You're conflating two very different things. The lockdowns are instituted at the state level, are different in every state, and are with the specific aim of (and in response to) preventing covid transmission. Adhering to a public health lockdown has nothing to do with Freedom, or lack of guns.

By making a false comparison between the two, you are muddying any argument made against the electronic freedom restrictions.

>Adhering to a public health lockdown has nothing can do with Freedom

Regardless of what the justification given is, limiting people's freedom of movement and association is by definition a restriction of their freedom.

I apologize for my lack of clarity. I intended my capitalization of "Freedom" to stand in for a particular philosophy, which I did not clearly explicate.

To restate: I think the COVID lockdowns are a very different case from these electronic restrictions, in scope, duration, reason, and advisability. A critique which cites both as similar examples of government overreach is missing its mark.

I say this as a fellow Aussie who thinks both gun control and COVID lockdowns are good, sensible policies (although I'm starting to get sick of the latter): both of those things are absolutely limitations on freedom, even in the libertarian philosophical sense, and at least partly explains why Americans are so strongly against them.

Freedom is about being able to do whatever the hell you want, so long as you don't restrict the freedom of others. It's not about being good or wise or socially responsible or even sane - it's just about nobody being able to stop you from doing whatever it is you want.

Even Libertarians understand that the situation is nuanced. For example, blackouts during wartime are the proper jurisdiction of governments. You can argue that pandemic lockdowns fall into the same category. (I’m not saying whether or not that argument is correct, but it can be made in good faith.)

But they don't. Lockdowns longer than the vaccination interval make absolutely zero sense if there exists a vaccine and the virus is endemic. Get used to the idea that you'll be getting COVID several times a year from here on out, and because you'll have antibodies, it'll be no big deal, much like with other coronaviruses today.

Importantly, there is NO PLAUSIBLE WAY to "stop COVID" by lockdowns or any other measures. Eventually you'll have to end the lockdowns, and it'll be waiting for you. COVID is the Taliban of diseases - it can't be defeated, but we can kinda sorta peacefully coexist.

In Western Australia locking down hard and early has meant we have more freedoms in the long term (thus far).

So while we have less freedom initially, it seems to play better in the long term.

The question is, what do you do now? It's not going away. You'll all get it regardless.

In hindsight, that argument makes some sense, but back in early 2020 when we didn't know what we were fighting, there was no reason to believe it was endemic and there was no vaccine.

But we did know what we were fighting. It was clear right from the start COVID would become endemic, epidemiologists were literally saying so. It is true that there was no vaccine and nobody knew how to treat the moderate cases, but we've now had the vaccine for 9 months. In the US at least it's available to anyone who wants it (and forced upon those who don't, sometimes), and it's been that way for 4+ months.

And yet, in Australia you can be forcibly detained and quarantined (in a camp, no less), forced to disclose health information, authorities can also use whatever force necessary to enter your dwelling (this would be a perilous affair in the US in particular), and so on. That is as far from "freedom" as anything I've seen. And it's also utterly and completely pointless and counterproductive as well.

You have some weird definition of freedom with which I am not familiar. To me, freedom would mean I could, at a minimum, go wherever I want to go, and meet whoever I want to meet, without government interference.

And if there are any epidemiological recommednations, _voluntary_ compliance would too mean freedom, but _only_ voluntary.

By your definition people in prisons are "free" too - most of them are locked up for a reason. And yet they can't go anywhere, and are most definitely non-free.

This seems like the classic 'what happens when your freedoms encroach upon my freedoms' discussion beginning

This is apparently your first comment on HN. HN has a consistent value system called the guidelines. Your comment breaks many of them. Please read them and don't write like this on HN again. Thanks. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Serves them right, too, for giving up the last backstop on the government power: guns.

Genuinely curious, do you not think the US government has better guns than its citizens? How exactly would this work?

If the guns pose no threat to would-be tyrants, why would they need to take them away?

We expect our government to protect our individual rights and allowing citizens to maintain some degree of dangerousness is a nod to that effect. Even basic arms are great equalizers allowing anyone to protect themselves fairly well in practice.

>If the guns pose no threat to would-be tyrants, why would they need to take them away?

because they pose plenty of threat to each other, which was in fact one of the reasons for the biggest change in modern Australian history, the Port Arthur massacre[1]

Australia, like many other nations does not have the same tolerance that the US has when it comes to violence.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_(Australi...

Do the new restrictions make Aussies think someone hellbent of murdering people like this wouldn't be able to do so? I see stories of people committing mass murders by driving vans through crowded streets, for example.

It is interesting that these restrictions pre-date the country's more authoritarian move. Disarming the populace occurred prior to communist takeovers, eg. Russia early 20th

Of course if someone wanted to inflict harm there are other ways to do it, but banning guns removes one very effective way of doing it. The claim that guns protect against the tyranny of government is dubious, since it seems to imply that civilians shooting at police or soldiers would improve an already dire situation - that seems unlikely.

Gun control has broad support in Australia - in a poll, 40% of respondents think the laws are fine as they are, 45% said they should be even stronger, and 6% said they were too strong.

https://essentialvision.com.au/gun-laws

The data indicates so, yes. I suggest you look up the numbers.

