My earlier self would have said that I didn't own a gun. But expecting the police to show up and protect me meant that I did have guns; I had just outsourced my physical protection (and all my negative associations about guns) to the police.
It's amazing to me now that I never made that connection.
Awesome connection...Along with the guns for personal protection, you should have a large atillary too. It was also about protecting the people from the government. So if they have a tank in their backyard, you should have a tank in yours.
Yes. I hear a lot of "civilians don't need military-grade weapons that can kill so many people at once."
So even though you know about Stalin, Hitler, etc you're ok with psychopaths in govt having access to those weapons?
Personally I don't like those weapons. But as long as they're in the world, I don't want them exclusively in the hands of centralized gov't and those drawn to positions of power.
This is a good point. We are complicit in violence either way. If we do the shooting ourselves, or expect the police to come save us.
Yes, and when we outsource it we can distance ourselves from every negative aspect of protection.
I think that this was a big part of the defund the police/ACAB movement. If one rejects the shadow side of human life that involves violence it's possible to feel morally superior to the police without ever recognizing that you've made their role in society necessary because you've ceded your responsibility.
💯. I often think about how this idea applies to our food, too. We are so distanced from the production of the things we eat, especially meat, that is allows us to consume in a way that is much different than if we were made to confront the moral consequences of our dietary choices. To kill our own protein.
Yes, exactly.
I once got into an argument online with a vegan woman who said she hated hearing the argument that rabbits and other small mammals are massacred to harvest her grains. She thought it was so much better that she at least wasn't *intentionally* killing them unlike horrible meat-eaters that have animal corpses on their plates.
