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Comment by daveheq | Hacker News Reader

How many American military personnel would just be OK with being told by the President to take property rights and freedoms like that? Do you think they're mind-controlled idiots? It doesn't just suddenly happen, we don't have a totalitarian mindset, it would have to be very gradual and against people who are demonized as immoral or as a scourge on society, like Mexicans or Jews or liberals or Christians. Even then it's so easy to spread news and there's so many people with guns and easy accessibility that it's just going to happen unless we become a more complacent fascist country.

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> How many American military personnel would just be OK with being told by the President to take property rights and freedoms like that?

We actually have some data about that. See this[1] comment for excerpts from a survey of "300 US Marine Corps soldiers". Short version of the results: 61.66% would not fire on US citizens if given the (illegal) order "I would fire upon U.S. citizens who refuse or resist confiscation of firearms banned by the U.S. government.", with 16% of respondents using very heavy pencil marks or writing comments in the margin for that answer.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10753894

To add anecdote to the data in a sibling comment, I was in the infantry for many years, deployed many times, saw lots of combat. The US government would have a big problem on its hands if any part of it ordered the US military to take property and/or shoot American citizens: Almost no one I ever met would follow those orders. It is a not-uncommon topic of conversation in the grand tradition of military "what if" games. But this is sort of to be expected: Civil wars are extraordinarily messy and complicated, and history bears out that no state goes into this kind of conflict with its military intact. In fact many times it's the kind of thing which triggers the civil war or coups d'etat: The army gets wind of some "unconscionable actions" by the government's ruling party, and some populist general rounds up a few of his most trustworthy subordinates, and seizes power. This is the story of human state failure.

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