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Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

"What happens when the sea of democracy recedes...."

We become very glad that, outside of the fortunately rare hellholes of NYC and D.C., and to a lessor extent Massachusetts and New Jersey, we've retained the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Puts a ceiling on the tyranny the state can exercise, and any attempt to confiscate the people's arms is a clear signal to turn our cold civil war into a hot one.

ADDED: various formulations list the following "boxes", soap box, ballot box, jury box, and bullet box. We still retain the other 3 even if the ballot box becomes an effective nullity, and in our Federal system it won't likely be so at the state level. Much can be done in our system there, including calling a constitutional convention and ratifying new amendments to the Constitution. Which is essentially what happened the last time we had a impossible central government.

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> we've retained the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Puts a ceiling on the tyranny the state can exercise

I'm confused by this outdated meme. A hypothetical modern totalitarian regime with the resources of the US isn't likely to be too intimidated by the large blustering egos of amateur militias and their (largely) civilian firearms.

Without the appropriate organization and infrastructure, simply having _guns_ isn't going to do anyone a whole lot of good. The government can still, at will, exercise control over the media and most channels of communication (including the internet, obviously). It can fairly easily win the war of public opinion if it really needs to. Any pockets of armed insurrection, at that point, merely constitute a series of aggravating nuisances.

Guns are just a tool, and one that will only become relatively less relevant and menacing in the modern age.

You can't imagine how the people in such a "hypothetical modern totalitarian regime" would be intimidated by their being assassinated at all levels but the very top which can afford really good protection, but would have to stay mostly bunkered down anyway?

That's just one example of how widespread gun ownership can be a bit more than an "aggravating nuisance". Another is this classic from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The GULAG Archipelago:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?

Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?

After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked.

The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

He goes on ( http://archive.org/details/Gulag_Archipelago_I ) to say:

If... if... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more — we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!

As if guns are the only things that can provide this kind of protection or have this kind of influence.

Yes, guns are powerful. So are four people with long knives. So are traps. So are the "half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, ...". The statement seems to be saying more about people's will to resist, not the necessity of firearms.

I suppose one might make the argument that guns increase people's willingness to resist, but this might not simply be because they make it easer ... in this case, the most ironically hilarious role that guns play is to provide a concrete freedom that guns, themselves, might be used to protect. That is, the best reason to have guns as a protected right might not be because they are a means by which to resist tyranny, but a right that's so painful to lose to so many that it motivates resistance.

"the US isn't likely to be too intimidated by the large blustering egos of amateur militias and their (largely) civilian firearms"

Why on earth has the US issued a global terror alert? Is there some global terror network that can really hit 21 diplomatic facilities or is the threat more local focused than that?

The US is a scared, self-defensive beast. It fears anyone with a lathe.

Good luck with that. There are basically two scenarios here to consider in a popular violent revolution:

1) The army sides with the people. In this case, the right to keep and bear arms is basically irrelevant as you have the backing of the world's most powerful army.

2) The army sides with the government. In this case, even the militia types with huge munitions caches don't stand a chance against the world's most powerful army. This is not 1776, it wouldn't be musket vs. musket.

3) The civilian force holds out long enough that a significant portion of the army becomes sympathetic towards the civilians and gradually switches sides.

Our armed forces are made of individuals. It would not be a boolean operation by any means.

4) n sided civil war unconstrained by old notions of geographically aligned forces.

False dichotomy, it's not likely that every single regiment of every single branch of the armed forces and police are all going to choose a single side.

Don't be so sure about that, the Federal government (or more specifically, the DHS) has been currying favor with local and state LEO orgs through funding and equipment distribution programs.

The relatively recent militarization of various police forces is evidence of that, and, much like the USG exerted pressure over west European allied countries to ground Bolivia's presidential plane, they will exert similar control over state and local police forces through "greater cooperation" policies.

Certainly a worry, but one bottom line is who do the local police answer to? Who pays them, who can fire them and make them outlaws with all the latter entails?

One thing that's quite unusual about our system is that policing power is smeared across the local, state and Federal levels, with the vast majority of it at the first. This imposes massive constraints on a would be Federal level tyranny.

That's certainly one way to look at it. On the other hand, the same powerful army has struggled on several occasions recently to put down insurgencies from determined, armed local populations in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, and several other places. Of course, in a Civil War II situation, there might not be the same constraint to wrap up the operation before popular support dwindles.

Occupying a hostile United States could possibly be the quagmire to end all quagmires.

Then again, in all those cases you cite they had a secure rear area, one reason I cite the "Amateurs discuss tactics, professionals discuss logistics" maxim. That's a much, much sticker proposition; as you posit, "the quagmire to end all quagmires", we're an ornery people.

"Amateurs discuss tactics, professionals discuss logistics."

If it helps - I happen to know two ex-Marines who believe most of the armed forces would never take up arms against American civilians.

The other issue is the "rights to bear arms" has never been a factor in any civil rights dispute in the US, whether it was systematically oppressing black people for generations or one-off riots or strike-breaking in which cops fired on crowds without causing wider conflicts as a consequence.

