I don’t know enough about Bolivia or Venezuela, I admit.
But. True story. When the Rodney King riots took place in LA, the LAPD retreated to Hollywood Hills and other homes of the wealthy, there to guard their stuff and never to venture out otherwise.
Korean-Americans in LA had only the 2nd Amendment to protect them. They quite rightly took advantage of it, and very likely avoided a lot of bloodshed and prevented a lot of property crime by doing so.
Again, best of luck to Venezuela.
basically when teh governmenmt started recieving flack for its corruption and mismanagement and the lack of food and TP brought people to teh streets, it started raining heavy arms, semiautomatics, for the “loyalists” in the favelas and otehr not so great places. So teh gangs are not empowered with teh latest equipment, and you ahve crime so rampant no bodyguard, wall or bulletproof vest can resist.
Probably because, again, a citizen’s right to bear arms in defense of order was not ingrained in Venezuela’s culture or constitution. The concept is/was new.
Solution: grab all the loyalists’ guns… somehow.
Plan B: Arm everybody else.
By the way, a basis of comparison:
Eh, nope, everyone has been freely armed, or unfreely. There had been revolutionaries before, but mostly the oil company executives had bodyguards. Big business started and has flourished… till now.
Not aware that a right to bear arms was ingrained in Venezuela law, as it is in the US.
And I now realize that I am close to breaking my own rule to never discuss the 2nd Amendment with non-Americans. It is an enormous undertaking of time that, in my experience, results only in hard feelings and ill-will.
Bowing out on this topic. Again, best to Venezuela.
It’s not dissimilar to talking to a conspiracy theorist or a religious fundamentalist. Entertaining at first, but ultimately dull.
That ship has sailed. Wish them a speedy end… no, that ship has also sailed.
Venezuela is screwed. May they serve as a warning to others.
Oh you mean like Zimbabwe served as a warning to others like South Africa, that is now applying a “Zimbabwe 101” course to everyone living there?
Seems like a recipe for disaster. Interestingly, a SA friend of mine had not seen the news about the Land reclamation and called his brother , who still lives in SA.
They seem to be not too worried at the moment, other than the episodes of Farm attacks, stating that the Land they are talking about reclaiming was in more “public” areas and not individual Farms. We shall see.
The thing is, as I said, both extremes, right or left, capitalism or proto socialism, eventually doom the nations they take hold of. Models like Chile end up like Brazil. In Central America, the new evangelical caliphates are killing the economy faster than the drug cartels.
So Venezuela is just one of many examples on how extremes in favor of just one group, forgetting a nation is made of parts and like a body needs all its parts, all must move or else, well, here we are and down we go.
Thanks for understanding it may be a little different in the US and elsewhere.
AFAIK, the Constitution in most Latin American countries does not touch the subject of weapons, in the same way it does not detail say in vitro fertilization regulations. It has overall patterns, AFAIK, that can be applied.
Moreover, we have been at war either with ourselves or someone else since…before becoming nations. Have I told you about our generala who sank a whole US fleet? Clever woman she was. Last time we defeated the US fighting more or less with the same weapons. Then we were caught in debt and to this day, 60% or more of GDP goes to pay the colonial tax, eh external debt. No need for guns no more.
I come from a line of pacifists. My grandpa, who was a famous skilled hunter, took his rifle and hunting dogs, along with my uncle’s and all male family to the mountains, to avoid fighting in our first civil war. No sense dying for someone else, was his motto. We have tried to follow it.
One of my definite experiences with gun was watching a supreme judge kill a young student who questioned his ethics, which truth be told, were non existent. He never saw a day in jail.He had the patience to leave the country club everyone was at, go home, take and load the gun, come back, pull the trigger. Defense argued being drunk.
And taking about drunk, one of my classmates was killed by a drugged up gringo, who was shooting wildly from his rooftop. We cannot process US citizens, he walked free.
So I do not believe in justice whether by law or guns. There is resolution, but the results vary. My experience is no different from the angry favelas dwellers in Venezuela. Maybe the difference is all they have is anger and an AR15, while I had a dream to study Chinese.
Constitutions which historically guaranteed a right to bear arms are those of Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Liberia, Mexico, Nicaragua and the United States of America.[4] Nearly all of the Latin American examples were modelled on that of the United States.[3] At present, out of the world’s nearly 200 constitutions, three still include a right to bear arms: Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States; of these three, only the last does not include explicit restrictive conditions.[2]
The verb tense is instructive here.
Sometimes a Constitution is a “living document” - which is to say, if you don’t keep the immune system healthy, it will be picked apart by vermin.
Shall we discuss the Venezuelan Constitution?
If you mean the one where democratic institutions were stripped and destroyed one by one … no thanks. That horse is dead.
A Constitution is a living document… until they manage to kill it.
This.
“Justice” in non-third-world countries is largely an illusion. People rub along nicely together not because they’re all afraid of retribution from the State (or from neighbours with guns) but because they recognise that getting along nicely works for all concerned. Third-world-ism happens when people just do not grok this simple fact, and start imagining that (a) civilisation can only be held together with threats and coercion from the guy with the biggest stick and (b) civilisation doesn’t matter anyway as long as I’m all right, Jack.
OTOH I recognise that violence has its place. There is always some fraction of the population who amuse themselves by causing mayhem (like the judge in Icon’s post). They steal, fight and kill because it’s jolly good fun. The size of that population varies from place to place; it’s their presence, and society’s reaction to them, that determines whether a country (or a subsection of society) “works” or not. A functioning police force and judiciary can keep that tiny minority from determining the fate of the majority.
So I’m quite intrigued by the idea of inviting an international force into Venezuela to sort things out. IMO this would work in a lot of places, but what’s required is not a military invasion. They just want a few hundred thousand solid, well-trained policemen who won’t take any bullshit but aren’t about to start blasting away at anything that moves. They want a whole lot of courts and impartial judges to process perps quickly and remove them from civil society, leaving everyone else to get on with life. Soldiers and helicopter gunships: not useful.
What you DO with the perps is a whole different question, since in countries like Venezuela, they’re probably about 10-20% of the population instead of a manageable 2-3%. You’d have to literally build a country within a country where the incorrigibly criminal could go and live out their preferred lifestyle choices of bashing each other over the head and stealing from each other, until such time as they get bored with it all, or die.
So basically what you’re saying is that for Venezuela to be a functioning society, it would have to become an entirely different country. I just don’t see social engineering on that scale being feasible. Unless you were to, say, exterminate the entire population and bring in the Swiss to repopulate the country (the Spanish version obviously didn’t work). That doesn’t sound acceptable by modern standards either. What to do, what to do…
No, I mean you should excise that bit of it that isn’t functioning.
I’m sure 80% of Venezuelans are perfectly normal human beings and would be happy enough doing what everyone else in the world likes doing, instead of cowering in their gated communities. 20% of them are psychopaths, retards, or otherwise unable to survive in polite society. So carve out a bit of Venezuela’s excess territory (they have plenty of it), rename it Lower Slobbovia, and send them all there. You’d probably have to establish separate laws for it and have a vastly larger police presence, but the aim would not be to punish the deliberately guilty; merely to allow everyone else to get on with life without having to worry about being robbed, murdered, or otherwise molested.