A Second Amendment hero

[fpb]

Christopher Dorner was clearly a firm believer in the Second Amendment. Meeting what he regarded as intolerable wrong in the state sector, he got out his gun and started shooting. If this is not what johncwright means when he says that an armed citizenship is a bulwark of freedom, I would like him to explain, because I see no other scenario.

Comments

[harry piper (from livejournal.com)]

How about the defense of the 2nd Amendment as needed for self-protection? I don't really buy the "I need my gun to defend against the forthcoming tyranny" argument (I see where it comes from, but I don't think it really works in an era where the government has jet bombers, drones, cruise missiles, tanks etc), but having a weapon for personal protection seems a bit more persuasive - then again you would have to convince me that more guns are used in incidents that save lives rather than in deadly accidents or crimes.
Funnily enough, my father - a policeman - was once sent over to Eastern Europe - I think it was Bulgaria - to help train up the local police force; and there he found that weapons were so widespread after the fall of Communism that there were some areas the police didn't even attempt to enter - shiftless youths with AK-47's hated the police and occasionally fired on them. Which has made me skeptical that widespread weaponry necessarily encourages law and stability - but perhaps it might work in a country with a more unified populace. Who can say?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Your father got a glimpse of what an abundance of guns in the polity REALLY does. It does not give strength to citizens; it gives strength to armed gangs. And if you think that has never happened in the USA, think not only of the KKK, but of such things as the nineteenth-century city riots and of the rise of organised crime. If that, in turn, seems to you irrelevant, you have to realize what we in Italy have long since known, that organised crime is ultimately a political phenomenon, placing itself instinctively in a political position between the people and the state, exploiting a mediator position. That is what gives the Mafia and its imitator their power.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Wait, why don't you just outlaw guns in private hands? Then the Mafia would be disarmed!

Well, if they obeyed the law, that is. Which of course they don't, or they wouldn't be the Mafia.

Which is what you don't get: criminals will always be armed. Gun control only disarms honest citizens, rendering them more vulnerable to criminal gangs.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

This comment is unworthy of you. It is NRA boilerplate of the cheapest variety. But as it happens you are wrong, too. While the NRA vulgate that Fascism "disarmed the people" is exactly wrong, it is true that a Fascist official, the legendary Police Chief Cesare Mori, did in fact order all permissions to hold arms through the entire Province (County) of Trapani withdrawn, in 1925, as the first blow in his plan to destroy the Mafia. It worked, too; not by itself, of course, but as a part of a string of emergency measures worked out in advance and carried out single-mindedly, Efficient, experienced, clear-headed, and ruthless (he was quite literally a bastard, brought up in an orphanage), Mori had worked out in detail a plan to break up the Mafia, disarm its members by main force, and destroy the authority of its leaders. Within a year, the back of the beast had been broken, and Mori was recalled. (He had never been a Fascist, and in fact had gained the hatred of several Fascist chieftains by his inflexible attitude, rare among contemporary police leaders, in the year 1922.) This may have prevented even more radical success, and certainly allowed a certain number of local "important persons" to put on a black shirt and go on doing business in the dark. But for the rest of the Fascist period, the Sicilian Mafia remained quiescent - one achievement of which the Fascists can boast, and, alas, do - although the relationships of complicity, culture, family connections and business links on which it was based did not go away. Unfortunately, there was one country in which the Mafia not only had not been broken, but had prospered to the point where the national authorities found it convenient to negotiate with it. The American government made a deal with Lucky Luciano that, under the guise of having him deported to Italy, he would have been given a free hand there, in exchange for support for their troops during the invasion of Sicily. There is no record anywhere that Luciano kept his part of the bargain, but, mysteriously, history tells us that the Americans went through their part of Sicily like a hot knife through butter, while the British had very stiff fighting in theirs. More importantly, by the time that national authority was restored in Sicily, two to three years later, a weakened, bankrupt and defeated national government found itself faced with a triumphant and virtually omnipotent Mafia. It took us fifty years and thousands of valiant dead to begin to reduce the monster to the conditions that Mori had achieved in one year.

This to say that the whole business of organized crime is slightly more complex than the ignorant demagogues of the NRA make it sound.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Well, for one thing, he deliberately killed two innocents.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

So, if he hadn't killed those two particular people, you would have no argument against what he has otherwise said and done?

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Didn't say that. A lot would depend on the extent to which Dorner genuinely believed that the LAPD was actually behaving in a terroristic and tyrannical manner which rendered legal action impossible to correct the wrongs, and on the extent to which it was true. I wouldn't do what Dorner did, based on my assumptions about the LAPD, but then maybe Dorner knew something I don't.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

So you have no problem with the principle of one man declaring himself law, judge, jury and executioner?

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I have a big problem with it assuming that this man is living under a reasonably just law. This is why I wouldn't do it myself.

Of course, Derman obviously thought that he was fighting tyranny. If he was right, his behavior might have been rational and even moral -- if he hadn't deliberately killed two innocents, that is, as I stated before. And I don't think he was right.

Do you have a problem with the partisan execution of Mussolini during the war? That partisan band after all was not empowered by either Italian regime of the day -- they took the law into their own hands, and acted as "judge, jury and executioner."

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Mussolini had been convicted of high treason by the legitimate authority of the Italian State, which still existed. On April 25,he had actually met with the leaders of the Internal Army (the Partisans) as they were about to take over the city of Milan, and had refused to surrender because his terms had been rejected. After that, he was on his own, and he knew it; no law of war protects an enemy who refuses to surrender, especially one with a capital charge on his head already. The brutality and slaughter with which his execution was attended was the particular touch of the Communists, who, wherever they went in Europe, tried as much as they could to brutalize and make bloody any kind of justice or vengeance. It seems fairly clear that that was part of their plan, and in Italy it is possible - I will send you the argument in private - that they might have had another goal in murdering him. But while the slaughter of his companions was nothing more than Communist butchery, there is nothing wrong in the execution of Mussolini - as such - according to the laws of war.

And you still seem to think that an individual has the right to set himself up as judge, jury and executioner. I'm afraid that is wrong in terms of ius gentium. Among the principles of war acknowledged by all law codes (including Sharia) there is the requirement that war can only be declared by a legitimate authority. The man who declares war on any group in his own name is a bandit, or, in beautiful and expressive Latin, a hostis humani generis.

[ravenclaw-eric.livejournal.com]

Have you read his manifesto? It's online.