Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

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> watching the left abandon their antiwar fervor.

As left people gain political maturity, they understand that those in power will not give up their power willingly, so force is required.

As a liberal person I am suspicious of any liberal who does not believe in gun rights, and I am even more suspicious of a liberal person who does not believe in unions, which is the 2nd amendment of labor rights. Neither the 2nd amendment nor unions can be used for their purpose within the bounds of the law.

Believing in human rights means believing in defending human rights with force, otherwise what is to stop someone from violating human rights?

If a powerful person uses their power against you, your choices are submit or fight. Leftists are slowly understanding:

  1. There are powerful people
  2. They will arbitrarily use your power against you
  3. Those people use their power to influence law so the law will not protect you
  4. You can't solve this problem within the bounds of the law

It's not hard to look at Ukraine and see that justice cannot be achieved without war and that you don't get to decide when you are at war.

The problem with this whole thought process is it's hilariously abstract. The people in power have F-35s. What is your collection of (admittedly, unnecessarily powerful) guns going to do against that?

It also assumes that such disagreements require force to be resolved, and that's just demonstrably not always true. Even if it sometimes is.

> The people in power have F-35s. What is your collection of (admittedly, unnecessarily powerful) guns going to do against that?

Military inventory, while powerful, isn't the end-all. Just ask Afghans about their experiences with two superpowers' machinery.

F-35s aren't particularly useful for collecting taxes, for maintaining a state. You can't use them to intimidate an individual, it's a huge waste of resources for the owner of the F-35. What's more dangerous than an F-35 is a group of guys with guns driving around in a pickup truck. Guns and trucks are just so much cheaper than fighter jets, so much more deployable... not to mention the entire logistical and manpower apparatus that goes into getting an F-35 in the air. If you want to win a war of attrition you use cheap, effective tools, not the flashy stuff. Flashy weapons are great for blowing up some other country's infrastructure, it's not very useful if the enemy is your own people. If you blow up all your own people and infrastructure, what do you have power over?

If you and everyone in a 10-mile radius of where you're sitting right now decided to ignore some federal law, like maybe the one against cannabis, what the heck is an F-35 going to do about it? Blow up a building, is that supposed to help? No, you get some guys with guns and trucks and then you can start going door to door, threatening people, looking around, collecting stuff, whatever. You can set up checkpoints and block off bridges, the whole shebang, because you're trying to establish control, not just blow things up.

Blowing things up has its uses but if you want to intimidate someone to the point where you have power over them, you need to be a little more intimate. You can't just be a fleck in the sky and you can't just show up do to the big stuff. You need to be in their face as a persistent, immediate threat. That's what influences human behavior and that's how power is established. That's exactly why small guns are such a sticking point in the USA, they're a very effective counter to this intimate threat.

Conversely the over abundance of guns also is fraying the social fabric and makes normal policing impossible.

FWIW, despite having a strong favorable opinion about gun rights, given Americas clear lack of responsibility in using their gun rights for good, I think it's hard to argue against gun regulation.

I am pro gun rights but not anti regulation.

I think liberals fail to acknowledge that sometimes you can't get out of "might makes right" resolution for disputes, which results in situations of denial around gun rights.

So regulation is seen as a weakening of gun rights because the people most in favor of regulating guns fail to also make arguments in favor of guns or discount the pro-gun argument entirely.

I wonder what the Vietnamese would think of your argument or the Ukrainians. I wonder if the people in Tiananmen wish they had had guns. I wonder if people in Hong Kong wish they had had guns. I wonder about the people in Myanmar or the educated class in Cambodia, or Afghani, or Iranians wish they had more guns.

"Who are the 2nd amendment protected guns theoretically meant to be used against? When are they supposed to be used? Can the 2nd amendment ever be used to protect a free state within the bounds of the law?" are pretty major critical thinking questions that it are probably worth meditating on, especially for liberal people.

What would have happened if Trump won is a question every liberal person needs to contemplate.

When the rule of law (the idea that powerful people cannot arbitrarily exercise their power) fails, it becomes might makes right. Would you rather be in a might makes right society where you have a gun or where you don't? I think that answer is obvious.

> Even if it sometimes is.

If you want peace prepare for war.

It's hard to get a military to invade its own country, harder to get them to keep doing it, and harder yet to keep the whole apparatus supplied in the process. And the waves of mass desertions tend to come with military hardware attached.

The most serious threat to an American insurgency isn't the US military, it's the police. And the police don't have F-35s... yet.

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