We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21648271 and marked it off-topic.
I find it interesting to observe that most 2A defenders are totally willing to support bills funding their potential adversaries and limiting your ability to organize.
I would argue that in the modern world strong encryption and other safeguards against surveillance much more worthy of of 2A protection than firearms..
Guns do work. You may end up dead, but you’ll take some with you.
Dying for a course can be a choice, but I would like it to bring some meaningful benefit to society. Just taking some lackeys with you doesn't seem all that useful to me.
Guns themselves are pretty useless except as ways to make a few people rich. The "revolution" against the powerful nation state are the tools of propaganda and discord. Enemies can manipulate our political system and the powerful forces of self-interest and partisanship fog the battlefield.
The aura of power associated with guns is literal bread and circus that keeps people angry and ignorant. There's a fantasy that some sort of popular revolt is a viable thing. It's not, and that's been demonstrated time and time again.
This sort of thing is a big part of the limits of US power today... there's nobody to blow up. We're equipped to fight the ultimate WW2, but that arsenal cannot be directly focused on a nuclear power. The United States has the most powerful and capable military that has ever existed, but like any tool, it isn't so effective in solving problems outside of it's scope.
> I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic
That's not to say these fears are completely unfounded -- they've been realized before many times throughout history. But when faced with questions such as, "Would the US military turn on the people?" they're likely to assess the risk far higher than the average person would. They're also far more likely to be libertarians.
We had a hard time getting soldiers to kill civilians in Vietnam. We had a hard time shooting others in WWII. How can you convince me that the majority of these soldiers are going to shoot their friends and family? That scenario itself seems ludicrous.
I'm not sure why the US military would be an exception in the history of hundreds or thousands of years of militaries being used against domestic civilian populations. Politicians are very good at getting militaries to heel. That's why militaries exist in the first place.
"We had a hard time getting soldiers to kill civilians in Vietnam. We had a hard time shooting others in WWII. How can you convince me that the majority of these soldiers are going to shoot their friends and family? That scenario itself seems ludicrous."
Some soldiers may have had a hard time killing Vietnamese civilians, yet despite that nearly 200,000 died. In WW2 tens of millions died. As for shooting friends and family, see the viciousness and bloodiness of the American Civil War.
Fortunately, the US has strong institutions and balance of powers that make civil unrest, etc a rare event. When there is, actions depend on the situation.
Note that I'm not an advocate of arming one's self against the government in any way. I'm pointing out that the fantasyland of some citizen militia fighting any modern nation-state is absurd.
Examples of things where unrest or rebellion were put down by force:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner%27s_slave_rebellion
Remember Kent State?
In the hypothetical scenario where there is armed insurgency against the US government and US military, I don't doubt that the US military would do what it had to do to suppress such an insurgency. Yes, there could be some dissent in the military against doing that, but short of an all-out civil war, they would obey.
I think this is a salient point and I appreciate you making it.
"And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower of a corrupt nation state?"
I am tempted to point your attention to the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu[1] where, poor, badly organized militia members armed with what, I think, could be characterized as "pea shooters"[2] held off the full force of the US Military in a warzone.
However I don't think that's a productive discussion because it easily gets bogged down by tactical details and it's hard to make an apples to apples comparison, etc. (although I encourage you to read about it).
Instead, I would simply say that I expect repressive, authoritarian behavior by states to expand to fit whatever vacuum is available and the presence of an armed populace places a ceiling on how far that reach will go.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mogadishu_(1993)
[2] Shitty AKs and old, Russian RPGs.
We should ask the Vietnamese and Afghans.
Or they can do terrorism. Assassinations, sabotage of infraestructure. Tyrants live somewhere, and they send their children to school. Collaborators(which probably would be civil servants, police and the army) also need to sleep somewhere and have children and family. They could just be shot while going home, or killed by IEDs while patrolling. Infraestructure is much easier to destroy than to repair. Killing the power grid or destroying a bridge hurts the rebellion as much or more than it does the dictatorship, but I don't think they would care much.
Having guns is also a great detterent to creeping tyranny(well, at least when the guns owners care enough to do something). If every overreach was met with hundreds of thousands of angry people with guns on Washington, they would stop overreaching.
I agree that it is quite foolish that these people support things which actually work against them, but do not understimate what hundreds of thousands of angry gunmen could do. Even if they didn't win, they would ruin the US. And making tyranny less profitable than liberty is a good protection against it.
If it would be that easy, ISIS would do it long time ago.
US?
