Comment by rcoveson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcoveson | Hacker News Reader

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> That doesn't work with the second amendment though because one side has guns and the other side has guns and tanks and drones and nukes and the ability to control all public communication networks, etc.

I don't want to be too blunt, but this is the "uninformed" I was talking about. The same asymmetry was present in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The ability to level cities is not actually that helpful when the goal is to control the population. Modern revolutions don't involve standing armies that you can kill will tanks.

> outright revolution (at which point the constitution doesn't really matter)

It doesn't matter beyond the point of revolution. It matters a lot that it was in effect before the revolution.

> what can't be argued is that the 2nd amendment has been effective at protecting our rights. Our rights are routinely violated.

I'm not sure if you just don't understand the concept of a last resort or if you actually think that we're at the point of last resort already, in which case my only question is: Do you own a gun yet?

> The same asymmetry was present in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Those also occurred overseas. The government didn't already have control over the population like they do here. They didn't have massive amounts of data on every last person there, and everyone those people knew. They hadn't been tracking all of their movements. If the founding fathers had tried to gain independence while still in Brittan the fight would have been much much harder.

We can argue over how well a revolution might go in theory, but the second amendment's failure to protect our freedoms isn't theoretical. Our freedoms are being violated all the time. It failed. That means that having the "last resort" option doesn't prevent our government from violating our rights. The second does not protect the first.

A last resort isn't effective at defending our freedoms under the government we have. It just maybe gives us a very very small chance to throw the old system away and replace it with something new that would restore our rights.

Personally, I'd like to think that it's still possible to vote our freedoms back, but there's been a lot of efforts made to reduce or prevent our ability to accomplish that and recently voter suppression efforts appear to be escalating alongside talk of "third terms" and election canceling. It's certainty not encouraging. In my case, under an absolute worst case scenario, the most effective use of a gun would be suicide. At best it might save me from looters. I can't imagine it being any use against a drone strike.

Your acceptance criteria for a last line of defense is pretty strict. Governments break the rules, a lot. If we tried to overthrow every government that broke the rules we'd be in a permanent state of violent revolution.

You don't seem like a violent person; quite the opposite. Most people are like that, myself included. I'm mad at the government. Steaming mad, even. But killing? Not even remotely close.

I get that it's easy to discount low-probability futures as meaningless, but I won't do that either. Maybe the insurance policy that is the 2nd amendment has paid out $0 so far. I don't think that's the case, but for the sake of argument let's say it's so. Even if it were so, history and current events indicate to me that we should keep paying for the policy. We think we've got it bad now, but our guy is an absolute kitten compared to some of the tyrants our species has cooked up.

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