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Comment by gostsamo | Hacker News Reader

This is a strange fantasy that many gun supporters share with you that having a gun makes you a warrior. It is even bigger fantasy that a persistent resistance can exist in an isolated urban setting when under the control of an overwhelming well-organized, well-supplied, highly technological armed force that has no restrictions to be civilized or respect individual rights such as is the situation in Hong Kong. It is very nice that you all have this gun fetish and it keeps you happy, but guns can't substitute for sound institutions, social cohesion, and rule of law.

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overwhelming well-organized, well-supplied, highly technological armed force that has no restrictions to be civilized or respect individual rights

The Soviets had no qualms whatsoever, even booby-trapping childrens toys. But they couldn't hold Afghanistan.

Can you tell me how long is the boarder between Pakistan and Afghanistan? Do you remember that a big part of the soviet defeat in Afghanistan was the US that was able to regularly supply money and guns to the resistance, giving them even land to air missiles? Do you know that the talibans had and still have bases in Pakistan that allowed them to lead the gorilla war that they did? Don't even try to compare Afghanistan with HK, because the two situations have nothing in common.

Do you know that the talibans had and still have bases in Pakistan that allowed them to lead the gorilla war that they did?

Yes I'll concede that fighting a guerrilla war without external support is difficult but it was always thus. Another example would be the Cuban revolution. However civil wars are often fought without any external backing being the decisive factor.

Mass protests has always overthrown governments. CCP's time is near

This isn’t a fantasy. It’s simply a fact when you have a huge number of people owning guns, implementing a dictatorship is harder. We also have a culture of loving freedom. In HK, you have a formerly free society that was brutally repressed by the authoritarian state. Saying “it will never happen” belies the fact it literally just happened!

I have family that lost everything to communism and had to restart in America. If you have never had to live under authoritarian rule, as a huge portion of civilization had to in the past and still currently do, it’s easy to think a reversion to the mean will never happen. But it can and does!

I'm from a former communist country. We had anti-communist gorilla fighters to the mid fifties. Guess what, the gorillas were hunted down and neutralized one by one. Guess why, they didn't have arm supplies, they didn't have outside power that would provide them with air cover, they didn't have safe bases for recruiting and training new fighters, for healing and planning operations. Without those basics your freedom loving people will be a sitting target. After a sufficient bloodbath, many will be killed, many will be imprisoned, many will be deported to other ends of the country, many will be broken, and the rest would prefer to forget and to return to some semblance of normality.

>> This isn’t a fantasy. It’s simply a fact when you have a huge number of people owning guns, implementing a dictatorship is harder.

> I'm from a former communist country. We had anti-communist gorilla fighters to the mid fifties. Guess what, the gorillas were hunted down and neutralized one by one.

What proportion of the population were those fighters? It's obvious that a small poorly-supplied force can't stand up to a brutal state, on the other hand "a huge number" of armed people might be able to, or at least put up a respectable fight. Furthermore, there's a deterrent effect from having an armed population that has to be taken into account.

I'm trying to explain that no matter of your handguns, tanks are an anti-infantry platform created with the explicit goal of killing people with handguns. The difference of putting a thousand and a hundred thousand people in front of a tank is how many times the machine guns will have to be reloaded.

You imagine that a totalitarian regime will be hesitant to use excessive force against its own population. A corrupt and decaying regime might be, like the russian military coup 1990. Compare it to China 1989 or if you want to be more recent to the arab spring civil wars and you will realize that handguns matter only if the military decides to not intervene. Tunis - the president fled. Libya - the rebels were cornered until someone sent the heavy guns. Egypt - the military changed the president twice. Syria - it is a mess, but those with the heavy guns will write the history. That's why gun ownership is a fetish that gives people the illusion of having control over much more complex reality. A single person can't stop a militarized regime. A million single persons can't do it either. Only if united in a coordinated and resourceful structures, they can oppose another organized and resourceful structure.

> I'm trying to explain that no matter of your handguns, tanks are an anti-infantry platform created with the explicit goal of killing people with handguns. The difference of putting a thousand and a hundred thousand people in front of a tank is how many times the machine guns will have to be reloaded.

I don't think anyone would seriously think that someone could mount a resistance with handguns. IIRC, the US figured they're more or less useless militarily prior to WWII. You'd need to use rifles.

