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Comment by reitanqild | Hacker News Reader

Thanks.

A little nitpicking: in US it is actually a right.

It might seem weird for the rest of us but then again in their defense they never had a Srebrenica, an Auswich, a Rwanda in the last century so I guess it can be seen as an insurance:

They're paying a few lives every year to protect against genocides.

(And to be perfectly clear: I don't want that system here where I live, I just try to understand their situation.)

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Yea but the civil war happened, which was super deadly.

I see what you are getting at. But honestly, if the gov wants to do a genocide, they have tanks and bombers to do it. No AR15 will help against that anyway.

Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam beg to differ. The armed population there did an excellent job of fending off a technologically superior force.

I won't call it excellent. If they didn't have weapons, then the US government would have caused less destruction and would have fixed those countries much more quickly. Similarly, if America didn't have guns, the civil war would have been faster and less bloody.

If you're a native person living there opposed to US occupation, it went very well. That's the whole point of using them as an example to how a population armed with little more than rifles and IEDs in many cases can hold back the might of the US military.

Tanks and bombers can do genocide, but they can't occupy & control. We saw that throughout the past 100 years, from the RAF's attempts to do 'air policing' in the Middle East in the 1920s to shock-and-awe in Iraq.

To control a population you need boots on the ground.

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