In the Madhouse 11th of December – Utterly sickening

The main problem with trying to follow the news and keep track of the most atrocious things is that the news is inherently depressing. Recently I read something that I rather wish I hadn’t, it is material shared from the interrogation of the victim of a gangrape where 20 men where involved. The rape took place in the stairwell of an apartment complex and during the rape other inhabitants of the building passed by and did not even bother calling the police (they justified it afterward when they were interrogated by saying that after living in the area they have learned to look the other way). After the rape, the woman had to get to a police station by herself because the locals she encountered though she was “gross” and told her to go away.

This story is so sickening that my mind just recoils, the horror of it on every level is just beyond comprehension. What kind of environment has been created if 20 people in an area take part in a gang rape while the neighbors look the other way? It is like the atrocities one hear about from the end of world war 2. This kind of thing should simply not be happening in any civilized society.

If anyone wants to read more about this crime you can click on the link at the bottom of this blog post and run it through googled translate (warning for graphic language).

This isn’t an isolated crime, we have recently had cases such as gang rape of a wheelchair-bound women. Gang rape is sadly becoming a thing here. Instead of writing more about these sickening crimes I want to entertain another thought, what should be done to the scum of the earth like the people mentioned above? In Sweden, rapists get off the hook disturbingly easily, 2-3 years in prison and that is it. Swedish prisons are not anything like hardcore American prisons either, by all accounts spending time in a Swedish prison sounds like an extended hotel stay with limited freedom. Can one even think of a worse insult to the victim than the idea that her tax money will go to paying her perpetrators an extended cozy prison visit after which the criminals will be let loose into society (likely quicker than if they had been tax evades or doing illegal file sharing)? It is absurd and such a perversion of the concept of justice.

Looking back in history can be enlightening. Back before there where tax funded resorts called prisons people had to deal with unforgivable crime in another way. Chopping someone’s head off or tying a rope to a tall tree was always an option, but the less severe alternative was rendering criminals lawless. Simply put if someone, by their actions, demonstrated that they have no inclination to be a productive part of society then they were declared lawless. It meant they were no longer protected by the law, anyone could kill, beat or rob a lawless person without fearing retribution from the law. Relatives of a murder victim could find the offender and take justice into their own hands.

In practice, the lawless person had to flee and never return or face death. On Iceland, for instance, they escaped into the inhospitable and harsh highlands of the island. In Sweden, I guess they escaped into the endless forests. A modern alternative would be to buy an island no one cares about, preferably one where it is hard as hell to survive and tell lawless people that they have x hours to get to the island where they will spend the rest of their lives, if they are found anywhere else they die. End of story.

 

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VARNING FÖR OBEHAGLIG MEN VIKTIG LÄSNINGImorgon fortsätter rättegången mot de män som står åtalade för att ha vå…

Posted by Joakim Lamotte on Monday, November 27, 2017

Source: In the Madhou.se – In the Madhouse 11th of December – Utterly sickening

News from the madhouse 17th of November

After the shooting, the county gets drained of its police

On October the 30th I wrote about the assault on a police officers home. Now all the police in that county (Västmanland), that is between Delaware and Connecticut in size, will be centered in the town of Västerås where the shooting took place. All patrols outside of Västerås will be greatly reduced. The reason is that the police force in Västmanland feels insecure after the shooting and many officers are apparently thinking about quitting. One could at this point talk about the police as tender snowflakes but I can sympathize with them. Given that Sweden used to be a very safe and secure country most Swedish police officers would never have to imagine dealing with getting their home shoot at and most people that got into that profession probably had other ideas about it. But this kind of retreat really shows that the police is easy to break, just shoot up an officers home and then you get free reign in the rest of the county. I don’t see how criminals could interpret this otherwise.

