[EDIT] Inb4 more people try to suggest that I’m mourning the loss of this scumbag capitalist fuck: No, I’m not sad he’s dead. No, I don’t think corporate murder is acceptable and no, I would not ever rat to police if I knew the shooter and yes, I believe the punishment fits the crimes he’s committed against untold thousands of people. THAT SAID…
I’m not down with vigilante murder or anything because it seems like the slipperiest of slopes toward chaos, but what other option is there in a situation where someone seeks to make an impact in this way? You can’t just beat up evil CEOs and let them go back to work. It would be naïve to expect them to change their ways when faced with consequences for their actions and then promptly let go. It just seems like the chances that it emboldens their penchant for exploitative behaviour and disdain for people in need are too high.
We’re just born into and strapped to this capitalist ride and expected to sit quiet and make these leeches their billions. How else can this cancerous greed possibly be dealt with? Is vigilante murder the only effective option? Honest questions. I’m terribly conflicted and I’m genuinely curious what more reasonable and intelligent minds than mine think about this because I can’t think of an alternative to murder in this case.
Ideally, we wouldn’t have to resort to vigilante killings to level the playing field but I 100% understand that we don’t live in a society where the rich will ever give a fuck about the rest of us or would ever sacrifice their power over us in the name of goodwill.
Jefferson was all about the trees of liberty and the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Curiously he also imagined that an ultimate weapon would outlaw war forever. He was half-right: We just have war with no-nukes rules. But we should appreciate that nukes are difficult to make and are too messy to be actually useful.
I suspect he didn’t imagine that guys going amuck (a trope since time immemorial) would be complicated by a surfeit of semi-automatic weapons. I imagine his solution would not be to limit civilian weapons but to look at the problems that drive guys to go amuck.
And also Jefferson, while he believed in abolitionism academically he did so not enough to free (or pay) his slaves, which means he didn’t have a solution for shit (literal poop) mixed into the meals sent down his dumb waiter.
And the problem with the amuck thing is it can still scale, hence billionaires might make AI-controlled swarming armies of killer robots to dominate the world, and then have a trusted lieutenant decide to use the same army to just burn it all down like Mad King Aerys Targaryen.
And no amount of gun control is going to stop billionaires from making doomsday weapons.