This is a really thoughtful helpful post. But let’s not minimize the fact that police have beaten protestors, jailed people who broke curfew, etc. not to mention that freedom of movement both within and outside the country has essentially been banned.
One wonders if the populace would have willingly accepted these horrors if their weapons had not been seized a couple of decades ago.
As the weapons weren’t seized, the obvious answer to that is it didn’t make any difference.
The ‘mass confiscation of guns’ in Australia is another American myth. A minority of firearms were purchased by the government. The number ‘confiscated’ was tiny and most of those people were convicted criminals.
This is a really thoughtful helpful post. But let’s not minimize the fact that police have beaten protestors
While I believe some of the demonstrations have been justified, I don't believe all have been. And some of the ones that haven't been have turned violent. More police have been seriously injured than protestors. I've seen one incident where I believe went too far in dealing with a protestor and it wouldn't surprise me if there's others. But there's a lot of cases where the police were simply themselves from attack.
jailed people who broke curfew
I don't know of any cases where somebody has been imprisoned for breaking curfew. It's a fine. Now, that's not a good situation, but it doesn't need to be exaggerated into something worse than it is. As I say there are real problems here - but it's harder to deal with those when we're also having to deal with shadow problems.
not to mention that freedom of movement both within and outside the country has essentially been banned.
The latter part is close to being true - there's quite a few exceptions to international travel but for the average person in the average situation, yes, that's fair. The former part does apply only in some places - in most of the country, people can move over a wide area.
One wonders if the populace would have willingly accepted these horrors if their weapons had not been seized a couple of decades ago.
Already addressed this in a previous post but I want to add to it. There was a buyback that took a minority of weapons out of the community. In most cases people could have kept those guns. Very few guns were actually confiscated and they were mostly taken from convicted criminals (and even then most of them were paid for the weapons because it was easier to get them to comply). Millions of guns remained in private hands, and there are actually more guns now in private hands than there were then. It doesn't make a difference to what is happening. Things haven't reached the stage where anybody is likely to want to use them.
I note that in the United States, the people who protested at the Capitol in January generally did so unarmed. Just because guns exist doesn't mean they need to be pulled out at every level of protest.