The authority BRÅ (The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention ) sends out a questioner every year to 10 000+ people asking if they have been the victim of a crime. The result of the questioner for 2016 has now been released and it shows that crime is at the highest level since they started doing this in 2005. The thing that really stands out is that sexually related crimes have doubled in one year, now 14% of women in the age bracket 16-24 years old report that they were victims of such crimes during 2016. Sexually related crimes is a very broad category ranging from someone flashing themselves in front of you to gang rape, BRÅ doesn’t give a breakdown of the numbers so we can’t tell what type of sexually related crimes has increase the most.

It also shows that except for break in’s most crime goes unreported, the reason for reporting break in’s to such a high degree is likely for insurance reasons, you need to file a report with the police to get compensation from your insurance company. The most common reason stated for not reporting a crime is that the victim simply doesn’t think the cops can or will do anything about it.

BRÅ is well known for trying to sugarcoat crime statistics and hiding and obfuscating reality, so if even they are now clearly showing that crime is at an increase one can only guess that the real story is even worse.

 

 

Source: In the Madhou.se – News from the madhouse 17th of November

News from the Madhouse 8th of November

Robber gangs threaten our safety

I have earlier written that large areas of Sweden are de facto lawless lands due to the absence of police. The article above highlights it. The article describes how an old lady and her handicapped and wheelchair-bound husband are harassed by burglars while the police do nothing. It takes the police 1.5 hours to even get to the couples house.

Several times robbers have been walking on their property, acting threatening and even assaulting them and forcing the old lady to protect herself with a baseball bat. The most shocking instance is when the husband called the police while his wife was being assaulted and THE POLICE DID NOT EVEN BOTHER SHOWING UP! So here we are, some of us paying up to 70% in taxes when everything is counted, and we do not even get police coverage for that. I would not be surprised that the cops would have taken a helicopter and been at their house in no time if the couple had a gun and used it for self-defense, that would be breaking gun laws and we can’t have such anarchy!

Jennifer had to give birth in a parking garage

Maternity wards in Sweden are lately running out of capacity, it is not as far as I know because there is a sudden excess of children being born, rather it is simply a lack of resources and staff. News like this is becoming very common lately, a young expecting mother was at the last moment denied a place at the maternity ward in the hospital she was supposed to give birth in. As a result, she was rushed to another hospital but it was too late and she had to give birth in the hospitals parking garage.

Situations like this are especially sensitive in the countryside because most local maternity wards have been closed. If you need to give birth and the maternity ward closest to you is full then you might be looking at a 120 + miles travel to the closest one. Women have been giving births in cars due to this situation.

This is just an example of how the healthcare system is decaying, the problem is that people, in general, don’t notice anything until they need it and if they don’t need it they believe everything is fine and dandy. I would not want to be elderly, chronically sick or just in need of a routine surgery in this country.

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Source: In the Madhou.se – News from the Madhouse 8th of November

The antidepressant epidemic in the worlds 10th happiest country

Scandinavian countries are often portrayed as idyllic and happy countries where everyone is walking around singing songs and being generally pleasant to each other. Every year Denmark is pushed out as the happiest nation on the planet in “The World Happiness Report” and Sweden is not far of at a solid tenth place. It sure is great with that big and fat welfare state that takes care of us right? Look how happy we all are!

Then a news like this hits, 10% of the Swedish population is on antidepressants, an increase of about 30% compared to ten years ago and the rate of increase is highest among people in their late teens and early twenties. If one ad anti-anxiety drugs to the mix it is close to 17% of the population taking mind-altering drugs to cope with reality. To be fair it is even slightly worse in the US where 20% of white adults are drugged down to manage life. So yes we Swedes are slightly happier if the gauge for happiness is how large a fraction of the population needs to drug themselves to cope with reality.

