>Seems like a politician can lie, steal and manipulate without much complaint //
I don't think that's true, there's just not much we can do about it.
Some Tory MPs are supremely awful people willing to cause harm to millions to line their own pockets -- and people vote for them because they will get richer themselves (so long as they don't fall ill, or get made unemployed, or become poor).
I don't think it's necessarily the hypocrisy here that has people up in arms. It seems that it's the unequal treatment (a close cousin to hypocrisy, for sure): has Gove been questioned by police, had his house searched, his computers and phone seized, etc.. I'm guessing "no he's rich, so he can get away with drugs crime that others get locked up for".
Many people probably thing his crime is de minimis and should really be decriminalised. But here's the rub, he is in position to initiate that; but he doesn't want to, because "letting proles use drugs is different to me using it" or some excuse.
In short, for me it's not plain hypocrisy but evidence of deep seated belief of their own superiority.
Per your last paragraph: you can't even tell if it's true, they just do it to try and look interesting when their public persona is very bland.
I just want to point out that there is a very active subreddit called Trump criticizes Trump[0] where people take historical tweets from Trump and show them as hypocritical compared to a more current tweet/events. The top post, for example, shows a tweet of Trump criticizing Obama for "attacking the internet" and saying that net neutrality is "the fairness doctrine" on the day that net neutrality was repealed, or another where he said he'd stand by LGBTQ+ and then ban trans folk from serving in the military. There's hundreds of posts and (other than people getting frustrated over the internet) nothing seems to be done about it.
Hypocrisy is only a sin when the other side does it.
Like when democrats push gun control and complain about systemic racism in the same breath or when republicans blindly advocate for whatever law enforcement wants while saying they care about individual liberty. Those things only ever get called out by the other side.
I'll give you a Canadian example. Our gun control system has three tiers: non-restricted (basic rifles/"long guns", shotguns), restricted (pistols, AR-type rifles, an arbitrary list established by the RCMP), and prohibited (machine guns, some pistols, some crazy stuff). Each tier has more restrictive licensing.
For non-restricted, you do a ~$200 course over a weekend, send $60 to the RCMP, and if you don't have any concerning criminal behaviour in your past, you're free to buy as many rifles as you want.
For restricted, you do another weekend course, pay another fee to the RCMP, and go through a more thorough background check. Per my understanding, this check used to only cover the last 5 years, but recent legislation has, I believe, extended that to your lifetime. So you pass the background check, get your license, and now you're good to go? No. When you go to buy a handgun, you have to say what you're buying it for, and there are only two choices: target shooting or collector. If you ever plan on actually shooting it, you choose target practice. Now, before approving the transfer, the RCMP needs confirmation that you're a member of a shooting club with a range. Around here, that's another $150-$300/year.
So at this point, you've spent around $700, used up two weekends, and spent time on multiple phone calls (only open from 9am-5pm), and you're finally OK to buy your first handgun. All of that, and where's the systemic racism? Its not direct, but disadvantaged minorities are: less likely to pass the lifetime criminal record check (got in a fight when you were 19?), less likely to be able to take two weekends getting licensed, less likely to be able to afford the mandatory fees, and less likely to have a job where you can go and sit on hold for a while, waiting to get to the front of the queue.
While it's not explicitly racist, shooting (especially restricted) is definitely not a sport that is particularly accessible across socio-economic backgrounds.
Systematic racism doesn't require a person somewhere saying "I hate black people" - it merely requires that the system be unfair towards people, correlated with their skin color.
Systematic racism could affect someone because the history of oppression against their race has resulted in them being born to a family that constantly gets evicted from homes due to poverty, which exacerbates the poverty for them and their eventual offspring, which means that the history of oppression against their race continues indefinitely.
I think the bigger question is why does Ben and Jerry's have a page discussing systemic racism on their website. Isn't that a few astronomical units outside the scope of their business?
They are very active in progressive causes. Perhaps when they sold the company to Unilever they negotiated some deal that allows them to continue to use Ben and Jerry website for their activism?
The earliest gun control laws were pretty explicitly Jim Crow laws, intended to keep black folks from being able to defend themselves against, say, the guys burning a cross on their front lawn.
And even today, there's a disparate impact aspect to it. I mean, the neighborhoods where you're most likely to want to have the means to defend yourself are the poor urban neighborhoods, which are disproportionately inhabited by blacks.
Some states and counties make carry permits "may issue" so they are free to deny them for any reason. In practice the most liberal areas deny all permit applications except for well connected people. Infamously Diane Feinstein (a prominent gun control advocate) at one point held one of 4 carry permits in San Francisco county, a de-facto no-issue county. I suppose it's more elitist than racist, but membership of the elite varies by race.
