify poverty itself.

Miseducation, or lack of access to safety towards guns, is a product of poverty the same as those same things towards birth control. We can either ban guns, and concentrate them in the hands of the upper class and the government, or advocate education of the poor. I choose the latter.

If we estimate about 1,000 police shootings per year, even if we assume all are unjustified, those murders are dwarfed by the roughly 10,000 civilian-on-civilian gun homicides per year, and again by the roughly 20,000 gun suicides per year.
So even if flooding society with even more guns prevented all those 1,000 police shootings (which of course it wouldn't) you're not actually reducing the number of lives lost.

Again these statistics are true to the world we live in today but are useless when talking about their theoretical value. There are tons of useless statistics like crime rates of black people or pregnancy rates of poor people, that are solely due to poverty and should be discounted when trying to discuss ending poverty. I agree that it's a huge tragedy that poor folks are pitted against each other and engage in gun violence against one another, but the solution isn't taking their guns away, which actually perpetuates their poverty, but rather educating them about guns and society.

I don't know, I feel like I'm doing a bad job communicating this because I have a terrible migraine right now, but my point is it's wrong and liberal to say we need to take everyone's guns and concentrate them in the hands of the rich because of gun violence statistics. It's a completely unrelated thing, gun violence comes from poverty the same as domestic violence, which is similarly reported at higher rates among the poor.

Incidentally, there are few things more frustrating to me than people who are supposed to be anti-capitalists falling for gun industry marketing propaganda hook, line, and sinker.

How about ypu respond to my actual argument instead of peddling this Great Man stuff?

I agree, Great Man stuff is stupid. I just wanted to make sure you knew the propaganda I was consuming was from anti-capitalists, not from gun industry marketing.

If my goal is the overthrow of capitalism in the long run, then arming the proletariat is fundamentally important to my goal. Using gun violence statistics within liberal capitalism, which could equally be used to argue that poor people are violent as to argue that guns are too dangerous, doesn't really disprove or even relate to the logical basis of supporting arms distribution.

 

[Lexicus]

Cop killers get trials too, I think they would've been pressured to follow the law after the media attention generated. I think his chances of survival would've been higher if he just approached the situation with a gun out rather than disarmed.

I disagree.

If somebody with a gun is trying to hurt you, and you do not have a gun, they are going to hurt you. If somebody with a gun is trying to hurt you, and you do have a gun, they may hurt you. That makes sense, right?

No. I don't agree with this premise. And of course this is the exact same argument the right always uses to sidestep the statistical argument. I would be happy to never hear "common sense" invoked in an argument again.

Also, you've demonstrated an acceptance that the US government has become fascistic in nature, especially towards communities of color, as well as an acceptance that force is absolutely necessary to combat fascism. So why weaken the ability of the people to apply force? Now I'll level with you-- I know that white folks currently have more access to guns than a lot of people of color, but Philando is an example of a person of color with a gun, and his situation exemplifies the uncertain usefulness of docility and submission.

If people of color engage in large-scale violent resistance against the US government, my guess is that the results would not be good. Docility and submission aren't necessarily a survival strategy, but overplaying your hand because you fetishize violent resistance against an unjust system isn't going to do anyone any good either.

Your problem is that you think about guns in the context of domestic capitalist life. I mean, I'll be honest-- I don't own a gun, and I agree it's unrealistic to expect revolution tomorrow or whatever, and I don't even exactly advocate gun ownership among everyone everywhere right now, but the political gun is something to discuss in the same way as anything else in politics. Obviously if we're trying to solve a problem in the "liberal democracy" of the US we have to limit our discussion immensely and come to one of the two acceptable conclusions on it. The interesting thing, actually, the real contradiction, is not in that a leftist is able to look to the potential of the gun, but that a leftist like yourself is unable to.

Guns have no potential except killing people. If you want the left to start the game of killing people, I must say that I think it is going to lose. The left will never be able to match the capitalists in the application of organized violence. And if the left ever does come to that point, there will likely be very little to choose between it and the capitalists anyway.

When it comes to guns though, you start coming up with the same types of statistics in the context of poverty as might be used to justify poverty itself.

Miseducation, or lack of access to safety towards guns, is a product of poverty the same as those same things towards birth control. We can either ban guns, and concentrate them in the hands of the upper class and the government, or advocate education of the poor. I choose the latter.

The problem is not miseducation. Despite the various kinds of nonsense that are peddled around this issue it is very clear that guns themselves are dangerous, and act as an accelerant to violence, turning altercations deadly, raising the stakes of domestic violence, and so forth. The only thing that more guns is going to accomplish is more dead people. I don't know about you but I'm a leftist because I want to see fewer dead people.

I don't know, I feel like I'm doing a bad job communicating this because I have a terrible migraine right now, but my point is it's wrong and liberal to say we need to take everyone's guns and concentrate them in the hands of the rich because of gun violence statistics. It's a completely unrelated thing, gun violence comes from poverty the same as domestic violence, which is similarly reported at higher rates among the poor.

And this is a preposterous caricature of my position. I actually think that step one of any serious gun control program in the US is to disarm the police. I have also, many times, expressed the view that the US government should be disarmed, at least with respect to nuclear weapons.

I agree, Great Man stuff is stupid. I just wanted to make sure you knew the propaganda I was consuming was from anti-capitalists, not from gun industry marketing.

Well now, let's unpack this a bit. Do you have any particular quotes or writings by those three folks that you think bear on this issue? I wouldn't be surprised that Debs' and Newtons' positions were in fact influenced by gun marketing (since guns began to be marketed as a sort of Freedom Insurance tool in the 19th century iirc) and of course Marx's revolutionary politics influenced him to take all sorts of political stances that I don't agree with. Early Marx was probably way into the idea of arming the working class; I think later (wiser, in my opinion) Marx might have taken a bit of a different view.

 

[Berzerker]

Why we would trust a member of a union and a government bureaucrat with a gun is beyond me.

same reason we hire other people, we dont want to do the job ourselves

 

[JollyRoger]

Killing civilians without justification?

 

[Berzerker]

he got in trouble for that, but he was out there because other people pay him instead of risking their own lives

 

[Bugfatty300]

Guns have no potential except killing people.

Despite the various kinds of nonsense that are peddled around this issue it is very clear that guns themselves are dangerous

Not from my experience. This is just outright untrue.

 

[Berzerker]

its that potential of killing people that convinces some criminals to seek out victims who dont have guns