My view on SSRI’s are biased and I don’t claim to have an objective view on them. What I do have is 6 months worth of personal experience with being on SSRI’s, I went through a severe depression that started when I was 17 and went on until I was about 21. At my lowest low I searched for help from the Swedish healthcare system, it resulted in me speaking with a psychiatrist for a 10 full minutes after which he wrote me a prescription for an SSRI and wished me good luck before he shooed me away. He told me that the waiting list to see a psychologist is about two years long so that was the best he could do. Then followed six months of my life that I can only barely remember.

Even when I was depressed I was highly motivated in many ways, I kept to my studies and I did 4-5 hard workouts per week, bodybuilding was a borderline fanatic obsession of mine, and I had a ferocious sex drive.  My mental coping mechanism was to beat my body hard with weights and it kind of worked. A week into the SSRI treatment I had no motivation to do anything, I didn’t go to class, I cut down on the gym and I basically just lied on the couch staring at the ceiling, I doubt I had a single sexual thought for months. I did not quite feel depressed anymore, I didn’t feel happy either, I just plain didn’t feel. No happiness, no sadness, no urge to do anything. The weird part about not feeling anything is that I wasn’t even able to feel that anything was wrong, there was never a warning from my mind that I should be laughing or crying or just plain feeling something.

The complete apathy turned out to be my saving grace. The prescription lasted for about 4 months if I remember correctly. When I ran out of pills and it was time to renew the prescription I just couldn’t be bothered and I stopped with the SSRI cold turkey which started a bunch of batshit crazy weeks. The experience of feeling something again was beyond description, I went on a roller coaster ride through all possible emotions. Up and down and up again, for a few days I was seriously thinking that I had utterly lost my mind. I could be crying one moment and laughing the next and having an anxiety attack shortly after. Most of all though I relish feeling something again, I looked back at the drugged hazed months and was utterly terrified of ever being in such a state again, ever. At that point I promised myself I will never again touch an antidepressant and that I would rather be dead than in such a mindless zombified state of existence. Now when I look back at this experience I realize I have almost no memories of the period when I was on the medication, I can’t remember a single distinguishable moment at all. It is just a gray haze of borderline “unexistance”, I can’t remember my thought process, I can’t remember a single meal or laugh or moment at all. I must have done something during those months, I just don’t recall. Perhaps memory is formed when emotional things happen and without emotions, there is no memory? It is a chunk of my life that is simply erased like it never happened.

After I got off the SSRI the depression and insomnia and all other issues I was struggling with came back in force, but there were at least moments here and there when I smiled and laughed. After that I have always known deep down that there are things worse than depression, feeling nothing is truly worse than feeling pain. It took me over a year to finally beat my depression and I did it through a lot of introspection and redesigning my internal monologue, in the end I came out much stronger from the experience. Seeing that medication is not an alternative and having no access to a psychologist I just sorted it out by myself.

I can easily see how my life could have taken another path though, a path where I perhaps had a slightly more engaged psychiatrist that would have called me to know if he should renew my prescription. Given how insidious the effect of the medication was it isn’t hard to imagine that I could have spent years in that drug-induced state, failing my studies, abandoning my fitness obsession and turning into an unfit, uneducated and apathetic waste of a human life. The low quality of the Swedish health care system might have just saved me.

It is a chilling thought that we are approaching a point where one in five people might be walking around as emotionless robots, going through the motions of life as automatons unaware of what they have been robbed of. What has society come to when that is a reality? What makes all those people feel so bad that they have to resort to drugs to be able to cope with life?

 

 

 

Source: In the Madhou.se – The antidepressant epidemic in the worlds 10th happiest country

News from the Madhouse – The war against the police

Recently there has been a string of very high profile attacks targeting the police.

Police station in Helsingborg bombed

Police officers home shoot at

Bombing at police station in Hallstahammar

Attempted kidnapping of police officers wife

A police officer heading a group against organized crime got his car blown up

It is becoming obvious that the police is under siege in a lot of places in Sweden, they are getting attacked not only when conducting their job but also in their homes and even the families of police seems to be fair game. The mayhem is no longer confined to the criminal suburbs in the three big cities, it is spreading all over the country. One can perhaps theorize that after the gangs consolidated their control of the “no-go zones” they are now expanding outwards and it makes for a very interesting situation. For the longest time the Swedish middle class has been able to ignore what is going on, simply because comfortable middle-class areas have not been touched by the increase in crime, the question is how long can the situation stay like that?

