Тег: Psychos

Is it legitimate to sell weapons to a mentally ill and potentially dangerous person?

If it is illegitimate, when exactly does it become illegitimate: at the moment of sale, or when that same unstable person commits a crime?

Ancapman

We are, of course, considering ancap, because under a state, this issue is resolved through political games surrounding regulations, and we are interested in what is the correct way.

Ancap is a free market plus the decentralization of law enforcement. The market means that the seller decides for themselves to whom and for how much to sell a gun. Anarchy means that conflicts are resolved on an ad hoc basis.

A psycho wants to buy a gun. The gun owner wants to sell it. A bystander fears that the psycho will shoot someone and would like the gun not to be sold to him. In other words, he has a conflict with the seller. But how will this bystander know that the buyer is a dangerous psycho? Do we have a society of total control, which is dreamed of by the author of the book Practical Anarchy, Stephan Molignon?

Of course, it is easy to imagine a society where all the dangerous psychos are known. This is a village or a small town where everyone knows everyone. This one isn’t a psycho, but a harmless hippie; he’s skating on the promenade. But this one is constantly shouting at his wife, and it seems there are fights. And when someone tries to reason with him, he becomes even more agitated and spews incoherent threats. Maybe he shouldn’t have a gun? And the owner of the only gun shop in the area would prefer not to take on extra responsibility. Or he sells it carelessly, and then tomorrow at the barbershop, he’ll be asked if he’s an idiot.

But people, you know, sometimes choose to live in megacities for some reason. Will megacities remain under ancap? I fully assume so: people cluster because many types of offline businesses have a significant positive effect of scale, and they will continue to have it even in the absence of state regulations.

In a megacity, generally speaking, all people look the same to each other. A gun can be sold in a thousand places. No one will voluntarily chip in to maintain a complex system of weapons registration and total medical examination, which means there won’t be one. Therefore, let’s simply accept as a fact that under ancap, any solvent psycho will always find a way to buy a gun, including anonymously, and even that loudmouth from the small town can easily do it simply by going to a megacity.

How to protect oneself from the consequences? In a small town, it is much easier for a dangerous psycho to be refused an apartment rental. He will be forced to move from time to time until he settles in the outskirts, where landlords won’t constantly receive complaints about their tenant. In a megacity, it may be unclear who to complain to about a violent neighbor, because generally, you simply don’t know who owns the neighboring apartment. But if it’s very irritating, you can, again, move yourself to a more decent district where more attention is paid to the peace of the residents.

Well, if the violent psycho does get a gun and intends to use it, the situation becomes very simple: get your own and neutralize the psycho. Or someone else who gets there first will do it. There is no time here to reason whether it was legitimate to sell that person a gun, or who to blame for the resulting situation. The probability of accidentally getting hit by a bullet is significantly lower than the probability of accidentally getting hit by a car or drowning, but that doesn’t make people give up cars or swimming.

In general, the question about psychos and guns was already asked to me about five years ago. Goodness, five years! How long I’ve been running this channel!

Discussion around dangerous psychos

The post about dangerous psychos sparked a surprisingly lively discussion, as well as a comparable number of likes and dislikes; therefore, there is something to discuss.

First, many expressed doubt about the idea that insurance companies would face customer demand for the treatment of insane offenders, instead of shooting them, harvesting their organs, feeding them to pigs, or exiling them (where to?)

Indeed, this is merely an assumption, an extrapolation of the current trend toward humanization, as well as the current trend toward a more complete understanding of the principles of consciousness and the causes of mental failures. Therefore, I assume that this treatment will become cheaper and more reliable. Thus, dangerous psychos will, in most cases, receive their treatment before it leads to a tragedy, and only in the rarest situations—when a clouding of the mind went unnoticed and led to murder—will the conversation turn to post-factum treatment; and only after successful treatment can the conversation about financial compensation begin. In the long term, such an approach remains quite profitable for insurance companies.

Secondly, of course, I count on the fact that if anyone, including a psycho, attacks anyone, they will be stopped by the power of weapons, and then both the holes in their body and their brain will be treated, after which a bill will be presented. So, the general alertness of the ancap community, where people are ready to personally defend their freedom and property, should also work to reduce the significance of the raised problem of violence by the insane.

Thirdly, the question of who guarantees that insurance companies will not begin preemptively treating healthy people for mental disorders caused disputes. It is clear that the roots of this question grow from the practice of punitive psychiatry by the state. Why does the state do this? To ensure that the subjects do not have any “little thoughts” about the forced termination of the social contract with the ruling regime. Why would insurance companies do this? Who the hell knows. Applying forced treatment to one’s own clients is fraught with lawsuits if the client was healthy. Applying forced treatment to other people’s clients is a very strange form of altruism, and even more fraught with lawsuits if the person was healthy. Forcibly treating the uninsured might prove to be a useful preventative measure to avoid waiting until they start attacking clients. Here, one must calculate the benefits/costs. But even here, the forced treatment of healthy people brings no benefit.

However, the theme will live on in cinema for some time

About dangerous psychos

We have psychiatric hospitals and maximum-security prisons.

Their “clients” remind us that there are very real psychopaths, maniacs, serial killers, and other problematic characters. Most of them are not Dexters or Hannibal Lecters, and they do not act in accordance with the public good. Due to the peculiarity of the processes occurring in their brains, there is no clear way to convince them using reasons or arguments.

How can ostracism help against them?

What would a system for searching and destroying or isolating such “Jack the Rippers” look like? If it is isolation rather than destruction, then with whose money and by whose efforts?

анонимный вопрос

People value security and are willing to pay for it. Inadequate aggressors are not just dangerous, but because of their apparent irrationality, this danger seems even more serious than if people applied the cold reason of an insurance agent. The same considerations apply here as to why people fear terrorist attacks more than car accidents, even though mortality from the latter is much higher.

The most obvious market agent that could provide such a service is, of course, insurance companies. They collect premiums while the client is safe and pay out a benefit in insured cases. Therefore, assuming that insurance companies act in good faith and do not cheat their clients, it is in their interest to promote the maximum safety of their clients.

But security from maniacs can be provided in different ways, and this is determined by social mores. Clients may desire security from packs of stray dogs but categorically protest against their wholesale extermination, so those who undertake to satisfy this whim will have to account for the corresponding restriction in means.

Similarly, simple empathy no longer allows our wealthy and prosperous society (and under ancap it is presumably expected to be even wealthier and more prosperous) to demand security from violent psychotics through their extermination; rather, it is a matter of treatment. Again, a mental disorder may be acquired rather than innate, for example, as a result of trauma, and before that, the person could well have been a respected client of an insurance company. Thus, the obvious line of thought in our case would be the search for methods of treatment.

Will this be expensive? Pennies. I did not mention the comparison between terrorist attacks and car accidents for nothing. A disproportionate amount is spent on preventing terrorist attacks. In the same way, violent psychotics will receive a disproportionate amount of attention, although their number is completely negligible. Of course, if a person with mental problems had an insurance policy, they would receive higher quality and more expensive treatment, but even if there was no policy, they would still be attempted to be returned to normalcy, and by quite humane methods.