People who have their actuarial blinders on, viewing mass shootings as strictly a public safety issue, clearly don't have the political insight or historical knowledge to understand the broad, grave implications for the future of democracy implied what they are claiming to already be indisputable, or, as they might be inclined to put it, only to be disputed by the irrational.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_of_the_governed

"In political philosophy, the phrase consent of the governed refers to the idea that a government's legitimacy and moral right to use state power is only justified and legal when consented to by the people or society over which that political power is exercised."

"Article 21 of the United Nation's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government".

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WHAT EXACTLY IS CONSENT?

How can an entity (a child, a woman, a population) be considered able to give consent if he/she/it does not have the power to say, "No"?

Think about that.

How does someone who doesn't have the ability to say, "No," in the first place, give consent?

That's not 'consent.'

That's called 'duress' - threats, violence, constraints, or other action used to coerce someone into doing something against their will or better judgment.

It is the very POWER to resist, or abstain, that makes even a vote, or any political decision, more valid.

Without that right, how can it honestly cannot be said that the people actually chose their leader, even in countries where people mandatorily go through the charade for fear of government penalty? You know what? Scratch that...ESPECIALLY, in countries where people mandatorily go through the charade for fear of government penalty. The presence of a government penalty alone already makes it something other than a free choice.

Can a 14 year-old girl, denied education from birth, surrounded by a clan of men three times her age, who will beat her, shoot her, or worse, if she attempts to escape, 'consent' to an arranged marriage? Is her 'Yes' a genuine 'Yes.' Now, give that girl an automatic weapon, and an escort to the nearest US embassy, and see if she still says, "I do."

Can anything done, under threat of penalty if you don't, be fairly described as a decision or a choice?

Vladimir Putin holds elections too.

His opponents spend most of the campaign in prison, under dubious charges. His army counts the ballots. He wins every time.

Still, at the end of the day, he claims to have the support of the people regardless of how the process was actually conducted. There are some western nations who aren't as far away from this as they think. Even where consent doesn't exist, the appearance of having solicited it still has the ability to legitimize illegitimate governments.

That a population of people that has the ability to physically overthrow its government appears to have CHOSEN its leaders, legitimises those leaders. The less capable of a revolution that population is, the less clear it is that the government chosen was actually their choice.

ISN'T THE GOVERNMENT JUST TOO POWERFUL ANYWAY?

You see, it doesn't matter if you DO subscribe to the theory that the US Government is some sort of omniscient, all-knowing, Illuminati-style, secret society that knows what color underwear you're going to put on tomorrow before you even decide for yourself, against which its citizens could never defend themselves anyway.

First, let's not dismiss all of the evidence that they are not that, such as:

• Catching themselves on internal recording systems of their own making, saying things they shouldn't have
• Getting found out engaging in oral sex with interns
• Accidentally having classified information in the possession of aids, who lack the security clearance to be in possession of it, turn up in parallel investigations, through being automatically backed up to the philandering spouse's laptop via home wi-fi, "Doh!" etc.).

Can anyone NOT see that it would STILL be a prudent, peace-keeping move (as well as a required ingredient for the basis for the promotion of democracy as a justification for foreign interventions against dictators) to maintain the illusion of self-determination on the part of the American people vs. bursting that bubble?

Still, even if the people were no longer in charge, of what advantage to the US Government would it be to let the people KNOW that they don't have the power anymore, through demonstration of that fact, when the entire legitimacy of the government is based on the perception of the people that they do? What credibility

Then, once a government did decide to embark on such a self-defeating, credibility-burning, legitimacy-undermining endeavor, in terms of pure practicality, how would a presidential administration round up everyone in a nation of 300 million people, unwilling to give up their guns, confiscate those guns, find the room to imprison the offenders in an already over-crowded prison system, and maintain the illusion that the authority of the government is still by consent of the imprisoned?

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FORCING THE AMERICAN POPULATION.

That is not to say that there is no such thing as overpowering the American population. That is simply to say that the moment anything is done by force to the American citizenry, that nation is no longer America. That would mark the end of the worlds foremost experiment in individual rights and consent over the past 3 centuries.

I'm not even conceding that the government has that kind of power. It should be obvious that the parallel with Australian society, even just in terms of political awareness of the common citizen, much less population size and ability to mount military resistance, is bogus. It's apples and oranges.

I saw LA burn for 5 days, and watched the National Guard have to wait until the coast was clear to take the streets back from the people, when only just a SEGMENT of just the African-American community, in just ONE American city, decided they'd had enough.

To say that the citizens of the United States 'have no chance,' should they decide to fight the government, concedes more ground about the validity of democracy as a form of rulership altogether than I think critics of America's gun policy realize they concede by casually making pronouncements like 'just ban them' without any ability to identify the party that is going to carry out such a ban - the proverbial "You and whose army?"

It implies that elections are only honored because of the benevolence of an invisible ruling class, to which all power has already been relinquished. It implies that all revolts are futile. It implies that, even if an election turned out to be a sham the illegal victor would relinquish the victory just to honor the gesture of voting.

Yet, every night, you see country after country descend into violence because of an unwillingness (often of the ruling party) to engage in free and fair elections.

I'd hate to be a fly on the wall inside the brains of people who think that this is just a function of some sort of superior biological disposition on the part of western people.

Unless you just believe "those people are savage" there is absolutely NO REASON to think that the same thing couldn't happen in the US, or any western democracy.

#catalonia
#yugoslavia
#rodneyking

This whole thing has been an exercise in how to show the naive that they are naive without actually using the word 'naive' for fear of scaring or insulting them; and, for some, the penny STILL isn't dropping, to the degree that they're prepared to call YOU stupid, as if YOU are the one who doesn't get it.

America is not just some playground for pouting visitors, like kids who get bummed out when the amusement park closes because of repeated safety incidents or bad weather.

People who live there have the final say in how thing are done there, and if this kind of thing has never broken out where you live, cheers. Many years of continued success, but there is another side to this coin you don't understand yet.

Hopefully, you'll continue to never see it. No one is wishing it on you.

Despite the arrogant, self-promoting, un-invited commentary of some, particularly in Australia. No one is wishing it on you; but, don't confuse uneventfulness with readiness.

The following photos are all from Los Angeles in 1992, not some 'third world' country. L.A. about an hour's drive from Disneyland, maybe half an hour from Hollywood and Beverly Hills, in Koreatown and South L.A.