The difference is more than just "the winners write the history books". The methodology was different. The patriots/rebels/insurgents weren't setting off truck bombs in city centers in the hope of making people not oppose them, and not just because they didn't have truck bombs. They weren't trying to assassinate the governor. It was fundamentally a war, not terrorism.
American Civil War 2 would be totally different.
Besides a lot of military and police support legal gun ownership as well and I highly doubt all of them would be choosing the totalitarian side if it came down to it so it's not entirely just civilians with pop guns vs a well-armed military.
I am certainly not an advocate of terrorism. But I think recent events show that it doesn't take a lot of arms for a motivated group to overcome a well armed unmotivated group. It makes me wonder what Hong Kong would be like now if 1 in 10 people owned a rifle or hand gun. Probably in the long run the situation would be much worse, but also maybe less hopeless.
The argument I reacted to was about terrorist tactic being used to create deterrent against tyranny. Like, it talked about killing children on their way to school.
Because answer to terrorism would be more freedom or something.
Also to add, the US military is sworn to protect the constitution and not members of the political elite. So were this extremely unlikely scenario of revolution to arise, you would definitely see a division of factions even within the military (some pro gov, others pro people). I believe there has been sufficient evidence to believe this. American soldiers would have a hard time killing other Americans.
I know this risks an admonishment by dang, but this needs to be said.
The soundness of such a tactic is moot when one considers the subject(s) at hand.
Contrary to popular believe, many totalitarian government do not shy away from arming their citizenry. History is rife with paramilitary death squads. What we do see in virtually all totalitarian governments is efforts to control the means of communication. I think this should tell us something.
The secure communication isn't the problem; it's having the commitment, discipline and the organizational operational security to use it.
I find this to be quite ironic since we now have a country run by a lawless president, who was elected with the help of a foreign, adversary and who gave a massive tax cut to billionaires and has done nothing tangible for those gun owners who voted for him.
A federal judge had to include in her ruling that presidents are not kings, which makes you think just what country are we living in when this has to be stated: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/mcgahn-testify-subpo...
Sure, it's not unusual for people to vote against their own interest; but what the people you described haven't realized is they are on the same side as the tyrant.
It's slightly delusional to think a few thousand gunmen in a country of over 300 million and an economy of nearly 20 trillion dollars could do what's required to "ruin the US".
Kill and intimidate people. This a serious question?
Yeah, in an all out war it's not likely to work. But an all out war against your armed citizenry also isn't likely to happen.
Politicians are still people. They too, can fear being at the wrong end of a barrel.
Which no, isn't some kind of veiled threat. But more an important point that politicians, just like everyone, also tend to want to live & sleep peacefully at night. It's not in their self-interests to make such a move.
What's far more likely to happen is what's already happening/happened. The erosion of various rights, and the militarization of the police force.
How do you say "make controlling you economically untenable" in Pashto or "bomb your way to the negotiating table" in Irish?
It's not about winning, it's about making tyranny expensive and unattractive. Insurgency is basically a bloody tax on doing something that a large enough subset of the populace finds sufficiently objectionable. The more armed the populace the higher the tax rate.
Him and his 'pea shooters' caused nasty losses to the Natzies, and ended up saving quite a few people.
The 'pea shooters' of Russian peasants (together with acquaintance of the local terrain) took down Napoleon.
A few guys with 'pea shooters' in America even founded a country!
You might want to make it seem like it was inconsequential by highlighting the fact that they were occupied. But I have to say, it seems a little keyboard warrior to minimize Danish resistance.
Russia had an actual army, but local guerrilla resistance played an important part. I've read about the bravery of the Russian resistance with awe.
For the US, yes we received support from France. I'm pretty well acquainted. But if you are going to say that George Washington and his men had nothing to do with our struggle for freedom, that's on you.
Using words like 'peashooters' makes the anti-gun lobby seem out of touch, just like people who would say Obama is Muslim/Communist. There's a certain nasty arrogance of showing huge disrespect towards those who have achieve more than you ever will.
The argument is about whether it can protect the freedom, not whether resistance (or refusal to cooperate) with whatever tools available deserve celebration.
The bravery alone does not stop armies and did not stopped the armies. Power, actual power did it in all those cases. (And for that matter, bad guys were brave too, sacrificed a lot too, just for the bad cause.)
> And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower of a corrupt nation state?
I think my comment quite clearly answered this question.
> bravery alone does not stop armies and did not stopped the armies. Power
Like the POWER AND BRAVERY of the ARMED local militias in the US which HELPED drive out the world's most powerful army. I'm sure glad they didn't get disarmed. Notice though, I said help. I'll admit my wording in regards to Russia was poor.
