# Does the state have a monopoly on violence? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 21, 2025, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175 "2025-10-21T21:11:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2025, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/81 "2025-10-28T18:39:07Z")
Crime exists to exactly the level that it’s tolerated because harsher counter-measures would be worse. We don’t think that mugging deserves the death penalty, let alone summary execution. The same cannot be presumed for brigandage, which is what murdering people for the contents of their wallets would be. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2025, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/82 "2025-10-28T18:49:38Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > I think you’re trivializing the escalation from assault and robbery to murder and robbery. Society wouldn’t stand for it; for those who got caught and tried we’d go back to taking the convicted after the trial out to the gallows behind the courthouse and stringing them up right then and there. That’s if they survived discovery and didn’t get lynched immediately frontier-style justice. Well, that’s a bizarre scenario. The US already has a ton of gun murders every year, and we generally aren’t seeing mobs breaking into prisons to murder the accused before they’ve even had a trial. They didn’t do that to Adam Lanza after he murdered a bunch of school children under the age of ten, it doesn’t really track that all of a sudden we’d see this happening over a common mugging. Although, if your assumption about the propensity of Americans towards mob violence is correct, that’s a _really_ good argument for disarming us. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2025, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/83 "2025-10-28T19:54:31Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > it doesn’t really track that all of a sudden we’d see this happening over a common mugging. We don’t and we wouldn’t. The hypothetical was that muggers became ambush killers murdering people for plunder. _That’s_ what people would rise up against. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2025, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/84 "2025-10-28T19:57:24Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > The hypothetical was that muggers became ambush killers murdering people for plunder. Yes, I understood that. It still doesn’t justify your bizarre scenario where all of a sudden the American justice system is overrun with violent mobs. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2025, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/85 "2025-10-28T20:01:07Z")
The bizarre scenario is that ambush murder for plunder could ever become a routine occurrence without provoking a backlash. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2025, 8:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/86 "2025-10-28T20:10:22Z")
But I don’t understand why you’d have mobs breaking into prisons to kill people who are already set to be murdered by the state anyway. Nor do I understand why this isn’t happening _now_, when we’ve _already_ got an enormous number of people being murdered by guns every year. Again, Adam Lanza committed a crime a thousand times more horrifying than shooting some guy for their wallet, and has conspicuously not been murdered by a violent mob. Also, not entirely sure how this is an argument for _more_ guns? If gun ownership becomes so widespread that the only way to successfully rob someone is to murder them, and all this street murder leads to violent mobs lynching people who haven’t even been convicted yet, surely that’s a strong argument for giving _fewer_ people access to guns? I don’t see any way in which your argument here actually supports your goals. ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2025, 8:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/87 "2025-10-28T20:59:28Z")
Non-state actors commit violence all the time, so obviously the State doesn’t have a monopoly on violence. They can be said to have a monopoly on _legitimate_ violence, but only because they’ve proclaimed themselves the arbiters of legitimacy. No, it’s a term you hear a lot, but it’s somewhere between misleading and dead wrong. It just isn’t how the world actually works. The State only controls _most_ of the violence, and that’s because they have the most money and power. Not much different than when the gang war finally ends and the one victorious gang controls the whole territory now. Like when Trump took office, and everyone realized that the Constitution was just a powerless piece of paper. We created a mental model of the way we wanted society to work, and then tried to force the world to fit into that box. And we could even fool ourselves for a long time that it worked. But it didn’t. We’re like sovereign citizens arguing that “we’re not driving, we’re traveling, man!” and we just can’t comprehend that the world doesn’t share our delusions. There’s no order, and the only reason it appears that way is because so many of us agreed on that fictional mental model, and acted as if it were real for so long. But once the outsiders came in and showed us otherwise, there’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Governments, like gender and money, are social constructs. And the transphobes and grifting fascists of the world have shown us how easy it is to ignore social constructs. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2025, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/88 "2025-10-28T23:24:52Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > But I don’t understand why you’d have mobs breaking into prisons to kill people When did I say anything that would imply that? I said that people would not passively accept a situation in which there was insufficient deterrence to prevent muggers from turning to murder as a necessity to rob victims. If the state can promptly catch these offenders and impose as swift, sure and undesirable an outcome as would make most criminals decide that it wasn’t worth it for someone’s credit cards, all to the good. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2025, 11:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/89 "2025-10-28T23:33:01Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > When did I say anything that would imply that? Right here? > [@Lumpy](#): > > That’s if they survived discovery and didn’t get lynched immediately frontier-style justice. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2025, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/90 "2025-10-28T23:51:03Z")