The US government certainly has better guns than the Taliban. Let's see how that's working out for them. Oh, my...

Regular guns are sufficiently potent weapons to give the government trouble. Whatever else you might think of him and his stunt, Ammon Bundy proved that.

The various stunts that the Bundy family has pulled off prove less about guns being

> sufficiently potent weapons to give the government trouble

and prove far more about how the US federal government has and continues to be reluctant to pursue anyone that has support from "small-government" right-wing groups, even if they continuously ignore or break federal laws.

You shouldn't let the politics of the situation cloud the obvious. If they didn't have guns, it would not have played out the way it did. That doesn't mean that what they did was good, or that how the government handled it was right. It just means that the availability of guns was a critical determinative factor. That also doesn't mean they were the sole factor, either. It can also be true that the government treated them with kid gloves. But it's pretty clear that they would not have done that if they weren't armed.

>Genuinely curious, do you not think the US government has better guns than its citizens? How exactly would this work?

How exactly did that work in Afghanistan?

True, but this is in the context of abject authoritarianism right? Under tyranny?

The US in Afghanistan, for all its successes and failures was on a nation building adventure, hoping to win hearts and minds. It was following rules of engagement, not operating an outright slaughterhouse.

In the context of abject authoritarianism, the government will just straight up execute you, or crush you with a tank like the PRC at Tiananmen Square.

This feels like a romanticized Lone Ranger against Big Brother kind of thing. The Fantasy of the Good Guy with a Gun™. I don't think it plays out that way in real life.

The worst the government can do in a country with 300M+ guns in circulation is "boil the frog", and hope to dear god the pot does not boil over at any point. It's not a fantasy. It's literally how the US was founded in the first place.

Well, yes, that's how it was founded in the 1700s with slaves, flintlock rifles, no suffrage, and most people had syphilis. A lot has changed since then. Like, well, tanks.

A counter narrative would be the Cultural Revolution as I pointed out. China's population in 1966 at the start of the Cultural Revolution was about 750mm people. By the time Tiananmen Square happened, it was 1.1b people. I'm looking for the numbers but I believe guns were pretty common.

I agree, a lot has changed since then. The governments have gotten a lot more abusive and intrusive, for example.

I dont think you can connect this argument with afghanistan, how do you see the connection there?

The Afghanistan army gave up rather than fight the Taliban, despite having far superior firepower and manpower.

Government might try to go house to house in red states. They'd encounter resistance everywhere, in innumerable forms. The government would be fighting with people defending their homes and their way of life. It would go very badly for the government.

The USGOV has bombed it's own citizens before, but it probably wouldn't go over as well in the age of twitter as in the past.

US citizenry is certainly much better armed than the Taliban, which has proven to be more than enough. 2nd amendment is so high on the list for this exact reason.

> 2nd amendment is so high on the list for this exact reason.

The order of ammendments is chronological, not one of importance.

Chronology correlates with importance here. IIRC, however, the Bill of Rights was passed as a whole, though, not piecemeal. So it could be that it's 2nd because the Founding Fathers thought it was important. "Security of a free State" and all that. Seems pretty important to me.

I mean that's kind of interpretrative. I could similarly say that it wasn't in the Constitution to begin with so it can't have been that important to them. Or that it came before they thought about giving basic rights to anyone who isn't a white man so maybe we shouldn't read too closely into the order or rely on someone from the 18th century to inform our priorities.

Oh, they have thought about it, and very early on at that. When Jefferson was drafting the Declaration of Independence, it had this bit in it:

"He [king] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce."

This was removed from the final version during committee review. Much later, Jefferson explained what he believed the reason for this was:

"The clause...reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in compliance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under these censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others."

The supreme irony here, of course, is that Jefferson himself was a slave owner until his death. And he had something to say on that, as well; written in 1820, on the occasion of the Missouri Compromise:

"... as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."

the constitution, as written, recognized the same rights for all men. The institution of slavery/discrimination was at odds with what was written from the very beginning

Not women, though. Multi-century statecraft is a long, iterative process. The founding fathers were hardly perfect, and that doesn't detract from the scope of achievement.

I agree, the characters behind the writing and their faults are irrelevant. The ideas are what matter, and they should be timeless or they need to be updated, eg. for women

And in the 21st century how important is the 3rd amendment compared to the 4th or 5th?

Are you sure? The Taliban have RPGs.

Take a look at this. Every gun in the video is privately owned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eV8N0bUzA0

In general, it's perfectly legal for US residents to own RPGs, artillery, tanks etc. If operational, they're classified as "destructive devices", so they have to be registered with the feds, and every transfer happens with their approval as well. It's also very expensive, obviously. But still possible.

And Blackhawks

It's a good thing we don't all have guns like folks in the States. Not too many mass murders here. And if you think you're protected from your government, you're talking about guys with small arms vs other guys with tanks.

Why compare to the States specifically, though? There are several countries in Europe that have much more liberal gun laws than you guys do (although also much more stringent than American ones), and similarly don't have a problem with mass murders.