We already see hints of this when someone gets canceled for something they tweeted 10 years ago. Imagine that, but on a broader scale with more violent consequences. That's why privacy is important for everyone.
I don’t believe we need guns atm… but we are unsure of what the future holds and surrendering such a monumental right would be next to impossible to “undo” if the time ever comes.
No freedom has ever been won or guarded with the types of firearms legal under the 2nd amendment.
Ever. Anywhere.
Literally every single example you're going to reply with is wrong.
Not even the American Revolution was "won" using personally-owned weapons. It was won using artillery, naval vessels, mercenaries from overseas, and the first thing that happened when a patriot showed up for his patriotic duty with his pappy's musket was throw it in the trash and issue a soldier a Brown Bess or Committee of Safety musket so that the caliber, rate of fire, effective range, and operating procedures were the same amongst all soldiers.
Not in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not anywhere at any time has a conflict against a government either foreign or domestic been defeated using personally-owned weapons.
The few times in America where it was tried, post Revolutionary War, the tax/whiskey/voting rights rebellioneers were crushed under the might of a pathetically small standing army that used cavalry and artillery to intimidate them.
The various slave rebellions and civil rights conflicts changed nothing. Lawyers, peaceful protest, not-so-peaceful-protest, and public opinion changed things.
In terms of ethnic violence, everywhere, every time, in each and every case where a smaller population has armed itself to protect itself the only result has been the employment of mechanized terror against them with horrific results.
"Oh but the Warsaw Ghetto.." nope. The germans went in, received fire from personal weapons, left and leveled the ghetto with tanks and mortars.
"Oh but if the Tutsis had had rif.." nope. Both sides had rifles. When the Tutsis started scrouging AKs, the Hutus responded with grenades, automatic weapons, and bulldozers. The government didn't even do most of the killing, instead ordering the Hutu majority population to do it for them, at the point of a belt-fed machine gun. During the Kibeho massacre guns were too slow so they just mortared the sea of refugees with 60mm mortars. If every single Tutsi had possessed an automatic rifle with infinite ammunition, they would have all still been murdered. A rifle is useless against 60mm mortars and air-mobile military forces.
The only protection against tyranny is strong civic organizations and the rule of law. When those break down whoever has the most cash to buy the most heavy weapons, usually the government, wins.
The only thing the wide availability of weapons has done in areas WITHOUT strong civic organizations and the rule of law has been to turn vast swathes of Pakistan and Afghanistan into lawless zones of chaos and misery, ruled by whichever warlord can get the most RPGs or convince their followers to become suicide bombers.
Ten million personal AR-15s are useless against ten thousand mechanized infantrymen.
Firearms protecting rights is a myth.
>When those break down whoever has the most cash to buy the most heavy weapons, usually the government, wins.
There is more wealth in private hands in the US than government hands.
That's a matter of interpretation, especially since weapons like those didn't exist when the 2A was written.
What really matters isn't what rights people who lived 200+ years ago thought that we should have today; it's what rights we, who are alive now, think we should have. We shouldn't accept the meaning, or even the existence, of the 2nd amendment simply because it's there. We should continually be scrutinizing and improving the entire document.
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"Listen, you fantastically retarded motherfucker. I’m going to try to explain this so that you can understand it.
You cannot control an entire country and its people with tanks, jets, battleships and drones or any of these things that you so stupidly believe trumps citizen ownership of firearms.
A fighter jet, tank, drone, battleship or whatever cannot stand on street corners. And enforce “no assembly” edicts. A fighter jet cannot kick down your door at 3AM and search your house for contraband.
None of these things can maintain the needed police state to completely subjugate and enslave the people of a nation. Those weapons are for decimating, flattening and glassing large areas and many people at once and fighting other state militaries. The government does not want to kill all of its people and blow up its own infrastructure. These are the very things they need to be tyrannical assholes in the first place. If they decided to turn everything outside of Washington D.C. into glowing green glass they would be the absolute rulers of a big, worthless, radioactive pile of shit.
Police are needed to maintain a police state, boots on the ground. And no matter how many police you have on the ground they will always be vastly outnumbered by civilians which is why in a police state it is vital that your police have automatic weapons while the people have nothing but their limp dicks.
BUT when every random pedestrian could have a Glock in their waistband and every random homeowner an AR-15 all of that goes out the fucking window because now the police are out numbered and face the reality of bullets coming back at them.
If you want living examples of this look at every insurgency that the U.S. military has tried to destroy. They’re all still kicking with nothing but AK-47s, pick up trucks and improvised explosives because these big scary military monsters you keep alluding to are all but fucking useless for dealing with them.
Dumb. Fuck"This is incorrect.
The United States military became very skilled at dealing with them to the point that Taliban activity was near-zero.
Analyzing the causes of death of US servicemembers during the conflict, a surprisingly low number was due to firearms. All of the AKs in the world were useless against the US military and the Taliban knew it so they decided to wait the US out instead.
The moment the US left? That’s a different story.
The moral of this should be that patience is more empowering than firearms.
So in what scenario can the US military "leave" the US? You are pretty much proving the guy's point, no?
Yes, the US military could scorch earth its backyard. Nobody really denies that. What would be impossible is maintaining that control for any meaningful amount of time. This is also assuming somehow that 100% of the military and 100% of its assets are on board with whatever "regime" comes to be, which I just don't see happening.
But your example of Taliban is a curious one, because, for all their expensive toys, US forces in Afghanistan never really controlled much ground outside of their bases. That's why the Taliban could wait them out - because most of the country out there was already theirs to wait in. To control all that territory would have required a lot more US troops, precisely because of all those lurking Taliban fighters with their measly AKs.
https://www.atf.gov/explosives/explosives-storage-requiremen...
“No indoor magazine may be located in residence or dwelling.”
As for valid uses of private ownership of explosives, they are used heavily to clear land and rocks / boulders.
Absent this, one of three conditions exist;
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious. This is your condition of tyranny (unaccountable power).
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition the State.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California P. p. 54.
<https://archive.org/details/economysociety00webe/page/54/mod...>
There's an excellent explanation of the common misunderstanding in this episode of the Talking Politics podcast: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership>
The misleading and abbreviated form that's frequently found online seems to have originated with Rothbard in the 1960s, and was further popularised by Nozick in the 1970s. It's now falsely accepted as a truth when in fact it is a gross misrepresentation and obscures the core principles Weber advanced.
Well, this is a very extraordinary claim… also, one that makes me feel like any potential example will be dismissed by you, as you seem to have essentially considered every single instance of armed conflict involving firearms.
The rest of your comment goes over several examples but I think the foundation is flawed. There is no scenario where there would be 10 million AR-15s vs 10k “mechanized infantrymen.” It’s also akin to saying matches are useless in a competition to see who can detonate the biggest sick of dynamite.
Just touching on your first example. Of course to win an international war against the largest empire on earth, you will need more than just firearms. However, the mere existence of an access to firearms is an undeniable factor in the way things turned out.
Do you really believe independence would have been gained through “strong civic organization and rule of law” - as you claim? You then follow that by saying if that doesn’t work, whoever has more cash and weapons usually wins… certainly not what happened in the revolutionary war… nor the next big conflict (war of 1812).
I could go on like this. I think you underestimate the story someone can build from your data (even if the story they invent is completely untrue) and I think you underestimate the frenzied desperation that can overtake people in power who are desperate to stay in power. Reading historic accounts of life in totalitarian regimes is worth the effort.
Hope you can prove your innocence!
The point to be made is that you don't know because you can't predict.