Friday, June 16, 2017

TGIF: Wrong Lessons from the Congressional Shootings

I’ll start off by saying that no one should commit violence except as a last resort in immediate defense of self or other innocent life. I know this subject lends itself to endless hypothetical scenarios, but that’s all I’m going to say — except for this: political violence has a poor chance of achieving liberty or any other good thing, but an excellent chance of producing repression by the state and other bad things. It carries within itself the seeds of many evils, so even in purported good causes, violence as a strategy must be viewed with the deepest apprehension.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!
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1 comment:

  1. AugustJune 16, 2017 at 2:23 PM

    He certainly didn't think strategically. Brevik did, but he was in a much smaller country, where the ruling political class was much easier to identify.
    And Brevik succumbed to the urge of the manifesto.

    It is particularly difficult in America. Just imagine this was your job- can you imagine the commute times? The temptation would be to go to D.C., but there's too much security there, so you'd be traipsing all over the country for good opportunities- and it's really silly to just pick one side; no, you'd have to go for the guilty on both sides and somehow evade capture until people got too scared to do anything unconstitutional. And they'd have to figure out why on their own, because again, the manifesto/sending a message stuff tends to lead to capture.

    The cost to mount any sort of real campaign would be high.

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