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> want mail order rocket launchers delivered to my doorstep." The state should fear its people, not the other way around, and the best way to ensure that is to give the people the means to put a bullet (or several) into any would-be tyrants.

You should look into France and it's protest culture. When the people are unhappy with the government's action, they go out on the street and protest. Without any weapons, this being a civilized country where violence is only a last resort. And you know what? Governments listen and adapt, even without the fear of direct death.

So i find your premise wrong to begin with. There is no natural right to murder, so i disagree that owning a weapon is a natural right.

And i find it extremely funny that the country that is so proud in their "everyone should be armed so the government is afraid of the people" culture has such shitty dysfunctional governments that act against the people's interests extremely often. Where are the armed uprisings against the Patriot act, civil asset forfeiture, racist abuse, abortion restrictions, failures to combat climate change or wasting money in useless wars abroad? No? When then?

>My feelings on gun control can be summed up as "I want mail order rocket launchers delivered to my doorstep."

I don't know. I'm a believer in extreme gun rights as well, but giving people the power to have rocket launching systems like MANPADS just seems a bit, dangerous.

You already have the legal ability to own a rocket launcher - it's not any different from any other "destructive device". The main barrier to ownership is finding someone willing to sell you one, and the price they would likely ask for it. There are rich collectors in US who own tanks (with active turret), artillery etc - mostly older stuff, but still plenty destructive.

A quick google suggests that if you want your tank to have working guns and/or turret you need a Federal Destructive Device Permit, which includes a background check and ATF approval.

Destructive devices are NFA items, true. If you want to own a DD, you need to pay the $200 federal transfer tax, which is done by submitting a form to the ATF and getting a tax stamp from them.

It's not a "permit", though. And there are no special limits on who can own one - if you can legally own a gun, you can legally own a DD or any other NFA item. One doesn't even need to be a US citizen or a permanent resident for that, even people on student and work visas can do it.

This is the site that I was looking at: https://nationalfirearmsact.com/nfa-regulated-items/destruct..., which seems to spell out the background check as a requirement. It also says you need to be a resident of the US. Am I missing something?

Background check is a requirement for regular gun sales as well, except private person-to-person sales - in practice, this is the vast majority of transfers.

ATF can be more thorough with NFA items because the law doesn't have a limit on how long they can look at you, unlike those regular NICS checks which have a hard limit - but the list of things that makes one ineligible to own is the same.

As far as residency, you have to be a resident somewhere in US, but you don't need to be a permanent resident / green card. A student or a work visa is good enough, combined with proof of current residency (such as utility bill with your name and address).

This isn't quite what OP asked for, of course - you can't have one "shipped to your doorstep" - but this is also true for most regular firearms (there's a collector license that enables this for some old guns).

If it's a choice between wearing a mask at the grocery store and the idiot next door blowing up my house with their mail order rocket launcher, I'll take the mask. If that makes me a bootlicker so be it I suppose.

I have a suspicion that I already know, but why are you jumping to a non-sequitur about masks? I tend to agree with the user to whom you're responding on this particular issue, and I still wear a mask in places such as public transit, enclosed spaces, etc.

So...I guess my point is that you don't _have_ to choose between masks and gun rights. I'm unsure of why you would bring it up.

From the comment I'm replying to:

> You can already see it with several countries' response to covid.

Perhaps the commenter was going for something else, but at least where I'm at we've had two straight years of people insisting they are muzzles, an infringement on our god-given rights, and the beginning of a slippery slope to tyranny. Perhaps the commenter meant something else, but since they didn't spell out what specifically about the "response to Covid" they intended to solve with a mail-order rocket launcher of all things, I was left to interpret for myself.

Fair enough, I suppose. I immediately thought of (what I consider to be) excessive lockdowns and enforcement in countries like Australia, but I can see how you went to masks.

It certainly could be. But even then I'm not sure I consider measures attempting to control a pandemic the height of tyranny. I realize this might sound like I'm pro-lockdown, I'm not, I actually think most countries completely botched their handling with measures both insufficient to have sufficient impact on the actual spread, while limiting enough to ensure significant damage from the measures themselves.

I also take issue with the idea of gun (or rocket launcher ownership) ownership as a means of prevention. I mean look at the top countries for (citizen) gun ownership. Sure you've got the US, Serbia, Canada, Uruguay, Finland up there, not bad, But you've also got Yemen at #3 and Lebanon and #11. If that's the kind of "freedom" private gun ownership ensures, then I'm not buying.

And again I'm not even that pro gun control. I think you should be required to get a background check to get one, I think you should be required to be trained on their use and safety, and I think you should be required to take reasonable measures to protect your firearms against theft. I'd say that's it, but I suppose I'm also against mail order rocket launchers. But for the most part, having met those requirements I think you should be able to buy what you want (within reason, again let's skip the rocket launcher). But as protection against government tyranny? Doubt.