OSD 286: The tyranny is here, it’s just not evenly distributed
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.
A dystopia becomes stable when the people inside it think they are free. The Matrix is a good story because most of the people in it aren’t rebelling. Neo’s proximate goal is beating the machines, but the ultimate goal is to show everybody that they’ve been enslaved.
UK police have gone on a PR push, warning people about posting anything online that “incites violence or hatred”. The context is some anti-immigration riots which then turned into several days of protests and counter-protests throughout the country. Paul Graham tweeted about the obvious free speech implications:
and while the replies largely agreed, some people subjected to those laws think they’re actually the ones who are free:
Kostas Moros made the point that in the US, police wouldn’t go door to door arresting people for tweets, because of the implication:
And that’s absolutely true, the Second Amendment helps set the bar higher here in the US. It makes sure we’re the free ones.
But … does it actually?
In 2022 across all of England and Wales, police fatally shot 3 people. In the 12 months ending in March 2023, they shot at people on just 10 occasions. And in that same period, there were 18,395 occasions where armed police were used at all. (Most police in the UK are not armed.)
The population of the US is 5.6x that of England and Wales. So let’s see how the numbers compare.
In 2022, police in the US fatally shot 386x as many people. (That’s 1158 people to be exact. All the data on police shootings in this essay is from Mapping Police Violence, and filtered from their Airtable of raw data. The site is quite opinionated but their data is solid and very well-annotated.) Population-adjusted, that’s a 69x higher rate of fatal police shootings. The confounders are that the US is more violent (the murder rate is 5.5x higher here) and gun ownership is common, so it’s possible that police have to shoot people more often. But 69x more often? Seems weird.
To compare apples to apples, consider suspects armed with knives. In 2022, police in England and Wales killed two people armed with knives. In 2022, US police killed 156 people armed with knives. Population-adjusted, US police fatally shoot knife-carrying people 13.9x more than British police do.
“Well, just don’t wave a weapon at the police and you won’t get shot” doesn’t quite explain the disparity. We’ve written about SWAT raids and law-abiding armed people being killed even in their own homes (OSD 74, OSD 123, OSD 155, OSD 194). Bryan Malinowski, the Little Rock Airport executive, is a recent example. The good news is that your personal chances of being killed for being lawfully armed are very low. About 44% of US households have guns, over 50 million people have contact with the police each year, and people being needlessly killed by police happens maybe a few hundred times in the US each year. Your odds of being one of those few hundred are close to zero. But the bad news is there’s strong evidence that US police kill far more people than they actually need to. If you are one of those people, you’d probably find it tyrannical.
The COVID era offered lots of other examples. Two salient ones:
The people in Minneapolis who were standing on their porch, watching police and National Guard march down the street to announce the start of the curfew. The police fired paint rounds at them for being on their porch rather than indoors.
The Texas cops who arrested people for protesting the public health order that forced bars to close. Ironically, guns are the reason the protestors were arrested. They staged an armed protest and were arrested for violating a Texas law that prohibits carrying a gun on the premises of any business that makes ≥51% of its revenue from alcohol.
The standard response is, “That was early in COVID and nobody knew what was happening. People wouldn’t let that slide now.” Maybe so. But one test is to ask yourself what they do let slide that’s even bigger. For example, of these two infringements which is more severe: (1) Most in-person businesses being forced to shut down for a few months one time, or (2) The confiscation of 20-50% of your earnings every year in perpetuity? Most people would say the latter by far, but we all still pay Uncle Sam his rake every April 15.
The point isn’t to litigate whether these things are or are not objectively tyrannical. That’s up to each person to decide. The point is just that in practice, the US is replete with government action that people (a) personally believe is tyrannical and (b) are powerless to stop. The Second Amendment gives people a lot of personal defensive power, but it turns out than on its own it grants almost no political power. In one sense that’s good — the activation energy on armed resistance should be sky-high, because the costs are ruinous. But where does that leave everyone who says that gun rights are the backstop for all our other rights? Are they wrong?
The value of gun ownership doesn’t come from firing the gun in anger. Most guns will never be used in that way. That’s the ultimate backstop, but most of the value of gun ownership is about the culture it builds:
If you’re stopping tyranny by firing live rounds, you’re way past the point where the law matters. From “OSD 233: What about nukes?”:
In a scenario where you need light weapons (or, to take it to the theoretical extreme, nukes), would laws actually get in your way, whatever they are? That would be by definition a situation where the law no longer matters. Insurgencies and war-making efforts succeed or fail for lots of reasons — and “darn it, the government said we’re not allowed to have RPGs” is never one of them.
The way guns really stop tyranny is by building a culture, and a personal legend in each person’s mind, that prizes freedom as a goal in and of itself. That doesn’t mean guns will always succeed at that. They demonstrably don’t. It just means that when they fail, it’s not because people need to start firing them — it’s because we need to build the culture even stronger.
This week’s links
Secret Service apologizes for breaking into a salon and using it as a staging area and private bathroom
Guys, don’t make us become a Third Amendment group too.
Julie Golob launched a Substack
Check it out.
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> The standard response is, “That was early in COVID and nobody knew what was happening. People wouldn’t let that slide now.”
Maybe in Texas but absolutely not, generally.
Most of the people I'm still in touch with from Canada have one of two opinions on covid oppressio:
1) "it's unfortunate, but we did what we had to do, and it saved us from dying of covid"
2) "If we had locked down _harder_, we would have saved more lives"
Both of those positions lead straightforwardly to "and I'll do it again"
Another great thoughtful post . I couldn't agree more. I was just speaking with a friend about this. As he he said that something like what is going down in the UK wouldn't/couldn't happen here. He proclaimed we have the Constitution!
I had to point out that it could and it is currently happening here. You are seeing it happen in various ways form internally censoring and externally censoring ourselves. To punishable offenses if your speech doesn't agree with what is allowed. For example I informed him about the various executive orders in different states like Texas and Florida which can make your speech (if deemed antisemitic) punishable. Which he was unaware.
As you rightly point out the lockdown of our speech also starts eroding do to a weak culture which starts to make concessions and qualifications taking for granted that First Amendment right.