[brigandish]

> Americans seem much more comfortable with the idea that both free speech and free gun ownership will get more people routinely killed; like car ownership, it's just part of the price, it seems.

In 2013 there were 33,636 deaths due to guns. Even without breaking down those figures (2/3 were suicides) it would take 178 years to reach the 6 million regularly claimed to be the total for the Holocaust. That seems to be a fair price to avoid genocide and tyranny.

Why would any of the mass murders "spill over" into mass genocide? I don't see why one should logically follow from the other (I stress logically because they obviously don't in practice, as the example of the US shows).

[hollerith]

>the 6 million regularly claimed to be the total for the Holocaust

Not to mention the other 42 million civilians and prisoners of war (mostly Russian and Chinese) killed by soldiers during WW II.

[pjc50]

> 33,636 deaths due to guns

.. or four Srebrenicas, or roughly the entire historical body count of the Troubles. If it was concentrated then we would say that it was genocide.

The big threat of the moment is "stochastic terrorism". If you tell enough people that X is a threat that is coming for them - that they are going to be victims of a holocaust - then eventually one of them will follow the logic that they can use their gun to avoid the holocaust by pre-emptively murdering the threat. Most people will recognise these messages as lies and nonsense, but there will be a number who believe it. Of those, eventually one will take action.

There has been a steady drip of those people "taking action", such as by going and opening fire on synagogues. Often they leave behind surprisingly similar manifestoes. They speak the same language and are radicalised in the same way, despite never having met nor being part of the same organisation.

Now, this is ""fine"" as long as there's only one such movement carrying out occasional massacres. What happens when someone decides to start pre-emptively shooting back? Reprisals? Riots? As soon as there's two armed groups in politics there is the risk of horrible escalation.

[brigandish]

> or four Srebrenicas, or roughly the entire historical body count of the Troubles.

If you're going to compare the 300+ million population of the USA with something, it's better to do it with (German occupied) Europe than a place with a population of around 1% that of the USA. It's also strange to bring in wars, civil or otherwise, and again compare numbers when the entire population of the island has a population of around 2% that of the USA's.

> If you tell enough people that X is a threat that is coming for them - that they are going to be victims of a holocaust - then eventually one of them will follow the logic that they can use their gun to avoid the holocaust by pre-emptively murdering the threat.

I suppose we should stop saying "win at all costs" or "some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that." because maybe a Liverpool fan will go on a killing spree.

[ben_w]

Mass murders aren’t the the thing that spills over into genocide — they get stopped when the shooter runs out of bullets etc. — it’s hate speech which spills over because it gets the speaker an army which can replenish itself.

To put it another way, it’s not like Hitler personally shot all the people he killed, he convinced other people to do it for him.

[brigandish]

Good, we're agreed, hate speech is vile. What we're not agreed on is the response. I am convinced by John Stuart Mill that I am not infallible therefore I should not be judge of who can and cannot speak. I can, however, judge the speech and think it is wrong and oppose it with my own speech. If they move to violence I may defend myself or others.

Or I could claim infallibility and judge that this is hate speech but that is not so this person cannot speak or say these things but that person can. In Germany, the person doing the judging was Hitler and people who agreed with him.

It doesn't sound like the best system to me. A big help to his plans was that the people denied the right to hold weaponry for personal defence were… Jews. As Frederick Douglass pointed out when talking about the oppression of blacks in America, without the right to bear arms the work of the abolitionists would not be over. History proved him (and Mill) right in Germany too.

[ben_w]

You say:

> A big help to his plans was that the people denied the right to hold weaponry for personal defence were… Jews.

Mill also said:

> That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

Which rather limits the effectiveness of — for example — the Jewish people taking up arms in self-defence in WW2. However, if you wish to argue that every victim of persecution was defending the other victims rather than themselves, the same argument would enable those same victims using their guns to shoot the propagandists. In fact, as Mill was a Utilitarian, I would expect [1] him to prefer that the free speech of literal-third-Reich-Nazis to be suppressed with a few literal bullets in the face, than to allow the holocaust to be escalated to 17 million dead.

[1] If someone resurrected him with an ancestor simulation, I’d expect him to have difficulty believing something that bad could happen and that it wasn’t merely a thought experiment like the utilitarian eyelashes thought experiment (whose formal name I’ve forgotten) or the trolley problem. However, as a note of caution to what I’ve written, although I’ve studied Philosophy formally, I got a poor grade and may be misrepresenting Mill without being aware of it.

[brigandish]

I think you've misunderstood the Mill quote. Immediately preceding the quote you used:

> the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.

He's saying that others cannot compel someone to do things, even if it is for their own good. They may only interfere for their own self protection. This implies and supports the right to self defence.

Ending the paragraph containing the quote you provided:

> In the part [of his conduct] which merely concerns him, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

This does not in any way limit or argue against the effectiveness or right to self defence but instead, again, supports it. I'd encourage you to read On Liberty as, in my opinion, it is the greatest modern philosophical work.