And IIRC, tanks haven't rendered infantry obsolete. They require infantry cover otherwise they're vulnerable, and there are environments where they just don't work well. Also, the tactics taken up by such a resistance would have to avoid head-on confrontations with tanks unless they have (captured) the right weapons to do so, since to do otherwise would be dumb.

> Compare it to China 1989...

The Tiananmen protesters were totally unarmed, and Chinese gun laws are extraordinarily restrictive, so I don't know what that's supposed to prove here. I'm not as familiar with the details of civilian gun ownership in the other countries you mentioned, but some cursory research shows that both Libya and Egypt have pretty restrictive civilian gun laws. There are also counterexamples to your thesis (e.g. Afghanistan) where poorly-equipped fighters have been able to effectively resist modern militaries.

> A single person can't stop a militarized regime. A million single persons can't do it either. Only if united in a coordinated and resourceful structures, they can oppose another organized and resourceful structure.

This is true. But arming those million single persons is a prerequisite for them to coalesce into an organized structure that could oppose a regime. Arming them doesn't mean a resistance will be successful, but disarming them would guarantee that any resistance would be a failure.

> the tactics taken up by such a resistance would have to avoid head-on confrontations with tanks unless they have (captured) the right weapons

See, there it is where it breaks down. A light militia which gun enthusiasts imagine cannot succeed without the cooperation of the armed force. Capturing heavy weaponry needs the leap of faith that the owner of this heavy weaponry will be ready to part with it. If they are ready to do so, then you don't need your handguns and rifles because you have the mindshare. If the other side has the heavy weapons and the means to produce lots of them while denying this capability to the resistance, then your rifles won't make a difference.

Both Libya and Egypt have tribe social structures out of the cities. Those tribes have guns of their own no matter the laws. The proliferation of local militias after the government breakdown in Libya did not happen out of the blue.

The reason I mentioned Moscow in my comment is to show that people were not armed in Russia either. However, the tanks were not ready to shoot and the coup failed. Authoritarian regimes do not fail because a few people with rifles make noise in the wilderness, they fail when they run out of the conviction of their own enforcement structures that the regime must survive. The revolutions in Eastern Europe happened without a single gorilla fighter and those were some of the most policed societies in history. Have you ever asked yourself the question how did it happen?

Afghanistan is not an example of poorly armed population. Those poor fighters had Stinger missiles. Afghanistan has a porous boarder with Pakistan that allows for the movement of people, money, guns, and drugs. It is like the EU but without the human rights. What's more, the mountainous terrain makes the effectiveness of deploying heavy guns rather limited.

> Arming them doesn't mean a resistance will be successful, but disarming them would guarantee that any resistance would be a failure.

Yet, last year a big part of the executive branch of the US government tried to subvert the elections and to remain on power. Stopping it did not take mobilizing local militias. Actually, local militias were part of the problem, but their mobility was hampered in various ways, including denying them air transport. That's why I say that reality today is much more complex than waving guns around. Power and influence were exercised a few abstraction levels above that.

So, if you want to stop an authoritarian government in your country, guns are the last thing that one should invest in. Maybe one should invest just in case of some very improbable scenario, but usually, if it comes to the guns, then the fight is already lost.

> The reason I mentioned Moscow in my comment is to show that people were not armed in Russia either. However, the tanks were not ready to shoot and the coup failed. Authoritarian regimes do not fail because a few people with rifles make noise in the wilderness, they fail when they run out of the conviction of their own enforcement structures that the regime must survive. The revolutions in Eastern Europe happened without a single gorilla fighter and those were some of the most policed societies in history. Have you ever asked yourself the question how did it happen?

I'm well aware of that. I'm not disputing that an authoritarian regime can fall that way, and in fact that's the only way some can fall (e.g. a well-established one). However, your thesis seems to be that civilian arms are pretty much totally useless in every case, which I disagree with.

> Yet, last year a big part of the executive branch of the US government tried to subvert the elections and to remain on power. Stopping it did not take mobilizing local militias

That's a different problem: that American "militias" are groups of fringe wackos drawn exclusively one from one end of the political spectrum.

> So, if you want to stop an authoritarian government in your country, guns are the last thing that one should invest in. Maybe one should invest just in case of some very improbable scenario, but usually, if it comes to the guns, then the fight is already lost.

It's not like people can do one anti-authoritarian thing, and one anti-authoritarian thing only. Personally I think an armed civilian uprising would mainly be an input into a very chaotic transitional period, not some standalone effort, but those cases, I'd rather have it than not.

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