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Comment by thecoffman | Hacker News Reader

It is sad that the sort of bigoted opinions you're espousing here are what us firearms enthusiasts have to endure. It has nothing to do with machismo, nothing to do with Obama, and nothing to do with birther garbage.

The right to bear arms is a right of last resort. Its the right that protects all others and, as such, it is the _most_ essential right.

As for naming incidents in the last 100 years where armed resistance to the United States government would have been productive or useful, I recommend you look up the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War 2. I also recommend that you read about the Black Panthers standing up to corrupt Oakland police and marching on government buildings, loaded guns in hand.

You don't have to be a crazy conspiracy theorist or a right-winger to realize the thought that "something like that couldn't happen in America" is naive at best.

edit: I omitted an "n"

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I'm curious how you suppose armed conflict would have helped Americans of Japanese descent during World War 2. Even in Los Angeles and San Francisco they were a minority, and were viewed with suspicion by much of the rest of society (Americans of German descent mostly gave up speaking and writing in German, despite being a plurality). It would have been almost trivial for the government to eliminate sympathetic feelings in the rest of the population by simply issuing propaganda saying that resistance by Japanese-Americans was actually a guerrilla campaign on behalf of the Empire of Japan.

So then what? Japanese-Americans give up all their possessions and live the hills? Where would they get food, guns and ammunition? After the war, there would be no way for them to reintegrate into society.

As for the Black Panthers, I would argue that images of them carrying weapons in the media did more harm than good to their cause. Today few people remember them as a community service organization and most remember them as a sort of quasi-terrorist death squad. A recent presidential candidate was even intimated to have had some sort of nebulous association with them as a way of tarnishing his reputation (though I hear he won anyway).

So I'm underwhelmed by arguments that guns are going to stop a tyrannical government. They may stop one that is completely inept, but a government with even modest propaganda resources will have no trouble playing one group of citizens against the other. Firearms enthusiasts aren't going to be portrayed as 'freedom fighters' by the media: They will be called 'terrorists' or 'cop killers.'

Not that I'm against gun ownership (though I don't personally own one). I just don't live under the misapprehension that it's going to magically 'solve government.'

I don't think his point was that firearm ownership by Americans of Japanese descent during WW2 would have been effective. I think his claim was that injustices have happened in America of the sort for which armed resistance is proportional and potentially warranted from the perspective of those whose rights were infringed.

> Japanese American internment was the World War II internment in "War Relocation Camps" of about 110,000 people of Japanese heritage who lived on the Pacific coast of the United States.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment

An issue facing firearm enthusiasts is that the most vocal (or at least the ones getting the most press) are in those camps. It's the same problem that faces many other groups, the extremists and zealots are the loudest and the ones people outside the group see. Any reasonable voice gets drowned out.

> The right to bear arms is a right of last resort. Its the right that protects all others and, as such, it is the _most_ essential right.

I'm going to have to disagree with this statement though. The 1st amendments's protections on speech, assembly and the press strikes me as a more important collection oy rights. It's what prevents us from needing to pull out our weapons and go to war against our government. Especially these days, with our technology and ability to disseminate information. I won't make the claim that many of the travesties of the past couldn't be repeated today in the US, but they'll be a lot harder to accomplish. Also, given the relatively short period US presidents and congresspersons stay in office, the voters actually have a chance to accomplish something if they'd show up in greater numbers and vote along something other than party lines.

No less a hacker than Eric S. Raymond has recently written thought-provoking blog posts about this not long ago:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4912

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4939

Alas, the information needed to vote intelligently is hard to come by in today's America.

If the 2nd is intact, the 1st will follow. Not so the other way around.

Not sure I understand your point here...

Are you suggesting that on a national scale things would have turned out for the better if Japanese Americans started shooting anyone who tried to intern them? Or if Black Panthers started shooting cops in the street?

It seems to me both those scenarios end up in a bloodbath. One which both minority groups would have little chance of surviving. And when the massacre is over, the government will say "Look - we were right all along! They were violent terrorists and we had no choice.".

Just a little reality check: the entire rest of the world thinks that Americans are utterly, raving insane on this issue.

I agree, but will also add, access to guns is not the only issue. The US has a culture of gun fetishism you just don't see anywhere else in the first world. That's not something that will change with legislation.

Not the entire rest of the world - or at least, not completely.

> The vast majority of men between the ages of 20 and 30 are conscripted into the militia and undergo military training, including weapons training. The personal weapons of the militia are kept at home as part of the military obligations; Switzerland thus has one of the highest militia gun ownership rates in the world

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland

If you're a "gun enthusiast", then you're not in it to protect yourself. You're only fooling yourself.

Note: That is essentially what the Boston Bombers were doing. If Robin Hood were alive in Nottingham today, I'm sure he'd be called a cop-killer.

Regarding Boston Bombers: I do not see how this is true. Explain?

Regarding Robin Hood: he was a cop-killer and a bandit, but when we read a fiction novel, this can be overlooked for a better literary presentation.

When somebody says "The right to bear arms is ... the _most_ essential right.", he or she is repeating that claim from the US Founding Fathers.

If America were being ruled by some sort of King George and the Founding Fathers had their revolt today, the Founding Fathers would be called "terrorists", just like the Boston Bombers are.

Americans have had this stuff drummed into their heads as a result of nationalist propaganda for over 200 years, because history is written by the victors.

If history were different and King George had won, they'd instead have been hearing about how gun control was the foundation of their liberty and how it protected loyal subjects of the Crown from those nefarious pro-French traitors.

The same goes for Robin Hood: he isn't given a better presentation because we are reading fiction but because King John lost. And John was a tyrant, by the way, who was made to submit to Magna Carta by force.

According to media accounts of the Boston Bombers that I have seen, they claimed to be fighting America because of America's injustice to Islam.

Apart from its increased plausibility, how is this different from the claims of American gun-nut militias who are worried about being forced to give up their liberty and their Christianity because of plots by the United Nations, an organization led by the anti-Christ?

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