In France we have a contract: if people are unhappy they rise against. If there's no risk of revolting, the fox is fearless in the chicken hen.
Now our police force (CRS) are just military and dress like robocop for any confrontation. People get hurt, the news outlets take the government side and the problems stays the same.
Instead it’s more a case of if the military wants to walk in and shutdown the place, it’s going to be a lot easier.
Not entirely a gun rights advocate at all, but I can see some people’s motives.
True for a head-on conflict, but the story in the article has the organised forces' equipment in a vulnerable place - 65Kft above a city.
Asymmetric activity in such a theatre would favour the armed civilian, for now at least.
Ground-based coordinated tracking with 1W laser on rudimentary automatic control could ground such devices. The gas-bag being a large, vulnerable target.
The relative ease of downing a tracking device, capturing, reverse-engineering then publicly reporting its capabilities should help keep them in check. For now.
Mind you, I served in the army (not the US one), battle tanks, so I'm hardly a pacifist. But you guys are just loudmouths who play too many video games and see too many Hollywood hero movies. No you won't win - and you will not even fight, apart from some very few not so bright people. Because you value your life way too much, liker 99.9% of everybody else faced with overwhelming odds.
The forces the US army is up against are not unorganized, they have pretty good training and equipment - and support from foreign governments. They are not desperate lone fighters.
Anyway, I realise now that you were not really responding to what I said. And clearly not to me personally, as a non-American. You just needed a place to get up on your high horse.
...but the way the U.S. laws are written, it's quite illegal to take up arms against or try to depose/overthrow the United States Government - no matter how totalitarian and authoritarian it might get.
In fact, nothing in the Bill of Rights or the Consitution or the U.S. Code guarantees such right[s].
This is not to mention the reality that the arms controls would make it seem like the citizens are bringing paper swords to gunfights nor how catastrophic those casualties might be.
The Ruby Ridge incident comes to mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge
As does the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Malheur_Nati...
Mind, I don't generally disagree with your premise, and I'm not a guns advocate. There do exist (as is typically the case) counterexamples to the general rule.
Some of those are based on informational vulnerabilities (see the #MeToo movement, and accusations against numerous power icons), some are based on data and information leaks. Some are based on backlashes -- Google's employee revolt against Dragonfly, and Edelman's against Geo[1] come to mind.
Physical sabotage against either very-high-value or very-exposed point or linear exposures (aircraft safety post-9/11, Stuxnet attacking Iran's uranium-enrichment centrifuges, pipeline and marine chokepoint vulnerabilities) expose the weakness of very-high-technology systems often having immense fragility.
What open resistance seems to rely on most profundly, as Gandhi and King noted, was the appeal to other sources of allegiance and sympathy. In truth virtually no power struggle is a naked encounter between two groups, but rather of consortia, with a high level of awareness of just how haywire things might go if one party presses its point too far. There's some evidence that reluctance to move against, e.g., right-wing extremist movements within the US is due to perceptions of high levels of support for those groups, including infiltration of institutions including law enforcement, military, and courts. I don't know for certain that this explains reluctance to act more decisively by the previous US administration, though I have a feeling it's at least part of the reason.
At the same time, open massed armed resistance does tend to be met with overwhelming force or opposition, though even that is often tempered. And in less democratic nations, the more so, as has been the case in, say, Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong over the past weeks and months.
________________________________
Notes:
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/business/edelman-geo-bord...
These were extremely localized protests in terms of people involved and goals. How would it work out on a national scale involving multiple parties and different goals on different scales? The article we're commenting on is about mass surveillance, how would a protest of 1+ million armed people look like, and how would the authorities treat it? As a protest or as an attempt to overthrow the government? And what happens when some of those people are actually pro-government and they also have guns?
Any major civil unrest is all but guaranteed to not end well (in general) because simply organizing it might be treated as a crime. And the fight is unlikely to be just 2 sided, "the people" vs. the government.
If you have to hang on to your guns because that's the only sure way to effect change then something somewhere went terribly wrong. And reality is that it was much easier to very slowly erode the freedom and not one single change was severe enough to trigger unrest on more than localized issues that only affected one tiny group of people. By the time people look back and realize what they had and lost, even guns won't help.
It happens.
For numerous reasons. Social resistance: the Prohibition, Civil Rights, and AntiWar (Vietnam) movements in the US, India's liberation movement, pro-democracy protests in South Korea during the 1980s, anti-globalism and 99% resistance movements in the 1990s and 2000s, Black Lives Matter and (to a point) the Alt-Right and militia protests (the latter being very prominantly armed).
The state, and power generally, gives up nothing without a fight. But a sufficiently credible threat will make it at least blink, particularly if there isn't a single central point that can be identified to remove a threat. Or if the power balance as a whole shifts.