In my state the process is definitely "racist" because you need to get the discretionary approval of the police, a group not known for being colorblind (to put it mildly), simply to posses in your own home(!!) anything that's magazine fed (i.e. anything reasonably modern).
The laws are also structured to make it legal minefield anyone who can't just get everyone in the household licensed (which ain't happening if anyone in the household has a record) and chuck all their guns in a safe. Sure, it's not overtly racist but there's s lot of less racist things that people complain about being racist.
It's all basically a poll tax on something that's supposedly a constitutionally protected right.
Assuming you're talking about a US state, I don't think a may-issue license to own a firearm that uses a magazine and keep it at home passes the test established by DC v. Heller and applied to the states by McDonald v. Chicago. Requiring a license is permissible under that standard, but it must be shall-issue.
>I don't think a may-issue license to own a firearm that uses a magazine and keep it at home passes the test established by DC v. Heller and applied to the states by McDonald v. Chicago
I am talking about a US state. I'm hoping they get a SCOTUS smack-down for the reasons you mentioned but I'm not gonna hold my breath.
Reagan and the black panthers not withstanding, having a gun hasent been very relevant the recent unjust murders that have hit the public consiousness. The police are perfectly willing to kill unarmed black men as well.
In the US owning a gun is a protected right, just like voting. It has been ruled illegal to levy a tax on voting as that would place a hurdle on the poor (and thus minorities who are disproportionately poor) and effectively deprive them of their rights.
Poll taxes are seen as an explicitly racist policy, yet the National Firearms Act somehow is not despite serving the same outcome. Same goes for the myriad of fees associated with carry licenses, fingerprinting, mandatory training, etc. And left-wing politicians are actively calling to increase these with the express purpose of making it more difficult to acquire firearms... the hypocrisy being that this disenfranchisement would hit the underprivileged the hardest.
That's just the economic angle. When it comes to enforcement, prohibitions on stock/grip configurations, barrel lengths, magazine sizes, pistol models, and public possession will always fall hardest on those who have the most contact with law enforcement... which again is minorities and the poor. These are infringements on everybody's rights, but they are most likely to result in legal consequences for people who tend to get stopped and frisked, or have their cars searched at a traffic stop over an imaginary weed smell.
How then should someone who doesn't want people to have the right to own guns, go about exerting that desire?
I want terribly strict gun control in America (get rid of them all), but I am very swayed by your argument that restrictions are merely obstacles for the poor, rather than the rich.
Get enough people that feel the same way to come together in a coherent group that can wield comparable electoral influence as the NRA, for a start. That’s the absolute minimum you’ll need to get legislation enacted, and you’ll still run into Constitutional issues.
For anything resembling a complete ban, you’ll need to rewrite the second amendment which is an awfully high bar. The exact language change will be incredibly controversial in any case, but it’s one of the more vague amendments because it includes a rationale in addition to the right being protected. If you’re willing to compromise some, there may be room for clarifying the scope of the right to bear arms without removing it completely.
Same way you'd overturn any civil right. Get a two-thirds majority of states to agree and hold a constitutional convention. Probably easier to just move to a less free country.
I understand that to you, freedom means the ability to carry a gun around and decide when another person should die (i.e. at what threat level shooting them is justified).
But please don't be so dismissive - freedom to me means not having to worry about my kids being shot at school, or having to carry a gun around to defend myself with.
Other countries you describe as "less free," I'd describe as "more free."
Freedom is the absence of coercive interference over one's life. Exercising self-defense with adequate tools is affirmatively more free than being forbidden from doing so.
Safety is not freedom. Both are desirable but conceptually there is no overlap, and in reality there is often a tradeoff. Conflating the two as though safety is a form of freedom is a pretty good shibboleth for authoritarians; let alone defining freedom as the feeling of safety, which is textbook doublethink.
The US has strayed in many ways, but we seem to have the most people out of anywhere who are still invested in actual freedom.
You shouldn't. Criminalizing private firearm possession is inherently a calcification of the police state's power to control the poor and protect the status quo for the rich.
You should worry about the systemic social problems that breed violence instead of fixating on one of the tools used to carry it out. We have seen with drugs and alcohol that prohibition exacerbates these problems rather than fixing them.
Gun control in the USA has always been enacted specifically for racist reasons, from the very first regulations designed to disarm freed slaves that defended themselves against lynch mobs, to federal regulations in recent history when the black panthers carried long arms onto the floor of congress.
That surprises me given the furore around the likes of Michael Gove admitting to taking drugs[1].
Seems like a politician can lie, steal and manipulate without much complaint, but hypocrisy is a major sin.
(Although it's sometimes difficult to distinguish between genuine public outrage and the newspapers whipping it up.)
[1]:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/08/michael-gov...