Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

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About gun control and freedom, I have the following opinion:

We need to be realistic. The only way armed citizenry can fight against a powerful government is through guerrilla warfare/terrorism. You're not going to fight a professional army that comes with ISR capabilities, air assets, artillery and heavy weapons by assembling a ragtag of your subdivision patriots while counting on the prowess of the hunting ability of Mr. Eckhardt in a tree to snipe the "enemy" officers. This makes good post-apocalyptic fiction, entertaining movies but it would mean the complete obliteration of your group, all of your family and all your neighbours with just a few artillery shells. Any kind of stand by civilians against a professional army from the most powerful military in the world could only have one result, and it would not be good for the "citizen's militia".

So, the only credible scenario for fighting an occupier/tyrannic government/alien invaders, as proved by countless examples in history of liberation movements facing a far more powerful enemy, would be good old terrorism (once you win, if you win, presumably you can call it freedom fighting), sabotage and other such hit and run tactics.

And once someone crosses this bridge, they don't give a fuck if they can buy their guns at Costco or in the back of van in a dark alley. Indeed, buying in the dark alley is preferred.

Nobody is going to fight the government using legally bought guns while using their government provided callsigns to communicate using their legally licensed ham radios.

So, legal gun ownership as a safeguard against an oppressive government is a fucking illusion, a feel-good excuse to have cool (even if dangerous) toys.

Revolutions and insurrections are made by people who don't give a flying fuck about laws and the current order, and 99 times out of 100, they lose and die in mostly horrible ways.

> while counting on the prowess of the hunting ability of Mr. Eckhardt in a tree to snipe the "enemy" officers

In an actual modern civil war, I would assume guerillas would be mostly using gun turrets built out of LEGO Technics or the like; suicide quadcopter RC drones (carrying e.g. grenades); and other extremely-low-cost impossible-to-restrict solutions to “leverage” ordinary weapons into being credible threats against a nation-state. (See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFMvesTUjAA)

And I would assume that modern thought on the meaning of a “well-armed militia” that can fight back against attempted civil incursion, would thus be a militia that has both access to the materials for — and training in the use of — these sorts of improvised "leveraged" weapons systems.

I would go further to say that, in the modern day, if possession of any of the aforementioned "leveraged" weapons systems — for purposes of home or firing-range training in the prevention of civil incursion — is considered illegal, then you don't really have a "right to bear arms", you just have some lip-service for gun nuts.

> suicide quadcopter RC drones (carrying e.g. grenades); and other extremely-low-cost impossible-to-restrict solutions to “leverage” ordinary weapons

grenades are illegal to own for a civilian in the US, so that situation isn't that hard to restrict.

Sure IEDs are a thing, but not quite as easy or low cost.

In the case of an outright revolution you're mostly correct, although i would argue that having guns legal and prevalent before the revolution makes it much much easier for them to be bought out of a van in an alley. If guns were illegal beforehand then the van method requires either making them, which is usually subpar, or smuggling them in from another country, which is risky. Having a large number of them locally available and just around means they can be easily repurposed or acquired.

Also, i'm unsure what you mean by "Nobody is going to fight the government using legally bought guns". One of the points of US gun ownership is that there is no easily accessible database of who owns guns. So once you own a gun legally you can then use it in the revolution.

However, there is an advantage to having guns even in the case of non-revolutions! Ruby Ridge is a perfect example of the use of guns to prevent future government overreach. The outcomes there have instilled a years long fear in government agents of going out to seize weapons from citizens.

> In the case of an outright revolution you're mostly correct, although i would argue that having guns legal and prevalent before the revolution makes it much much easier for them to be bought out of a van in an alley. If guns were illegal beforehand then the van method requires either making them, which is usually subpar, or smuggling them in from another country, which is risky. Having a large number of them locally available and just around means they can be easily repurposed or acquired.

Myanmar is a case in point. There's currently an armed rebellion against the the military dictatorship there, but (at least a few years ago) is was hobbled by Myanmar's strict gun control laws. IIRC, when the military started shooting protesters, they sometimes tried to resist with single-shot hunting rifles, but were predictably beaten. An NPR story I heard a few years ago described how they were trying to smuggle stuff like AR-15s from Thailand, but the quantities were so inadequate the protesters-turned-rebels had to train with wooden mockups.

This looks like a more recent article on it, and it sounds like things are getting better: https://asiatimes.com/2023/05/myanmar-pdfs-getting-the-guns-.... However, I bet the rebellion would be farther along if Myanmar had a healthier supply of privately-owned, capable guns to draw from. Here's a quote:

> Over the dry season months, [Myanmar Air Force] jets and helicopter gunships ratcheted up the tempo of daily strikes which in addition to supporting the regime’s embattled ground troops also deliberately targeted villages, clinics, churches and even camps where hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) have sought precarious refuge.

> But for all the publicity and outrage they have drawn, the [military government's] Russian-built Yak-130 jets and Mi-35 gunships were not in fact the most important killers shaping the course of the conflict in recent months. That lethal accolade should rather go to the humble assault rifles and grenade launchers now turbocharging resistance across the flatlands of central Myanmar.

> Over the past five months of this year’s dry season, an accelerating proliferation of automatic rifles and other small arms seldom seen in 2021 and 2022 has wrought a striking if virtually unreported transformation of the war.

To summarize a common counter to this doomerism.

You cannot control an entire country and its people with tanks, jets, battleships and drone or any of these things you believe trump's 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 tyrants in the first place. If they decided to turn everything outside of Washington DC into glowing green glass they would be the absolute rulers of a big, worthless, radioactive pile of [excrement].

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 is a police state it is vital that your police have automatic weapons while civilians are unarmed.

BUT when every random pedestrian could have a Glock in their waistband and every random homeowner an AR-15 all of that goes out of the window because now the police are outnumbered and face the reality of bullets coming back at them.

If you want living examples of this look at every insurgency that the US military has tried to destroy. They're all still kicking with nothing but AK-47s, pick-up trucks and improvised explosives because these big weapons you talk about are useless for dealing with them. And the US wouldn't be dealing with one major insurgency it'd be dealing with hundreds spread across thousands of miles with different demands, motivations and M.O.s.

Or you get the armed version of Hitler's 1925 Sturmstaffel and Saalschutz/SA pre-military militias that helped a crazy dictator rise to power believing they were doing the "right thing", opposing the corrupt government.

This kind of military superiority argument lost the US 2 wars. Yes, you can absolutely flatten a city block with ease, but if the US couldn’t do it to people 1000s of miles away in dirt poor countries, they’re going to have a hell of a time convincing enlisted soldiers to shell their neighbors.

Regardless of the practicality, the second amendment explicitly calls for the regulation of government via militia. The Supreme Court has continually held that right extends down to individual citizen’s right to own firearms. From your perspective, perhaps citizens need access to more powerful weaponry to fulfill the 2nd amendment’s mandate. Currently, laws like the NFA restrict practical access to automatic weapons, and introduce licensing requirements for specific weapons and accessories, such as suppressors and short barrel rifles.

Whoa whoa whoa! You're being way too rational about this issue.

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