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> Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think any rioters in countries like Spain go to a protest with a bet real chance on their minds that they might die.

That's the thing, they do, and have in the past too. Some might even recall riots ~70 years ago that kind of spiraled out of control and led to a civil war.

Looking at what's happening in Iran as we speak might be a good idea as well, where they've had enough, know that there is a good chance of their regime literally executing them on the spot, yet they're brave enough to continue fighting, because they realize what's at stake, and have run out of other options.

> The ICE officers are armed and absolutely will use their weapons if given half a chance to

So this was the whole point with the 2nd amendment right, that when/if the government repress you in that way, you have weapons to fight back? Or am I misunderstanding what that part is/was about?

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Americans are much more comfy than Iranians are though. As much as Americans might dislike what's going on, they're not fighting got their own survival.

Democracy, authoritarianism are all abstract and vague concepts

The people who love the second amendment are the ones that support the president. Most of them would gladly shoot me or you if their president told them to. In fact, a significant portion fantasize about being able to shoot other Americans and get away with it. This is one half of the country holding the other half hostage. Despite what you think, there are many protests going on. But a lot of Americans simply agree with what is happening.

> So this was the whole point with the 2nd amendment right, that when/if the government repress you in that way, you have weapons to fight back?

Not as far as I understand. The 2nd amendment was from a time when we did not have much of a standing army and the country relied on militias for firepower. Some of the proposed language for the second amendment makes this clearer, but it was cut in the final version.

The tyranny bit was probably always someone's fantasy, and the self-defense aspect is basically a shift of interpretation that is much more recent.

(White) Americans of the center and left have long since lost the conviction that you may just need to bleed for your children’s freedom. It’ll come back, hopefully not too late.

Trump gained more support in 2024 across almost all demographics. To make this only a white issue is misleading and casually racist.

"Trump won 15% of Black voters – up from 8% four years earlier. "

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/behind-trump...

The thing is, to most white Americans, their childrens' freedom isn't at stake. The majority of white voters have always supported Trump, and probably support ICE, whereas most of the rest simply don't don't consider it their problem.

And unfortunately that probably won't change until ICE kills more of them and makes it their problem.

You are right that America isn’t going to fix this problem until Trump supporters feel the pain. It is coming, but I’m afraid of what we will have to go through to get there.

> The thing is, to most white Americans, their childrens' freedom isn't at stake.

It absolutely is at stake, they just haven’t realized it yet. (Insert obligatory “first they came for” quote.)

Democracies are vulnerable to many things: populism, vote-rigging, importing migrants to vote for a given party, and much more. Without a reboot, many democracies slide into autocracy. First, the government bans weapons, then curtails civil rights under the guise of child protection, offending religious sensibilities, blocks websites, and gradually tightens penalties for free speech. It all happens gradually. And suddenly you can't write your opinion online without being arrested. The UK is a case in point. Unarmed people are doomed to change things not only in authoritarian countries, but even in nominally democratic ones. Examples include peaceful and not-so-peaceful protests in Iran, Belarus, and Russia in the struggle against the authorities. Peaceful protests without the support of the army and the elite always end in failure. Another example is the protests in the UK against the influx of Muslim migrants, where the authorities support the latter.

> Unarmed people are doomed to change things not only in authoritarian countries, but even in nominally democratic ones. Examples include peaceful and not-so-peaceful protests in Iran, Belarus, and Russia in the struggle against the authorities. Peaceful protests without the support of the army and the elite always end in failure.

I'd take issue with that, because once it becomes an armed conflict then the full power of the state military will be deployed.

And modern nation-states of mid-size or above all have militaries than can crush any civilian armed resistance, simply because of the lethality and capability gap between civilian and military weapons.

The only winning move for a populace, then, is to try and keep resistance sub-armed conflict (and avoid being bated into armed resistance).

In Minneapolis and other cities, you do have protests, you have the people following ICE, and it's a valid discussion to have that without the protests and the "mostly peaceful" resistance from Minnesotans is helping the nation see what criminals ICE people are, and what an awful thing they're doing to the country.