(arguably the one area in which citizen-owned firearms have actively affected the history of US civil liberty is in carrying out the occasional assassination of people adjudged to have been bit too keen on civil liberties)

Yep. There's a great article by the Atlantic called The Secret History of Guns. [1] I'll go over a couple of interesting points.

- Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a concealed carry permit after his house was bombed in 1956. After that he had armed supporters stand guard outside his house. King's house was described as "an arsenal."

- The co-founder of the Black Panthers found a law on the books allowing them to open carry in California. Blacks were getting no protection by the police so this was pretty pivotal. The Panthers started arming themselves and had a picnic outside the State's Capital building. After this happened the racist California legislature pushed through a law banning open carry. It was signed into law by Ronald Reagan. Funny enough, he was the first president endorsed by the NRA.

- "After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities."

- "In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control"

[1] http://theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-h...

A bit of unmentioned history: the NRA wasn't in the business, so to speak, of endorsing candidates until after the 1977 Cincinnati Revolt (at the annual meeting), so Reagan or Carter were the first Presidents they could possibly endorse. Carter was anti-gun but smart enough not to be visibly, Reagan signed the Gun Owners Protection Act of 1986 reigning in the BATF, without which we very possibly wouldn't have a gun culture today (or perhaps we'd have tested out this thesis of armed resistance and revolt).

ADDED: Every major party Presidential candidate after 1977 has been a gun grabber with the possible exception of Romney (details on request), the NRA's only been able to endorse the least worst, or in 1992 and 1996 endorse neither.

The bit about the "1920s and '30s" is more fair, but if you read the full text and know about all that the NRA didn't support, including the cited inclusion of handguns in the NFA of '34, "forefront" falls short of the mark. And of course per the Cincinnati Revolt that NRA isn't the modern NRA, which nowadays has done a 180 on concealed carry, the gravamen of this article's claim. Major NRA figure Marion Hammer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Hammer) was the leader in establishing Florida's 1987 shall issue law, which opened the floodgates so that today 42 states, soon to be 43 with Illinois, have shall issue regimes.

Circling back to MLK, today he wouldn't have much difficulty getting a concealed carry permit (or set of them) good in most of the nation, including all of the South.

Lots of liberals were famously armed when they went into the South, like Eleanor Roosevelt, many blacks kept themselves alive or less repressed with personal firearms, like Condoleezza Rice's father and his friends, and then there's the Deacons for Defense and Justice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacons_for_Defense_and_Justice . jivatmanx in the other reply right now covers a bit of what happened prior to and during the Civil War; I hail from the southern edge of what you might call Bleeding Missouri and have studied it a bit, guns were most certainly a very important factor.

As for strike-breaking and all that, while it's not an area I've studied, it's well established that both sides were armed and used their guns.

I'm not saying many liberals, strikers and black people weren't armed and prepared to fight where it favoured them.

I'm saying they were, and people got oppressed in a far more direct, blatant and universal manner than anything that is likely to emerge from PRISM or the present US government's policy goals. Citizen-owned firearms might have been handy in the odd skirmish, but they didn't cause legislators or law enforcement to back down. Black people sat in the back of the bus and grudgingly accepted there wasn't much they could do about their neighbour getting lynched. Strikes were bust in a blaze of gunfire and millions of other members of the trade union movement went to work as normal the next day. Even as determined a revolutionary as John Brown failed where the Union military succeeded a year later.

Concern that the oppressed could potentially gain access to firearms neither dissuaded administrations from enacting oppressive laws nor accelerated the pace of their removal.

Why would it be different next time round?

Strange, I have this memory of the following successes of both groups:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Act (the Wagner Act, even if moderated by things like the Taft–Hartley Act)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fourth_Amendment_to_the_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_v._Virginia_Board_of_Ele...

And it's always struck me that the Civil Rights Memorial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Memorial) is most remarkable because it only has 40 names on it.

(Just the highest of highlights, I'm leaving a lot out.)

I am aware the twentieth century happened.

However, I have yet to see anyone seriously suggest that the Civil Rights Act was introduced because the police were terrified that black people defying segregation laws might shoot them, or the Supreme Court ruled segregation in schools unconstitutional because it had proved unenforceable. For that matter, those Southern whites who thought their rights were being violated by "forced busing" proved equally reluctant to resort to armed confrontation. It wasn't a hot war, or even a cold war, it was a culture war.

The right to bear arms was orthogonal to the civil rights movement: it didn't prevent the original introduction of the tyranny off "Jim Crow" laws which were effectively enforced for decades, didn't influence the legislative and judicial rulings against them in the mid 20th century and couldn't even protect the movement's key figures.

Obviously we disagree, I think the RKBA allowed a lot of blacks to continue pushing by allowing them to continue living, or living longer, or limiting the degree to which they could be easily intimidated.

One thing you're not factoring in when you compare this period to the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras is economics and technology. Everyone including blacks were much more able to afford small arms and ammo by the civil rights era, and guns were a lot more maintainable after we switched to non-corrosive primers and smokeless powder. And of course technological advances helped the economics by driving down the intrinsic costs of guns and ammo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_%28abolitionist%29

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Malcolmxm1carbine3gr.gif

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