Given that the violence is now escalating to the point that the police are targeted everywhere it’s not hard to assume the crime wave is about to spill out for real. Quite obviously the gangs are not satisfied with running their small fiefdoms in the ghettos. How will the average Swede react when crime moves into their areas? What does it take to wake this sleepwalking nation?

Already some politicians in one of the mainstream parties want to commit the military to stabilize the no-go zones. Such a suggestion would have been laughed at just a year or two ago, certainly when considering that the motion is coming from members of the same party whose leader just a few years ago begged the Swedish population to open our hearts to immigrants.

Some might think this situation is good, as an anarcho-capitalist I should perhaps want the state to break down so that voluntary and more efficient solutions can take its place and restore law and order. If Sweden had the same kind of gun laws as many US states I would maybe think along those lines, but given how restricted the right to self-defense is in Sweden it just isn’t feasible. The police might not have the resources or will to strike down on large-scale criminality, but they are still more than willing to crack down on normal people that just want to ensure their own safety. It is after all much easier and less risky to chase hunters and other legal weapon owners than it is to try and get hand grenades out of the ghettos.

As usual, I can’t claim I have any suggestions on how to improve the situation, I can simply say it gets more and more interesting for every day that passes.

 

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Source: In the Madhou.se – News from the Madhouse – The war against the police

Things that tick me off

 

Why does politics have to infest every corner? Is it really necessary for it to invade every possible crevice and sour the mood?

Today I was watching the show Arrow, no one will claim Arrow is a masterpiece that should get a place in tv hall of fame for it’s mature and well-constructed plots, it’s deep and thoughtful content and its careful handling of socially sensitive topics. Arrow is junk entertainment and most of the time it is good junk entertainment. Sometimes one just wants to plop down in front of the tv and watch a guy with a bow and arrows brutalize aliens, ninjas, and the occasional magician all while wearing uncomfortably tight clothes or hardly any clothes at all.

That is apparently not good enough for the producers and scriptwriters though, perhaps they deep down feel a bit dirty for producing tv that is completely inconsistent and borderline incomprehensible if one really thinks about it (why don’t aliens have security cameras in their spaceships? Why is the Flash so fricking slow in most episodes? Why don’t Oliver just call the Flash in every episode and have him sort it all out?). To remedy that they squeeze in some hamfisted social commentary in an effort to feel what exactly? Relevant perhaps? To prove their intellectual depth?

That is exactly what happened on the 13th episode of the 5th season of Arrow. Someone got the bright idea to dedicate the episode to gun control and what followed is the cringiest episode in a show that is 99% pure cheese. The constipated dialogues, the sudden moral indignation towards weapons and the talking down of a poorly misunderstood mass shooter that just slaughtered people in the name of gun control, it was all just plain crap and I am surprised I suffered through it. We are after all talking about a show where the main character routinely kills a dozen people per episode when he is not busy torturing someone, most of the time the victims are just guards that happen to be at the wrong place. Even the league of assains henchmen probably have a wife and kids at home you know!

You simply can’t take gun control propaganda seriously in a show that is all about vigilantes murdering people at their whim. Can the producers and scriptwriters really not see just how plain idiotic and out of place that is? The cringe level is way over 9000, but most of all it breaks the entertainment value. There is no need to be politicized popcorn flicks like Arrow. Progressives are crying for their safe spaces all the time, well why not just allow some forms of entertainment be a safe space from simple-minded political correctness! We get it, you are all for social justice go write a debate article or something! I want that hour of my life back, please!

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Disclosure, I might earn a small commission if you purchase something through one of the Amazon links in this post.