Mass resistance movements tend to come at unpredictable moments. The killing or particularly well documented crime of a government, for example. Something acute will trigger it, like George Floyd or Renee Good (whose murder triggered widespread outrage, protests, and despite the bots on Twitter, some shift in the view on ICE from the middle and right).

If, for example, a brigade of soldiers or officers opened live fire on protesters, I think the country would shut down.

Another point, as others have mentioned: It's actually the massive amount of armament on both side of the equation that keeps people from taking the next step. The citizens of Minneapolis could probably take out a hundred ICE agents a day, but now we're in a civil war because the next steps are insurrection act, hundreds of people dead in days, potential of the MN state guard being activated to fight against national forces, and it's already three steps ahead of whatever would happen in Spain.

edit: There are some people already exercising their rights loudly. See: https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1qdnmh...

>The citizens of Minneapolis could probably take out a hundred ICE agents a day, but now we're in a civil war because the next steps are insurrection act,

That is not a civil war.

Just because historians haven't yet given the beast a name, it acts and growls just like like exactly what it is, and "civil war" is exactly what some members of the federal administration want, as you might read in their brazen proclamations about re-interpreting the constitution along a hundred dimensions at once.

https://www.project2025.observer/en

The local and federal authorities are at a complete standoff right now. When's the last time you recall a local government essentially asking the court for permission to deploy its national guard to enforce a restraining order against the federal government? All while said federal government was openly conducting sloppy pseudo-urban-warfare in broad daylight?

I urge you to pay attention.

I'm paying attention, just not buying into administration wanting a civil war.

Won't happen.

Regardless, would you agree that we're watching a constitutional crisis unfold? The stability of case law is being completely undermined.

I won't defend certain current practices, you are trying to shoehorn me into a yes/no answer to fit me into a side. I won't play that game.

I'm not trying to fit you into a side, especially not politically. What I'm pushing back on specifically is any insinuation that this will just blow over. That to me is hypernormalization.

And it's not that "the administration as a whole" wants devastation, but study up on what Stephen Miller wants.

You cut off half the sentence.

> So this was the whole point with the 2nd amendment right, that when/if the government repress you in that way, you have weapons to fight back?

The point of the second amendment was, in no small part, so that the central government wouldn't deny the states the means to commit genocide against the indigenous population on their own, because the states didn't trust he central government to be sufficiently enthusiastic about it. That was the major security concern alluded to by the “necessary to the security of a free state” bit.

Zero of the Federalist papers corroborate this.

The Federalist papers were campaign ads for ratification of the base Constitution from a faction opposed to adding a Bill of Rights (an opposition explicitly stated in the Federalist Papers; it was, in fact, the central theme of Federalist #84.)

They are neither a reliable summary of the motivations for the provisions they support nor any kind of argument for the provisions in the Bill of Rights.

The opposition to the Bill of Rights was that it was unnecessary. Rights do not originate from the Constitution or the law.

The Bill of Rights was specifically designed to abrogate any possibility of infringement of those enumerated rights by an out of control State.

>The point of the second amendment was, in no small part, so that the central government wouldn't deny the states the means to commit genocide against the indigenous population on their own,

What kind of revisionist history is this?

The feds were telling the states "screw off, we do the negotiating" before the ink was even dry on that. Steamrolling the natives was never really a seriously contested job or a point of political contention, the feds were always gonna be the ones to do it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in the case of the Cherokee forced relocation from Georgia, the Georgia state government told the federal government (Andrew Jackson) that if the gold-bearing lands weren't depopulated of indigenous peoples then the state would start killing them (after already having terrorized them with armed state militia).

That's 20+yr later and an entirely different generation of politicians though, a far cry from the "we'll just slip this in here so we can harass the red man" that the person above is alleging. And it was done with state backed forces, not like they would have been handicapped by lack of a 2a.

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