All or nothing arguments that remove the nuance (like saying 'it does' or 'it doesn't') are generally employed by people who aren't well positioned to understanding the complexities of reality. Any intelligent review includes more nuanced words. And any review that completely dismisses the power of armed local populations resisting oppression is simply going to be detached from reality and history. The use of the derogatory term 'pea shooter' is the perfect example of this dismissive, arrogant and ignorant take on history.
The Nazis my grandfather killed by putting lead through their skull certainly didn't think those were 'pea shooters', it takes a certain type of keyboard warrior to see a gun that way. Even a little .22 purse gun is no trivial matter.
> The argument is about whether it can protect the freedom
The people my grandfather saved I'm pretty would agreed that they 'obtained freedom/had their freedom protected thanks in great measure to the small arms' my grandfather had. Which kinda covers both the original goal posts and the new ones you created.
How closely does the NRA guard its donor list, or Guns & Ammo its subscription roster?
I don't think I've actually ever really understood this aspect of American paranoia.
I think the claim is simply that it can potentially change the outcome.
And before anyone disagrees, how many soldiers died in Iraq & Afghanistan at the hands of insurgencies?
Philadelphia bombed a city block to flush out an entrenched armed group in the '80s, and life went on (for everyone who didn't have their home burned down). Don't underestimate the American capacity to believe something was done because it was necessary. It's the only country to have ever deployed nuclear weapons. Twice.
What are the 2 most-armed civil societies in the world? US and SUI
Then you have the other end of the spectrum: is regulation of private gun ownership predict government turning on its citizens? No.
Is regulation of private gun ownership a prerequisite for authoritarian govts to turn on citizens? Yes
If anything, it is mistrust.
The whole point of the right to bear arms is that they're meant to be used against the government when they overstep their bounds. But what happens when the people who bear said arms agrees with how the government is breaking the law?
The “I lost them in a boating accident” won’t work when they zip tie you to a chair and start cutting off body parts.
I'm sure you can understand why most observers are puzzled by this, since guns are ostensibly purchased as tools used to prevent one's own death.
More than half of them are desk/bureaucracy bound. It's probably more like 3/4 of them, not to mention many of them will favor the gun owners, but let's be generous to the opposing argument and suppose all active street duty cops were in on it.
So you are saying each police officer is going to arrest and remove weapons from 10 people scattered across millions of square miles. They will also need to ostensibly put those 5.5 million 'bad Americans' somewhere. We don't even have jails for that many people. You'd need literally a few million guards just to keep them. And that's just NRA members. There's many more gun owners than there are NRA members.
Have you been in the US? Do you understand how insanely unrealistic this is?
Lists are great when the people you want to hurt are small in number and weak in force. Neither applies here.
A tyrant dictator could send the army, but again, way outnumbered. Not to mention how big the USA is, how rugged the terrain can be, and how well acquainted the locals are. Even just rounding people up is super hard when people WANT to cooperate (look at our response to natural disasters)
The tyrant dictator can take over with tanks, no doubt. But then they would face a long, protracted guerrilla war with all freedom loving Americans. If Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, the founding of the USA, etc have taught us anything, is that you can conquer, but holding a territory is a whole other ball game. And holding is where it's at.
Since you are bringing them up, you must be.
So tell me gun ownership statistics for Australia and participation in gun ownership organizations. I'd be interested to hear what happened there and learn.
I mean I know they pretty much disarmed, and I've seen the positive statistics paraded by anti-gun supporters, but I've yet to hear about the details of what % of the population was armed, what % the population supported disarming, ratio between gun owners and cops, etc. That would say a lot about the feasibility comparison.
Since you are implying the feasibility of disarmament was worse in Australia, I'd love to learn about the exact details that allowed you to come to your educated conclusion that it's worse in Australia. I'm always happy to learn about things I didn't know about.
Unless that is you are just assuming. Like when you said 'take their guns' without even considering feasibility and then you ignored posts that confront you with contradictory evidence to your assumptions. There's a certain type of attitude that will base their conclusions on made up information (aka assumed... I can't say you are presuming as you don't seem to have the data needed to make this about probability), without bothering to check or even ignoring contradictory realities as perceived and recorded by human consensus. It's not very pretty.
If this is true, you'll be happy to do your own research. The Australian experience with an assault weapon ban, gun buybacks, and a firearms registry is well-known to anyone remotely serious about gun ownership discourse, and the fact that you aren't familiar with it casts into doubt the ostensible good faith with which you've approached me with this short essay of glib intellectual overextension.
The italicized "ass" in "assuming" is cute, and also 100% against HN's code of conduct, by the way.