Comment by wredcoll | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wredcoll | Hacker News Reader

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> Sure, but Germany has had one of the higher genocide rates of disarmed people in the past century, to the point it exceeds the past century death by firearm inside the US.

They weren't "disarmed" you absolute knob. "They" had guns and weapons and fought back against the nazis and lost. It turns out a bunch of civilians with small arms does not actually pose a meaningful threat to a state level military.

What makes this comment so obnoxious, aside from getting all the facts incorrect, is it helps promote this awful notion that you can be immune to state oppression if you just buy a gun. Shockingly, it does not work that way on real life. If you want the state to not oppress people you have to actually put in work to prevent it from happening, because if a state level military is coming to kill you it doesn't really matter how many guns you have in your closet or how cool your black temu tactical gear is. Artillery from 2km away will just kill you.

(Also as far as I know, when the vast majority of native americans died, they had plenty of guns.)

You can't oppress people with artillery.

You need to get close to them to check their identity, their Covid passes, or whatever. You need to get close to confiscate contraband. You need to get close to prevent them from organizing and assembling, and so on.

Of course with nuclear bombs and F-16s you can blow everything to bits, but that's not how governments typically oppress people. You generally don't want to exterminate your tax base, you just want them to have the "right" opinions and beliefs.

The Russians blew Grozny to bits but the issue is they started fighting militia with mostly small arms, then they ended up with a bunch of dead civilians plus a bunch of dead militia plus a bunch of surviving militia who now has... their own artillery pulled from the rubble.

In the end deploying the artillery in Grozny and elsewhere during the first Chechen war was a pyrrhic victory that ended in years of Chechen independence.

Then there's the alternative as my compatriots saw in the YPG -- small arms bought them enough time to ally with the USA.

> a state level military is coming to kill you it doesn't really matter how many guns you have in your closet or how cool your black temu tactical gear is. Artillery from 2km away will just kill you.

I've fought in a non-state militia that held off a nation state, in a civil war. About half the people I met died, but yet, the rest remain. So you're wrong.

>They" had guns and weapons and fought back against the nazis and lost. It turns out a bunch of civilians with small arms does not actually pose a meaningful threat to a state level military.

... Those in the Warsaw ghetto did with smuggled arms, and held out for several days, meanwhile their disarmed brethren did not last nearly as long.

>"They" had guns and weapons and fought back against the nazis and lost

Jews were virtually disarmed in Germany before the genocide started. In conquered states,they occasionally held off longer with smuggled arms. (In some cases like Malka Zdrojewicz, fighting even seems to have possibly save her life as officers admired her courage and sent her to a non-genocide destination.)

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