Source: In the Madhou.se – Things that tick me off

News from the Madhouse 26th of October

This week one news article stands head and shoulders above just about anything else. Sometimes I go about my business wondering if all of reality is just a hallucination made up by my sick mind, then I come across news like this and realize that my brain could never by itself invent something quite that demented.

Person employed for life to be a living art exhibition

In Gothenburg they are building a new rail line and new stations to go along with it. Now it appears that a person will be employed full time, for the rest of his(her? its?) life as a living art exhibition. The person in question is free to do just about anything he/she/it feels like doing and the point of the exhibition is that is is “a commentary on wage earning”.

Yeah… I think I will just leave it at that, further comments aren’t really necessary.

 

Source: In the Madhou.se – News from the Madhouse 26th of October

Jailing old ladies

I have been rather busy so I haven’t gathered any news from the madhouse during the last 2 weeks or so. But the madhouse never rests, boy does it not allow anyone to take a single breath of relief thinking the worst might have passed. The latest news is so crazy that I have some trouble grasping the true significance of it.

70-year-old lady prosecuted for facebook comment written on SD’s page

The headline by itself is bad enough. SD is, as I have mentioned in the past, the largest “anti-immigration” party in Sweden. They are usually given epithets like neo-nazi or white supremacists by the mainstream media but in reality, they are pretty old fashion social democrats complete with the social democratic view on immigration from say 1975. Anyhow, as any modern party they have a facebook page and on that page an old woman wrote this comment:

“Tala om skämt dom har inga problem med beröring eftersom dom våldtar varenda kvinna dom ser, slår ner personal slår sönder sina boenden osv, det är vi som blir illa berörda av dom 30 åriga skäggbarnens beröringsframfart.”

It can be translated into something like this:

“Talk about a joke, they have no issues with touch because they are raping every woman they see, strikes down staff, breaking their own housing, etc., we are being badly affected by the 30-year-old “bearded kids” touches.”

I don’t know what comment the woman was replying to so I don’t know the full context, a few things need to be explained to understand the comments. The “bearded kids” reference is about the adult asylum seekers that pretend they are children in order to get asylum easier. This has been going on for a long while now and pretty much no one thinks the “children” are children anymore. The part about striking down staff and breaking their housing is from news reports about unrest in asylum camps.

Now is that comment racist, well she doesn’t specifically mention race but it is understood to any Swede that “bearded children” means people from Afghanistan, Syria and so on. So yes she is saying all of those people are violent racists so I guess we can all agree that it is a racist comment. Probably from an old lady that feels betrayed by the state, living on a minimum pension and reading the increasingly absurd news and in an agitated moment wrote something stupid. The story should simply have ended there, but it didn’t.

In Sweden, we have a very “flexible” law against hate crime that includes hate speech. The law is covering ever more things, as laws are prone to do, and now this woman got the attention of a prosecutor that is going after her. That by itself is spooky, why would any sane prosecutor even bother going after an elderly lady that probably is completely harmless? The twist to it though is terrifying. The prosecutor that is interviewed in the article states that they are getting more and more cases like this because there are groups searching the web for people that write “hateful” things and then file charges against them. In this case, the comment by that woman is over one year old!

Think about that for a second, the prosecutor admits there are people organized in order to dig up old sins online and when those people bring cases to him he willingly prosecutes. It doesn’t take much of a leap of imagination to realize those groups are most likely radical leftists, Antifa and the like, and they are already one year back in their search for people that write politically incorrect things. Can you imagine a more effective way to make people shut up than to let everyone know “we are watching and we have the prosecutors on our side”?

Add to that the fact that things like “transphobia” is going to be added to hate crime laws, i.e if you are skeptical about how many genders there are and such things. Since it isn’t a new law, just a new interpretation of an existing one, then theoretically someone could write something that is legal today, but in the future, someone can dig it up and put it in front of a prosecutor. You need not only be careful about writing things that are against political correctness today, you also have to keep in mind what might become politically incorrect tomorrow!