Which is not the same as saying that criminals who had already been caught wouldn’t be handled by the law. The hypothetical presumes a tsunami of murder drowning the country; if the criminal justice system was overwhelmed people would do what they had to. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2025, 12:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/91 "2025-10-29T00:03:04Z")
Ah, I see the disconnect - when you said “survive discovery,” I thought you were talking about the discovery phase of a trial. Which, admittedly, is a weird thing for me to have assumed. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2025, 12:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/92 "2025-10-29T00:51:43Z")
My bad, I used confusing terminology. Sometimes translating Lumpy-to-English is challenging. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2025, 1:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/93 "2025-10-29T01:30:20Z")
> [@DrCube](#): > > . Not much different than when the gang war finally ends and the one victorious gang controls the whole territory now But that’s clearly untrue. It’s not a hypothetical that describes plenty of places in the real world, and life in those places sucks worse than even under the crappiest government that can enforce its monopoly on violence. There is a real difference for people living under a gang that temporarily gains control of a territory (until the gang leader is murdered or the gang in the next territory decides to invade) is objectively worse than life under a government that has control of the state institutions sufficient to maintain its monopoly on violence ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2025, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/94 "2025-10-29T04:08:06Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > The bizarre scenario is that ambush murder for plunder could ever become a routine occurrence without provoking a backlash. It _did._ That backlash is known as “government”. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2025, 5:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/95 "2025-10-29T05:50:57Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > The hypothetical presumes a tsunami of murder drowning the country; if the criminal justice system was overwhelmed people would do what they had to. Your argument is that people would never stand for living in a society where large numbers of people are being shot and killed? Lumpy, we live in that society now. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2025, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/96 "2025-10-29T14:01:09Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > > [@Lumpy](#): > > > > The bizarre scenario is that ambush murder for plunder could ever become a routine occurrence without provoking a backlash. > > It _did._ That backlash is known as “government”. Totally. This is not some bizarre hypothetical, this is the reality when you don’t have a government with a monopoly on violence. The obvious recent example being the Taliban who won out in Afghanistan because this was the reality of daily life for people. The Taliban did a better job of stopping it than the alternatives, so despite being a really crap government, they seemed like the best option ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2025, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/97 "2025-10-29T14:57:40Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > There is a real difference for people living under a gang that temporarily gains control of a territory (until the gang leader is murdered or the gang in the next territory decides to invade) is objectively worse than life under a government that has control of the state institutions sufficient to maintain its monopoly on violence Is it, though? What if “temporary” meant “generations or lifetimes” and “gang” included groups that give their members a say, allowed peaceful leadership changes from time to time, and rightly saw that curbing common abuses was beneficial for goodwill and holding on to power? I’d say, at best, we’re working with a difference of degree here, not kind. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2025, 3:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/98 "2025-10-29T15:09:53Z")
> [@DrCube](#): > > What if “temporary” meant “generations or lifetimes” and “gang” included groups that give their members a say, allowed peaceful leadership changes from time to time, and rightly saw that curbing common abuses was beneficial for goodwill and holding on to power? And bureaucracy, and a legal system, and taxation system, and a police force, etc etc. Which are all needed to enforce the states monopoly or violence. That is absolutely how states develop. The idea of the states monopoly of violence is not some kind of utopian ideal. It’s the lowest possible bar to qualify as a state in the modern sense, it covers everything from liberal Scandinavian democracies to the Taliban. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2025, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/99 "2025-10-29T15:53:53Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > > [@Lumpy](#): > > > > The hypothetical presumes a tsunami of murder drowning the country; if the criminal justice system was overwhelmed people would do what they had to. > > Your argument is that people would never stand for living in a society where large numbers of people are being shot and killed? > > Lumpy, we live in that society now. Not really. The actual incidence of annual gunshot deaths is under 50,000 in a continent-sized nation of 330 million people. Consistently about 60% of those are suicides. Factor out self-chosen membership in a high risk demographic like gang members and career criminals and the residual number of “innocent victim” deaths by gunshot is more modest still. The news media and Hollywood grossly exaggerate the risk of random gun violence. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2025, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175/100 "2025-10-29T16:03:44Z")
The number of muggings in this country are about 100,000 per year. So the numbers are comparable. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-state-have-a-monopoly-on-violence/1024175.md?page=6)