Quote of the Day
Going after the guns and the lawful owners is the wrong approach; it emboldens criminals, leading to an increase in violent crime. Repeal the gun laws, empower the lawful citizens, and go after criminals, and the problem goes back to reasonable levels. It will never get to zero no matter how many laws they pass or repeal, but if the goal is to reduce crime, empowering criminals and hamstringing peaceable citizens will NOT do it.
Archer
May 10, 2023
Comment to Lies and Deliberate Deception
But it is clear the goal is not to reduce crime. At least not crime as most people define it.
Well put!
But I fear this will fall on deaf ears. There will remain some people who think that school shootings are a majority of gun deaths, or that nearly all shootings involve an AR-15, or that one more law will cause criminals to become law-abiding.
As others have said, the police are also there to protect criminals from citizens’ righteous anger and retribution. We’ve seen a few cases in recent years showing what happens when the police and prosecutors won’t do their jobs. So far the prosecutors try to come down hard on the citizens. I fear we will see more and more justice meted out by the citizens, and while the wokesters are trying to make us think the citizenry doesn’t approve of this street justice, the reality is that the vast majority are happy to see criminals get their just desserts.
Ya, the last thing government ever wants is for people to find out how worthless they truly are.
And nothing shines a light on that more than vigilance from the population at large.
Government has always needed criminals to justify their existence. To them there is no worse/more dangerous person than the vigilante.
Correct. It’s part of the “social contract” that criminals are handled by neutral third-parties (e.g. the government, DAs, police) rather than vigilantes following “an eye for an eye” justice. Police and the rest aren’t there to protect the law-abiding from criminals; they’re there to protect the criminals from righteous anger of the law-abiding.
As Robert Peel (the founder of modern policing) said, “The police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”
That’s the agreement. We all have the duty to help uphold our laws, but under our system we delegate most of that responsibility, and in return they do it as a full-time profession so the rest of us don’t have to interrupt our lives to “posse up”.
The problem is, what happens when the government/DAs/police fail to uphold their end of the contract? What happens when they refuse to prosecute criminal behavior and the citizenry’s only recourse is to handle it themselves? What happens when, rather than being a neutral third-party, they operate a two-tiered justice system that lets certain privileged elites skate while severely punishing the rest of us for the exact same infractions?
Potential outcomes are left as an exercise for the reader, but I can think of a few possibilities.
When the social contract is broken, it’s broken for everyone.
Exactly Archer, thanks. And you have history, law, morality, and anyone without an agenda to back you up.
“But it is clear the goal is not to reduce crime. At least not crime as most people define it.”
And never has been. It always about some pyscho’s lust for control that somehow manages to allude them for like, the entirety of human history.
The criminals in power go after the legal guns and the legal gun owners for a simple reason. Professional courtesy. They don’t want to interfere with the ability of other criminals to engage in crime, just as they don’t want anyone interfering with THEIR abilities to engage in their criminal endeavors. They want US disarmed. NOT the criminals who don’t actually pose a threat to their grasp on power. This isn’t complicated. Evil…but not complicated.
I’m thinking the fatal flaw in our thinking is we missed their main un-spoken point.
They don’t see anyone owning a firearm as lawful. They won’t say that. But their every action bare exposure of their true nature.
We are not allowed anything of which their highnesses do not approve.