The sad part is that people don’t fully realize this, discussions end up in arguments like “but what she said is indefensible!”. Well yes, but that is missing the point completely! We are now living in a country where you yourself can start digging into your neighbour’s Facebook feed to see if you can find something to file charges for. Maybe an old homophobic joke written back in 2012?

So if someone is standing in the way of your career climbing, if someone has a nicer car than you or maybe you just plain don’t like someone, than all you have to do is start digging. He/She/It is bound to have written something awful at some point in life!

Source: In the Madhou.se – Jailing old ladies

News from the madhouse 14th of October

I have been traveling this week so I haven’t had time to follow the news, good for my sanity perhaps but bad for this blog. Now I am back and here is some depressing news from this week!

In the Swedish Institutes marketing towards Arabic countries feminism and equality is not mentioned

On Sweden.se one can read good reason for why you should move to Sweden. In Russian, Chinese and English they highlight that Sweden is a very gender equal country with opportunities for everyone. In Arabic, they “forget” to mention the equality bit while highlighting how well Sweden provides you for life and how many different allowances you can get from the state and municipalities.

SVT stops cult children’s show

It’s turning into a national sport in Sweden to censor or destroy old cultural expressions that do not fit into the current politically correct narrative. The works of our cherished author Astrid Lindgren for instance and Tintin got censored earlier. Now the hammer has come down on the childrens show Bert. Bert is a comedy show about a boy and his struggles in early puberty and the show was made in the 90’s. Apparently, two episodes are disparaging against homosexuals and blacks so they have been taken down from SVT’s online archive. SVT is the Swedish state-sponsored television company and the maker of Bert. I didn’t pay all that much attention to Bert when I grew up, but it is a bit baffling to see things that are relatively young get hammered down as opposed to older works like Tintin. It is crazy how quickly the PC train is moving. Allowable opinions from just 10-20 years ago are now considered damaging.

Twittered about the troll factory #jagärhär and then lost her job at the university

A researcher at Stockholm University, Bilyana Martinovski, twittered about the troll movement #jagärhär and then promptly lost her job. #jagärhär is a movement, partially run by the above-mentioned SVT, that seeks out uncomfortable opinions on Twitter and then replies with the tag #jagärhär which attracts the leftist mobs to attack anyone that expresses such opinions. They apparently also go further and try to get people fired if they dare to hold the wrong opinions. We might ask then if Martinovski is a closet Nazi, a champion of Aryan supremacy with despicable opinions? Nope, she is just bringing attention to cases of gang rape. Just look for yourself on her Twitter. Be sure to follow her to show some form of support!

Source: In the Madhou.se – News from the madhouse 14th of October

Is is not about total gun deaths!

Sometimes I really wish more people read, and understood, Taleb’s groundbreaking work in The Black Swan and Anti-fragile. Gun legislation fits that perspective like feet in a pair of walked in hiking shoes (yes, I am suffering some serious mountain cravings right now).

The naive point of view, as demonstrated by the notoriously naive and shallow thinker Dawkins, is as follows:

Country A (and B, C, D, E) has fewer gun-related fatalities than country X. Therefore country x should mimic the legislation of country A.

Libertarians are, including me, unfortunately always baited by this kind of argument and then we get the endless debate about whether or not the statistics used are correct. Perhaps, we wonder, we get a different result if we look at region q vs region g within country x or maybe we should adjust for culture or ethnicity or all other kinds of nuances. By falling into this trap libertarians let the progressives set the agenda completely. It is just a form of nerd sniping. What I am here to tell you is that it does not matter if the statistics are correct or not! That entire discussion is a sideshow orchestrated to avoid the real issues (for people interested in the sideshow anyway read this for the best look through the statistics that I have come across)

So let’s ignore of such heavily politicised research and instead take a wider perspective. I also want to avoid the ideological tangent about the inalienable right to own weapons, even though I fully stand behind that idea, because I think the fragility argument is much more interesting. Gun laws are one of those cases where you make the entire system more fragile, you might at best buy yourself less gun-related homicides (depending on the statistics used, nerd snipe) at the cost of catastrophic risk for the entire system.

