What is the actual reality that says now there's a "balance of power" between the people and their government in the US?
How did people or groups challenging it with their guns (or even peacefully) because they thought of it as an "oppressive government" fared?
Well there was an American revolution that gave us our nation in the first place. I’d say it fared mightily well.
And I never said it was fair, I said it was a balance; the balance is very clearly biased towards the government, but they do not enjoy such power for complete and violent subjugation. They rely instead on propaganda, I would argue that is the foundation of their power in fact; the creation myth of our government, that the public interest is represented, keep a critical mass unwittingly subsurvient.
Guns do not make an army. Should 20 million AR-carrying Americans rise up, the "government" would be the least scared. The day after they stormed all the state houses, they would fractionize and turn against one another.
False dichotomy. There are plenty of nations that have strict gun control laws and plenty of liberty.
False dichotomy. There are many nations that have strict gun control laws and plenty of liberty.
Or like the fact that the US has the largest prison population (percentage wise) than any western country, by a huge factor? And where over a million people are convicted of felony per year?
There is nothing logically inconsistent with saying disarming the native population was a tactic used to further subjugate them, as an example. Racially motivated violence has almost unilaterally been the causal result of insufficiently armed minorities. Im all for letting non violent offenders out of prison.
And how would those ar-15 bros would fare against an organized, professional army, with training, logistics, and coordination, not to mention air support, tanks, and the state on its side?
Not to mention most of those millions of gun owners would need to be on the same side to begin with, to count together.
>perhaps here you will find the reason you enjoy more liberties than someone living in china or north korea
I doubt it, First Amendment aside, European countries are freer than the US in more substantial ways (for starters, they don't have the kind of kafka-esque over extention of the law in the US, or the biggest ratio of prison vs general population, SWAT-ized trigger-happy police, and so on), and they don't have guns at home, except the ocassional shooting rifle.
Depends on the terms of engagement and the makeup of the professional army.
Are ar-15 bros going to effectively take and hold territory? Maybe on a temporary basis, there's a lot of potential objectives that are regularly barely defended. But it's pretty easy to roll out the national guard or whoever to flush people out if desired.
Can ar-15 bros be a significant problem for occupying forces? Almost certainly yes.
If you wanted or needed to remove this group or their weapons from a territory, it's going to be a major challenge, and highly disruptive to the other occupants, and that's going to inspire more people to take up arms. This is insurgency 101.
The american public has no guns, only the occasional shooting rifle. Did I do it right? You do not distinguish between freedom and liberty, those liberties are at times suspended. Things are definitely not ok in the united states, but thats not what guns are there to stop at this stage of our political system. The most valuable tools in the day to day are encryption and censorship resistant systems.
The government doesn't have a safe harbor they can operate from in a civil war, particularly one that has no clear geographic split. This severely curtails the use of heavy ordnance due to the importance of not killing the uninvolved populace, since that would only encourage them to also question the legitimacy of the government.
As a practical matter, it is not possible to control the US via military force short of indiscriminately murdering most of the population, and a domestic military force doesn't even have that as a realistic option. Everyone knows this, so this is a deeply unserious scenario and the government would avoid precipitating it at all costs.
The whole thing is just implausible.