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Comment by NickC25 | Hacker News Reader

That's a tired trope which has no standing in reality.

Some overweight Trump fan in the middle of Arkansas or Montana with an AR-15 has no chance against a single 5th gen Fighter, let alone an entire military with nuclear weapons, and a whole range of classified weaponry that us citizens can't even dream of conceptualizing.

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There are several problems with this very bad argument. All modern wars are largely fought with small arms. This is primarily due to the fact that most battlegrounds are now urban areas. For example the reason the Israel-Palestine conflict has gone on so long is because Israel (having armament that could wipe out all of Palestines territories) does not want the spectacle of killing millions of innocents. The second any 1st world country uses heavy armament against it's own people, it's done. Especially if they're nuclear. The world will turn their back on them, and some agitator (like China or Russia) will see this as an easy opportunity to invade. This also assumes that the military hasn't couped - most service people are ardent 2A supporters. Even your local police department will likely not abide. You may think it's a trope but that purpose of the 2A was exactly as stated, stemming back as far as English Bill of Rights with self-preservation and natural rights as being fundamental.

"Some overweight Trump fan in the middle of Arkansas or Montana with an AR-15 has no chance against a single 5th gen Fighter, let alone an entire military with nuclear weapons, and a whole range of classified weaponry that us citizens can't even dream of conceptualizing. "

Yeah! That's why the US military had such overwhelming victories in Vietnam and Afghanistan, against primative peoples who couldn't even conceptualize our advanced weaponry!

We "lost" in Afghanistan because we spent too much time and money trying to drag the middle east into the modern world....and to also enrich military contractors whose boards were also made up of active politicians all the way up to folks who worked in the Oval Office.

Hell, we didn't even have a plan going in there - Bush II had Osama Bin Laden dead-to-rights and ignored the intelligence briefs because he wanted to go kill Saddam. There was no objective besides spend time and waste money.

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