Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

IMHO, the keeping of guns acts as a crutch [0] that lulls people into thinking they can always fight back when the true time comes. I believe they think there's no need to prematurely worry about mass surveillance (thus Snowden is a criminal), because if the ultimate results are used wrongly, then their guns can be used to put an end to it.

Of course the same pathology applies to democracy itself, so out of the (ballot, jury, ammo) boxen, the only avenue us individualists really have left is the S-box.

[0] Please don't misjudge my perspective - I think people have the right to keep and bear whatever tools regardless of purpose. And I think the 2A, as written, quite obviously covers fully auto, explosives, and armored vehicles. It should perhaps have been revisited with the advent of nuclear weapons though. A good legal test would be stewardship - what type of weapons can an individual/group practice with and store without causing harm to others?

I agree, and I find the viewpoint that guns will protect from Americans from a totalitarian government as naive.

The US military has proven itself very effective at fighting those only armed with small arms. In Iraq roadside bombs have proven a far better weapon than assault rifles.

Trying to imagine the Oregon militia fighting against predator drones seems insane. IMO, the 2A is just an opiate that the government uses to lull right wing voters into acquiescence.

If there is an actual revolution you can expect people within the military to take sides.

If the military [mostly] side with the revolution, civilian legal entitlement to handguns is even more unlikely to affect the outcome than if they don't.

I want nothing at all to do with a 2A debate, but ...

The "nuclear weapons" argument is actually a useful and substantive retort from gun control advocates - I don't think it should be waved away as if it's absurd or silly.

But at the same time, I think there is a very, very simple solution to the "nuclear weapons" problem, and that is to cap firearms capability at whatever the highest capability employed by the state and local law enforcement that one is subject to.

No SWAT team or sheriffs department will have a nuke, so the problem is solved.

Because of posse comitatus[1], you can't end up with a situation where local law enforcement disarms itself completely (and thus, disarms all citizens) and hands over larger tasks to the military, since they can't do that. On some level, local law enforcement in the US needs firearms, so that unintended consequence is skirted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act

but ... we jumped right in!

Your test seems like a good one too, but federal domestic law enforcement would need to be included as well. Organized police would flip their bacon, but getting rid of that power asymmetry is kind of the entire point. It could devolve into police using only bureaucracy-approved expensive weapons or network DRM, so it would have to be by general weapon class and we'd need non-corrupt courts for actual implementation.

Ultimately I don't think such "debates" come down to much besides showing how out of hand the government has gotten, through both attrition and precession. The Bill of Rights should be viewed more as a bunch of (failing) test cases than something with hypothetical legal force.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com