Nicker on 27/5/2025 at 11:59

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Not heated at all. Just so fucking old and irrelevant.

demagogue on 31/5/2025 at 00:11

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I am quite happy scratching my gun itch in video games.
Same with motorcycles, fast cars, aircraft, and skateboarding for that matter.

They're all risky activities where I don't think the thrill is really worth the risk, and games are so visceral these days, you can basically get the gist of the thrill from them well enough.

As for their importance to "radical politics of the last resort"... I mean, you know I worked with Myanmar dissidents for a few years. One of my oblivious kook-right highschool buddies was asking me if they respect the right to bear arms in Myanmar, and I was thinking, wow do you have a privileged view on life. Myanmar has been in basically non-stop civil war since the 1940s. There's the logical end of radical politics of the last resort. Is that what you want for the US: 90 years of civil war straight, always scrounging for your next meal, entire generations of kids lost to war and poverty? Anyway, of all the things Myanmar needs, more guns and the right to use them isn't really the thing that's going to help it.

Of course in a past time I'd say the US's advantage is that it doesn't behave like these tin pot dictatorships that could really descend into such hellish social conditions where going into open rebellion feels like the better alternative. But now the US seems to be flirting with that kind of radical thinking, which I think gives the whole 2nd Amendment debate an edge it hasn't had before, where it was really just ego stoking since there was never any chance US politics was ever going to rile people up that much to resort to arms on any large scale.

That actually goes back to practically the beginning. If people didn't know, the original purpose of the 2nd Amendment and state & private "militias" was always about forming posses to (1) capture fugitive slaves and (2) defend against raiding Native Americans, half the time by just taking their land outright, both of which are basically the US's two original sins, which is why the 2nd Amendment to me has always come across as the heart of the Original Sin if you ever had to pick one law for it.* It wasn't really ever about underlying revolution or radical politics, which was never a good fit for the American temperament compared to our European counterparts at the time. How things have flipped these days!

*For the record, I think gun laws should be normal legislation (I think a good idea is to require mandatory training & licenses and gun registration and insurance like a driver's school & license and car registration & insurance) and it doesn't need to be at the constitutional level, same as prohibition, where it's about content and behavior and not governmental structure.