At gunpoint

The following post is an excerpt from a writeup by Devon Eriksen.

If you don't own a rifle, your opinion is mostly irrelevant.

Everything humans do to interact and work together is a proxy for force. Force is base-level communication, because it requires no common language or concepts, and it definitively settles every dispute.

Problem with it is, it's risky, expensive, and mostly not very enjoyable. So we developed proxies for it. First language, then persuasion, deception, negotiation, money, blackmail, fake news, advertising, psychology, etc, etc, it's all a proxy for the underlying asset... force.

So if you have no weapon, then your opinion is only relevant when it influences those who do, whether directly or through second and higher order effects.

This places you at a considerable disadvantage, not only because those who can wield force directly can cut through the abstractions and wield that force directly, but also because the threat, stated or implied, of doing so carries weight and can change how others wield those higher-level abstractions.

This is why Jordan Peterson is wrong. Free speech, when available, can be used to defend many things, but when it is under threat, it cannot be used to defend itself. The right to bear arms, however, can be used to defend the right to bear arms. And that is the difference.

If you need a further example, look at what is happening in Britain. The masters do not want their slaves expressing certain opinions, and they are imprisoning them for doing so.

Their real plan of attack, for course, has little to do with the people being imprisoned. They only have the resources to do that to a tiny fraction of the population. The real plan is heads on spikes. It's using the fear of being one of those people to shut everyone up. Everyone but them.

But ask yourself... if you were British, or French, or Canadian, or Australian (or perhaps you actually are), instead of having the outrageous good fortune to be American, what the hell would you do? How would you use the right of free speech to defend the right of free speech? If you say this is wrong, they'll find an excuse to call it hate speech and lock you up.

And you consented to this, you morons. A few crazies shot a vanishingly small percentage of kids, and instead of locking up the crazies, like any sensible population, you let them take away your only capacity to resist them. You cheered for it. You begged for it. You brag about it. You try to snap back at us with it, saying that at least .00000000001% of your schoolchildren (in the ghetto) aren't being shot (by other feral teens in the ghetto), as third-world barbarians hack your little girls to death with machetes and rape your teenage daughters and your own government won't lift a finger to stop it, because they hate you and they want it to happen.

You don't want to admit that the primary civil right, the right on which all the others is based, is the right to be armed. Because if you did, you would have to face three horrifying truths:

1. You've been wrong all this time, and the very thing you were smuggest about was your biggest mistake.
2. You are in a shit situation, because you now have to figure out how to bring down a government that hates you, can use force on you any time they want, and you can't stop them.
3. America, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic are the only free countries on Earth. Everywhere else is a police state.

Americans have always known that ultimately, no matter who you are, now matter where you are, no one is coming to save you. You must possess the means to save yourself, or at least to fight back, to make yourself expensive and dangerous to kill, so you can save the next guy.

This is the reason, the real reason, why Americans love guns. We let you pretend it was because we were fat stupid belligerent rednecks who like power fantasies, because that lie seemed to make you happy, and it's not nice to take away the comforting delusions of toddlers and crazy people. But now that delusion is hurting you, and, contemptuous as you have been of us, you are fellow human beings, fellow civilized humans beings, and we don't want to see you die, so we have to tell you the truth. We love guns because they are not only the tool of liberty, they are symbol of our value, not as tools or slaves of regime, but as independent, free human beings of inherent worth.

In America, when I walk past a police officer on the street, he has a badge and a gun. But I have a gun, too. Right there under my shirt. And mine works just as well as his. And that changes everything. Because now I am not the only one dependent on the rule of law. He is dependent upon the rule of law, too. Because if the rule of law is the only thing that prevents him from killing me under color of authority, then the rule of law is the only thing that prevents me from killing him in the act of resistance.

The deterrents exist on both sides, and we all have to play nice. And mostly, we do. Because those deterrents make sure we really, really want to.

They're not playing nice any more on your side of the big blue wobbly thing. They have guns. All you have is a mouth and a keyboard.

How that working out for you?

An armed society is a polite society. That's not just a saying. That's not just fiction.

And Terry Pratchett was dead wrong. It doesn't just last until "some twerp drinks out of the wrong mug or picks up someone else's change by mistake and five minutes later you're picking noses out of the beer nuts."

Only a person from a disarmed society, who has never lived in a armed one, could have been so profoundly, pig-headedly, disastrously delusional.

If you haven't trained with guns, owned guns, carried guns, you have no idea what they're like, or what you would do if you had one, or what everyone would do in a bar where everyone had one.

Because the answer, the real answer, to "[what everyone does] in a pub where everyone goes armed" is "not get their goohuloog heads kicked in by the police for speaking out against their masters".