Quote:
Originally Posted by Spexxvet
Their clarity is lost on you, then. I am actually pro-death penalty. I am NOT pro-vigilante-ism. If everyone were to pack a gun, there would be many more innocent deaths.
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Here too is another fantasy not borne out by historical or sociological research. There is at least one book out on vigilantism in California, citing occurrences in San Francisco and Bodie. I had the good fortune to read it, but suffer the bad fortune of being unable to recall its title, alas.
To begin with, armed self-defense is hardly vigilantism, but simply something humans will and can do, and which is a human right, after all. Vigilantism occurs when the citizenry believe, correctly or not, that the operation of justice is either inadequate or so corrupted it cannot actually do justice. In the California examples, vigilantism was an ad-hoc response to inadequacy of the judiciary to actually do something about crime, either general or in a specific case. Committees of Vigilance never lasted beyond an immediate problem -- after all, there was no money in it. One only sees vigilante action if the justice system, both juridicial and enforcement, has broken down and manifested incompetence at the social protection it's supposed to perform.
And this is not the belief among any of the correspondents in this thread: we all think the judiciary and law enforcement work, at least well enough.
Nor is there anything about innocents that gravitationally attracts promiscuous stray bullets. In the heavily-armed frontier era, the gun carriers made a point of not slinging lead at anyone, like frontier women, who wasn't slinging lead at them. Even then, the butchers' bill was not extreme. In the year before it was incorporated as a city, and believed by researchers to be its most man-eating year, Dodge City, Kansas had five homicides, total. This was generally true of experience all over the West: far less gunfighting than movies (dramas, you know?) would lead you to believe, and near ubiquitous carrying and possession -- subject to local ordinances, aimed at reducing shooting within city limits, but unconcerned with any firing one might be called upon to do outside them. It goes to illustrate Ringer's Paradox: that a freedom restricted is a freedom preserved. The art of the thing is not to over-restrict, which I believe is too often the case -- and a policy supported by uninformed opinion.