The fundamental issue is the balance of power and the founding fathers of the US seemed to have a keen sense for this. Most (progressive) people scoff at the idea that armed plebeians are a good counterweight to a tyrannical state, what can a bunch of hillbillies do against tanks and fighter jets? However, this month gave us the perfect opportunity to contrast armed vs unarmed peaceful uprisings towards the state. I am of course speaking of Kurdistan vs the Iraqi state contrasted with Catalonia vs the Spanish state. Both Catalonia and Kurdistan had referendums about secession, both secession movements are angrily contested by the state but in only one region could the state send its henchmen to try to beat the plebeians into order.

It is well known that the Kurds are armed to the teeth and have their own armed forces, the only thing Baghdad could do against the Kurdish secession vote was to throw them the stink eye, the Kurds could peacefully tell Baghdad “up yours!”. In Catalonia, however, the population had no means to defend themselves with force, thus Madrid could send its henchmen to beat old women with batons, shoot rubber bullets into crowds and stomp on people already lying down. The violence was far worse than anyone could imagine in a modern democracy. The vote could take place anyway simply because 6000 corrupt thugs could not prevent the will of several million people, but the contrast is stark and the story of Catalonia is not over yet. Madrid is now sending in the army to prevent Catalonia from acting on the yes vote.

Imagine the future in an ever more fractured world. If the citizens of Jämtland would turn away from humorous resistant and start a real secession movement then it would be easy for Stockholm to stomp it out. But if all Texans went to vote with a handgun in their belt it would be rather hard for Washington to subdue that with its federal police forces. These kinds of situations will become more and more relevant as time goes on, the vote in Catalonia has already encouraged secession movements both within Europe and all around the world, since the state is built on violence and only knows violence that is what the states will use to try and subdue those movements. For everyone that thinks armed civilians are no match for a modern army please explain why the US is still in Afghanistan.

History is full of rebellions against the state when the state does something the population dislikes (usually raising taxes), one should not discount the moderating effect a well-armed population has on state power.  The guns are primarily not there so the population can overthrow a tyrant, the guns are there to make sure no tyrant appears in the first place! You can’t figure that out from statistics.

It is not only about secession, rebellion or balance of power with the state though, many nations in the world are completely satisfied being ruled by the state they are under, it is about having an insurance for when the state fails. As we can see in Sweden today very large parts of the country have no police presence anymore and former police admit the areas are “lawless lands”. The effects of this can still not be determined from the crime statistics, violent crime is on the rise but other crimes are going down, but anyone with a head for incentives can predict what will happen when the criminals fully understand the situation.

One only needs to ask a simple question, if you live in a house deep out in the woods in Northern Sweden and you know the nearest police is 200 km (120 miles) away, would you not prefer to be able to protect yourself? Right now nothing stands between people in those regions and the kind of crimes being committed against South African farmers. Fortunately, a significant fraction of the people up north are hunters and have hunting weapons, it is not so far-fetched to assume some of them will start to keep their weapons outside of the lockboxes if things turn darker.

Gun laws make society more fragile even if the state remains benign, all it takes is that the state becomes incompetent or short on money for things to turn ugly. People that assume the state will always (or has ever been) efficient and good at its job are truly living in a fairytale. It doesn’t matter if the statistics show gun ownership decreases or increases crime right now, what matters is how the situation will look when the day inevitably comes when the state can no longer enforce its will. Just ask the South African farmers or in the future, if we are unlucky, Swedes in the rural areas.

Source: In the Madhou.se – Is is not about total gun deaths!