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"'The best possible preventative is a heavily-armed populace. There's a reason you never heard of a Holocaust in which six-million armed Jews were massacred.'

Good point. I agree.

'To be strictly technical, the wave of killing on world-war scale is going to be Armageddon.' [...]"

No, wait, I qualify my above comment further. I think that in a free society (free in the sense that one can say what one likes and own arms and free to keep the car he has earned (etc.), but not free in the sense that he can steal a car and go unpunished), an open and honest discourse is an important component of preventing mass murder and other evils.

If my neighbors are armed, and most of them (or all of the most vocal and most active) believe that my parents and husband and should to be sacrificed to Zeus (or the abstract twin gods of eliminating pain and stopping all (including cultural) evolution, or to the Flying Spaghetti Monster) when they turn 70 or go blind or have kidney problems, arms alone don't do the trick. Arms are necessary, not sufficient. Open, honest, educated discourse is also important, at least.

I don't think myopically believing that arms alone are all that matters helps much. I have real concerns. I've laid them out and backed them up with well-connected ideas with and references. Thankfully, we're not living in a total dystopia, we're living in a largely armed society, and one in which we can influence legislation. It's not perfect, but it should be enough to fight future cases the Schaivo case portends. To be dismissed on the grounds that no mass murder will happen until Armageddon is not morally satisfying, unless you define as Armageddon whatever the next mass murder happens to be, and dismiss all efforts aimed at preventing that as futile.

Cryptic references to Armageddon may make you feel wise and deep, or like you are letting trickle out what you know to be deep truth, but they are not satisfying to someone who really cares about potential mass murder and doesn't happen to share all of your beliefs. If anything, it shows a fatalistic complacency; alone the lines of "just don't worry about that despite the evidence you presented that has you worried, I know the only real danger is this other thing."

Also, I strongly resent earlier implication in this thread (I believe in your fictional "discourse" bit) that my concern for what I see as a very real problem, and willingness to back up that concern explicitly, suggests that I am somehow disjointed. Energized concern about serious ideas is not sick, and it is a lie that not remaining chill about everything reveals some sort of disjointedness. You didn't say that, but you implied it heavily with rhetoric. Remaining chill about potential mass murder, when there are both a history of it and what appears to be intellectual efforts behind a new wave of it, does not prove you are any more mentally aware than I, and I don't care how many cheap quips you make about downing beer with Jefferson. That level of social "I'm so chill so I must be right!" posturing wouldn't work in South Park, for corn's sake.

Also - I forgot to make explicit the force behind "government" of the sort I discussed in my last post. Notices that many of my examples involved the word "voluntary". The force behind patterns that are initiated voluntarily, is individual volition. Individual volition comes from a combination of genetic inheritance (getting pissed when someone steals your car), cultural inheritance (learned belief that if someone steals your car, you are are right expect him to be punished one way or the other, perhaps by you), and individual conscious thought (recognizing, perhaps with the aid of some sort of study or discussion, why it is that you are right expect the dude that stole your car to be punished).

It didn't occur to me right off the bat that this force was central to what you were getting at, so I instead left it to words like "voluntary", but I'm now guessing it was (I haven't yet read the posts I haven't yet replied to). It is not at all because I am cognitively dissonant, which I guess you will accuse me of yet again. It is because I am not paranoid about forces or government all being bad. I actually think many of them (forces and governing principles) are how we voluntarily run our lives, for the good. Alarm clock use is a governing principles. Hunger for breakfast is a force. Part of it is seeing the world the they eyes of "heck! lots of this stuff isn't oppressive!", and thinking about the nature of those non-oppressive, yet often systematic, things.

You don't know everything anymore than I do. Each person thinks the neighbor who has ideas hooked up in his head significantly differently than he himself does is both paranoid (has undue connections) and cognitively dissonant (lacks important true connections). The check on each is evidence. The check is not "I'm so chill, you're so pissed" posturing.

I think that in a free society (free in the sense that one can say what one likes and own arms and free to keep the car he has earned (etc.), but not free in the sense that he can steal a car and go unpunished)

As I said, "freedom" never includes the right to initiate force against someone else. You don't need to specifically mention such an exclusion, except perhaps in grammar school, when teaching the kiddies about freedom.

If my neighbors are armed, and most of them... believe that my parents and husband [I] and should to be sacrificed to Zeus... arms alone don't do the trick.

True--but that's equally true today. If your neighbors are all satanists, they might decide to use you for a black mass, and you and your pistol might not be enough to stop them. But worse, if the government decides that your wacky little religion displeases them, your pistol won't stop them from surrounding your place with tanks, pumping if full of CS gas, and then setting it on fire. So I accept what you say here, but I dispute whether it would be any worse than today.

Your point is good from another angle, too. It's worth pointing out that you do have the right to hire a security guard. If you're allowed to shoot in self defense, then you're also allowed to hire someone to do that for you. You and your neighbors can, if you all agree, hire some security guards and divvy up the cost. For example, if everyone on your cul de sac agrees, you can stick a gate on the end of the road, with a guard booth, and have other guards running foot patrols.

Aha! You might reply. Isn't that what the police do today? The answer is no; the police force me to pay for them whether I wish to or not. In the above scenario, your neighborhood is protected, but everyone is participating voluntarily. But even more importantly, there's an issue of jurisdiction: these guards can protect your homes, even using deadly force. But they have no authority to roam outside your neighborhood and bust into people's homes. In other words, these guards are truly your servants, not your masters.

If you fast forward that scenario a few years, you'll realize I think that before long there would be a handful of fairly big security firms. Pinkertons might be big in the west; Securitas in the northeast; Seguridad in the southesast, etc. So doesn't that mean that we have a de-facto government? Or a handful of warlords--namely, the CEOs of those companies?

The answer is no. Many people won't hire any security firm; they'll arm themselves heavily, and put man-traps near their basement windows. If you think the Pinkertons are too uppity, you are free to stop paying them. You could hire Securitas instead, or you could start your own security company and compete with them. And best of all, the security company has no power whatsoever to "make laws". All they can do is provide guard services.

By contrast, today's police are effectively rulers. They can break into your house on filmsy excuses--such as anonymous tips, or "glimpsing illegal activity through your window", or any other made-up "probable cause". They routinely harrass motorists, and if all else fails they will claim you were "weaving around the road." If they shoot you, there's a general presumption that they were within their rights to do so, sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren't, and SOME of those times they're punished for it. But they get away with some pretty broad excuses: the wallet in his hand looked like a gun; he reached suddenly for his pocket; it was dark; etc. And worst of all, police face no competition. The Pinkertons will try to please you, so you don't switch to Securitas.

Anyway, the bottom line is that I'm not describing a Hobbesian "all against all" sort of jungle. Many "government" jobs will be taken over by insurance companies, security companies, etc. Everything government does can be done better on the free market.

It is because I am not paranoid about forces or government all being bad.

In other words, it's OK with you that they have the authority to take your property, tax your money, and arrest or shoot you, because you feel trustful that they won't use those powers in ways that you object to (very much). It's touching that you have this level of trust. If I don't share it, am I allowed to opt out? If I can opt out, then I wish you the best of luck with this "government" thing of yours. If I can't, then you are approving the use of force against me.