Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by soco 15 days ago
Is this theory working in the US? Do we see the social people with weapons suppressing the antisocial gangs with weapons? If you see proof for this, good. But I don't see it. Also, one downside of firearms is collateral victims.
4 comments

The U.S. has lots of social people with guns: police, guards, military, etc. We have a system where we draw a line around certain social people with guns and call them “the government.” But governments didn’t spring out of thin air. They reflect a broader social principle that the optimal level of social piece involves a non-zero number of people capable of exercising violence.
>But I don't see it.

Do you really see armed gangs terrorizing citizens somewhere in the US then? You not seeing people in the process of suppressing gangs is fine, it just means the suppression is very effective. If suppression did not exist as you imply then you'd be seeing armed gangs collecting protection money from you every week.

No, because the state owns a monopoly on violence and cracks down hard on vigilantism.
>"Is this theory working in the US?"

Yes. It's the country with the most gun ownership metrics from almost every dataset, and there's not nearly as much gun violence as you'd THINK despite that.