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Comment by redstripe | Hacker News Reader

What's admirable about it? This is just a fiction that you Americans tell yourselves about the next revolution.

Name one, just one way, that ease of gun ownership has protected Americans from their government in a way that citizens of other western democracies have suffered?

There is no scenario in which any citizen with a gun in any country defeats their government. Your gun will keep you safe about as well as your password protected Word document keeps you safe from the NSA snooping.

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If you were an officer of the law pressed to go door-to-door to say, purely hypothetically, take the oldest child by force to inscribe them in some dystopian military program, you'd probably be a lot more hesitant if you knew that there was a chance you'd get shot in the process right?

I believe that's the security that us Americans (I imagine your sneer with that) feel by being armed.

Isn't it that the Swiss are all armed as well? They seem to have fared rather well in a 20th century Europe fraught with conflict. Tell me that's a coincidence with absolutely no correlation to their pro-gun culture.

There is a reason why you have to resort to "pure hypotheticals" and you should dwell on that.

Every authoritarian regime is a pure hypothetical until it is not. I believe that the US has not fallen to that, partly, because the population is armed to the teeth.

Switzerland has heavy restrictions on owning ammunition, it is not comparable to the US

It also makes it more likely that innocent people gets shot by police because they could have a weapon on them, and this is not hypothetical.

Swiss gun culture has nothing to do with American gun culture. Guns are for hunting and sport that's it.

Essentially no one even thinks of getting a gun for self defence. There also has never been an idea that guns are for defending yourself against your own government here.

Yet every swiss male citizen does military training and is issued a weapon to keep, to use in staying proficient.

There's no need for a military culture, when the government has already mandated it for you.

Not that it isn't popular:

>On September 22, 2013, a referendum that aimed to abolish conscription was held in Switzerland. However, the referendum failed with over 73% of the electorate voting against it, showing strong support for conscription of men in Switzerland.

Military service isn't popular at all, but the majority of people do agree that it's necessary to have a military and they don't want a professional army. So that leaves the current system.

The popular mechanism remains- there's no need to encourage a voluntary interest in military culture and therefore military readiness, when it's already a popular idea to mandate the readiness.

In the absence of that mandate, there would be a vacuum in which citizens suddenly have self-interest in promoting voluntary readiness, which is implemented culturally.

> Guns are for hunting and sport that's it.

I'm not sure your source but you should double-check it; it's entirely incorrect.

> There also has never been an idea that guns are for defending yourself against your own government here.

Says who? Are you Swiss?

I am Swiss yes and have done military service.

> Name one, just one way...

The civil rights movement of the 1960s.

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.'' ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956"

"There is no scenario in which any citizen with a gun in any country defeats their government."

In case you haven't seen the news, ~75,000 militants with AK-47s just conquered a country of 30,000,000 persons in a matter of weeks.

So you’re saying Americans with guns are like the Taliban? Hilarious, and probably true.

> There is no scenario in which any citizen with a gun in any country defeats their government

Imagine writing this not one month after the Taliban wins its war against the US.

Fine. Perhaps I shouldn't have said any nation, but Afghanistan is not a modern nation state. It's a time warp back to some era 1000 years ago with poorly run government theater that only existed to keep the kleptocrats stealing from their wealthy benefactor.

Do you imagine some well armed coalition of militias in Idaho or wherever is going to be rampaging through the American countryside and declaring a new nation? I wonder if these guys hugged their rifles in their last moments: https://youtu.be/t9K0fhMCTGk?t=102 NSFW

> Name one, just one way, that ease of gun ownership has protected Americans from their government in a way that citizens of other western democracies have suffered?

1776

> There is no scenario in which any citizen with a gun in any country defeats their government. Your gun will keep you safe about as well as your password protected Word document keeps you safe from the NSA snooping.

Good thing it's not just one citizen then. Is the government going to nuke/drone all its citizens? If not, then they have to have some presence on the ground. At which point I'll take having arms vs nothing.

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