While most of my examples don't rise to the level of direct overthrow, they do very much represent an armed resistance to central government authority. And yes, that's gone quite poorly for the opposition in many, almost certainly most cases. But not all.
The exceptions might prove illuminating.
Correct, it would be redundant. We have a separate foundational document devoted entirely to that right.
If you're referring to the Declaration of Independence, that is a legal document[0] that doesn't enshrine rights - even if we're to posit that it did, it speaks specifically about the colonies and the United Kingdom (Great Britain), so there's nothing to extend those principles to any other government entity.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I...
Yeah, it would be a civil war with orders of magnitude more dead.
I don't understand the American fascination with guns. When have they ever been useful against the government?
The one in 1861 was ultimately not effective.
The chinese are slowly removing democratic institutions away from the people. The people are rising up to protect them without guns.
Democratic norms are slowly being eroded from the US as well. Extreme gerrymandering, electoral college / popular vote, overt foreign interference, requested foreign interference, voting irregularities, voter purges, voting machine irregularities, a complicit senate, out of control corporate funding / ownership / bribery of politicians.
What are the people with guns doing? Nothing. In some cases cheering it on with claims of "if your side tries anything we are armed and ready".
Does having an armed population really protect the people from the government? Does it protect a democracy? does it protect the constituion? Or is more likely they become a paramilitary wing of a corrupt government? Just look around the world and see what happens in other countries with a heavily armed population? Then tend to form groups to have power, slowly becoming war lords, which the politicians then use a power source to keep the population in check.
Maybe an armed population made sense a few hundred years ago (maybe not though), but am going to have to see some working out to show it is still relevant today before being believed as an unquestionable truth. Some examples would be good. And before everyone shouts SWITZERLAND SWITZERLAND. If you are comparing the US population to Switzerland, I think you have more homework todo as all that shows you, there is a lot more to it than just having guns.
Good point, but you are lumping all gun owners into one mindset.
I could definitely see that happening, but it would not be all gun owners, just a percentage. And of the many gun owners I know, the percentage that would support any government and impose anything on others would be really low.
The idea is to back civil society with an implicit, but never used, question of force.
If things break down into shooting, that's civil war. And who knows what happens next, but it's not likely to be good for anyone or the country.
I'm rather neutral on the issue itself, I see pros and cons, but the fact that the insane, often completely unreasonable group has lined up on one side makes me want to take the other.
[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2019/06/oregon-republica...
Try taking over a Federal installation without being well-armed, and see if it goes anywhere near as well for you as it did for the Branch Dildonians.
Pro tip: cameras are almost as important as guns. Bring both.
It was just more of a thought experiment. I totally understand your point and I’m fully aware that there are a lot of issues and other problems with an armed population that totally suck.
Your comment didn’t address the quote.
If Hong Kong citizens were all armed, what would be happening right now? Is there a similar historical situation we could look at?
A confounding factor is that both the US and UK militaries have been fighting extended insurrection 'policing' actions for much of the last two decades, so you have an army that is used to been an occupying force.
All that said a smart military commander would never use local troops in their own backyard anyway.
Is why the local regiments were confined to barracks, the last time the UK felt the need to put tanks on the streets of Glasgow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_George_Square
It's not like those guns do anything. Americans seldom protest their governments laws, and are conditioned to be living and having passed upon them way worse laws than French (without guns) have...
Isn't the point is that they don't need to actively do anything because they're a deterrent?
In a lot of ways, the French are unquestionably better off.
The whole line of argument is moot though anyway, because with these new technologies I don't think the French will remain better off in those ways for too much longer. Neither guns, nor protests will be effective as deterrents in the face of ubiquitous surveillance. Both will be fairly impotent against these technologies in fact.
Possibly use of firearms by the general population against police and government in HK could have led to the simple invasion of HK by the PRC army, with shootings and executions like those that happened at the time of Tiananmen, but on a larger scale. Right now, possibly the lack of firearms is a brake on falling into this doomsday scenario. When you know the other fellow doesn't have a firearm, you don't need to shoot first.
Want to pass a law that cuts on workers' rights in a country that typically doesn't protest? Sure, go ahead. Want to do that in France? You'll think twice about it after the clashes of 1st May and of the gilets jaunes.
"There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Please use in that order."
(...) "On 10 December, Macron condemned the violence but acknowledged the protesters' anger as "deep, and in many ways legitimate". He subsequently promised a minimum wage increase of €100 per month from 2019, cancelled a planned tax increase for low-income pensioners, and made overtime payments as well as end-of-year bonuses tax free."
So much for nothing having changed.
Not to mention tons of France-wide and regional implications, the political impact on several levels, and the pause and hesitation it would bring to politicians considering to unilaterally pass unpopular laws in the future.