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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

I suspect the only reason the US government lets Americans think the second amendment would enable the population to forcibly remove an undesirable government, is because the weapons and strategic/tactical/leadership skills of the population are vastly out-classed by the armed forces.

What good is a semi-automatic against a supersonic jet that just fired an air-to-ground missile in your direction? Plenty of AK-47s in Afghanistan, they don’t even take on subsonic drones effectively.

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In other asymmetric warfare situations, supersonic jets have done very little to end a conflict. No sane person would ever want to start a war with a civil militia containing nearly all able-bodied men in a region; it's bad enough when just a couple per cent are against you, all with small arms. Imagine how bad it would be with 20%, 30%, 40% of the able-bodied against you.

But most of those small arms suck.

In Vietnam and Afghanistan they had weapons being sent to them including stuff like artillery and mortars.

A bunch of militia with store bought guns(many pistols or hunting rifles) doesn't really compare to guys supplied with full automatics and RPGs.

Consider also that there are arms manufacturers and state militias all across the country. If it's California, they have (some of) Northrop Grumman. If it's Virginia, they have General Dynamics Mission Systems.

Both of which can get magically disappeared in hours with the superior weaponry and numbers in the hands of the federal government.

Yeah, it'll work out really well when the U.S. military uses their General Dynamics Mission Systems radios to order their General Dynamics Mission Systems drones to fire General Dynamics missiles at General Dynamics. While their General Dynamics M1 Abrams tanks and General Dynamics Stryker AFVs roll through the streets to kill the civilians.

This is not the way things would play out. The federal government would twiddle their thumbs and say that they are very cross with the separatists, and we'd all get on with our lives.

I thought the implication was the tanks rolling up at General Dynamics offices and factories to “protect national security assets from terrorists”, and the General Dynamics CEO welcoming them with the closest one can get to open arms when you’re wearing heavy body armour.

“Disappeared” isn’t just destroying, it’s capturing, too.

Gotcha, sounded at first a lot like "attack General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman because lol we can".

> ...the closest one can get to open arms when you’re wearing heavy body armour.

Ironically, heavy body armour (depending on the width of the chest plate near the breast) is likely to force you to have open arms, not the opposite.

You really think in a rebellion they would allow them to legally sell guns in mass quantities?

It takes very little for normal people to produce explosives and IEDs.

IEDs are cute compared to artillery or anti-aircraft.

When tyranny starts to come in there's a long period where the government can order the police / military to stand down, but doesn't have the power to order them to commit atrocities themselves.

So there's usually a violent group of government supporters who don't have any special arms or training. eg, Hitler's brown shirts.

The second amendment is very affective against them.

If the alternative is genocide then I'll take my chances. Asymmetric warfare is a real option and with enough turned generals and armed forces you'd have access to the same high powered weapons and the people could form a militia as well.

Genocide isn’t the alternative but rather the escalation in the hypothetical where the 2nd Amendment is relevant. The US does have nukes, after all.

I don't imagine there would be popular support for the U.S. government nuking Americans in Seattle over a sovereignty dispute.

Neither do I, but the US doesn’t currently have any serious independence movements and last time it did things went very badly indeed.

It would never be “over a sovereignty dispute”, it would be to stop what the rebels were imminently going to do in that sovereignty dispute. Nuking is extreme, but there will always be (at least, in the eyes of the government) a excuse to escalate to the level beyond what is available to the rebels to protect the innocent threatened by them.

It would only come to nukes if the other side escalated to weaponry just below nukes. In that case, it's not "nuking Americans in Seattle", it's "nuking well organized terrorist cells using advanced weaponry, in order to save further loss of life."

The point is that no matter how much "power" the federal government has granted to civilians via the 2nd amendment, the federal government will ALWAYS have more.

Those weapons only win if you don't care about civilian losses (that is one way to win a counter insurgency, see Mandatory Palestine) - but by not caring about civilian casualties I mean you have to be willing to commit genocide (again, see the British actions in Mandatory Palestine).

If you do care about civilians (and I assume the US armed forces would be forced to care) a jet is probably not worth much against an AK-47, as long as that AK-47 is in the hands of a guy who is willing to hang out close to a bunch of civilians.

Again you can win a counter insurgency either by winning over the local population or by utterly destroying it (see manda, the Island of Melos).

Who is a civilian in a civil war in a nation which has a constitutional right to bear arms?

I wouldn't cite Afghanistan as an example of how well military high-tech works for suppression. If it did, it wouldn't be and wouldn't have been such a mess.

On the other side, if I remember correctly a few AK47 and bunch of men was pretty strong against USA army in Vietnam. How come?

Maybe the jungle had something to do with it. And also in the 60s and 70s USA did not had drones.

US army is not authorized to operate on US soil. I like how you want to drag this conversation into something totally else.

I’m not American, I didn’t know that, and given this is a hypothetical anyway I don’t really think that restriction matters.

Then what is the alternative? Wouldn’t you rather die with the honor of defending you and your families liberty than live under an oppressive regime?

The argument that “the government is too strong they’d beat you with your puny guns” is so incredibly short sighted. You’re discounting the power the rifle gives the people not only as a weapon but a symbol of freedom and revolution. An armed society is a deterrent at the very least.

Mozambique’s flag has an AK47 on it for a reason.

I would flee a country if and when it looked like that country was too far down a bad path.

I am in the process of doing so now, as it happens — leaving the UK because of the Investigatory Powers Act, because the Home Secretary wants to ban unbreakable encryption without understanding it, and because Brexit removes one of the major obligations to follow international human rights laws which would allow me to sue the government to fix that law.

I’d rather pick my battles and live somewhere new, than die an unknown and unnamed victim of a remote death machine.

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