I sometimes think about the origins of the second amendment and if it's intent was to empower citizens against a potentially oppressive government then it has failed. US military technology might as well be black magic. What can a "well regulated militia" do against smart bullets, M1 Abrams, Apache helicopters, etc?
Thank goodness we are kept fat and happy.
The biggest threat is well paid mercenaries. It always has been.
Civil war was a civil war, with the country split into two sides. Regional bonds took precedence over national ones but the military of each faction sided with the people of their region. Japanese internment and native Americans involved minorities. The soldiers didn't come from those communities, and native americans were barely considered people much less Americans. It doesn't take much to get the majority to take action against a minority, but that's not an existential threat to democracy.
What you're saying, albeit you managed at least a bit of tact, is that Japanese internment and the genocide of Native Americans don't count as military-assisted oppression because "it was just the minorities".
The genocide of native Americans, slavery, segregation, and Japanese internment were all carried out consistently with the desires of the relevant polity of the time. When George Wallace stood in front of the school house and shouted "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" he didn't do it to try and impose his idiosyncratic view of the world. He did it because he knew it would endear him to "the people" of Alabama.
Well then, I don't care much for your notion of "democracy", and don't particularly understand why it would be worth defending or even necessarily better than minority rule in the first place.
Most reasonable definitions of democracy delineate between mere mob rule, and democracy as a governmental philosophy (including aspects like equality before the law).
The word "minority" conjures up images of the oppressed, but through most of human history, the minority have been the oppressors. The majority were, historically, ruled by the will of a minority of people that made up royal families, etc. Saudi Arabia, for example, is a society in which a minority rules the majority.
Now, of course, in a democracy the majority can use violence to suppress the minority. But that is in fact the bulwark of democracy: the majority using violence or the threat thereof to suppress royal families, warlords, etc. And while ideally the majority does not do this, oppressive rule by the majority is almost certainly preferable to any situation where the minority is in power.
Peterloo
two examples I can pluck from memory
Members of the all-volunteer military are significantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods. Only 11 percent of enlisted recruits in 2007 came from the poorest one-fifth (quintile) of neighborhoods, while 25 percent came from the wealthiest quintile. These trends are even more pronounced in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, in which 40 percent of enrollees come from the wealthiest neighborhoods-a number that has increased substantially over the past four years.
-- Who Serves in the U.S. Military? The Demographics of Enlisted Troops and Officers
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-...
If you took away the college loan forgiveness and other benefits of the military, you'd lose quite a bit of the force.
Hogwash. Military technology is by definition the usurping of freedom. Always has, and always will be. You are born free - the machines are made to take it away from you.
This concept is actually called "bread and circus", and was originally applied by mid-roman emperors to better control the populace and keep political satisfaction up. I'm kinda disappointed that the wikipedia article doesn't go into detail about this because it played a huge part in maintaining control of the empire.
You can't maintain a police state by blowing up houses. If you do that, you end up cutting off your only revenue source (taxing employed people), because your tax base either can't or won't work (because they're dead, the roads are impassable, etc.). In fact, this situation would actually be quite beneficial to an insurgency, because if an attacker can't pay or feed their foot soldiers, they will lose their army.
In the end, you need foot soldiers to maintain a police state. It's not economically feasible to give everyone state of the art sniper rifles like this, and spending 10x more money on soldiers doesn't make them 10x more effective.
It is exponentially harder to maintain a police state than to destroy one, which is why even poorly trained, poorly equipped insurgencies can effectively fight against well trained, well equipped governments. If the US government has problems with this in Vietnam and Iraq, imagine how much worse it would be if they tried the same thing on their own well-armed revenue source.
The US has ~2M active duty / reserve military members.[1] The SR25 is a common choice for 'sniper' rifles in the military and costs about $5K new and kitted out. If this state of the art rifle costs 5x the typical rifle, it would cost $25B to outfit half of our current military with these weapons.
The US spends over $650B per year on our military[2], so that $25B would only represent 4% of our annual budget.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...
I always feel that "well-regulated militias" acting as a counterweight to the US government is a silly idea, because by the time a militia is called into action, (1) the government can also mobilize all its shiny toys and crush whoever's in the way, and (2) WTF were you doing while your country slid slowly and painfully into the level of present-day Iraq?
Additionally, vastly superior technology doesn't necessarily outweigh other factors. It certainly makes a huge difference but history is littered with counterexamples.
At least firehoses, dogs, and guns have a chance of illiciting sympathy from onlookers (e.g. the international community). Protesters on a big slip-n-slide will probably just end up on /r/funny.
The assumption isn't whether a government can get oppressive to the point where people fight. It's "Is our government so good that citizens will never have cause to oppose it, for the rest of human history?"
"nearly all the autocracies in the world with a higher [than $6000 ] per capita income are petro-states" http://thediplomat.com/2012/10/is-chinas-communist-party-doo...
If by "we" you mean you and me, and people like us. Plenty of people are skipping meals to save money.
How would you organize your coup? The government listens to all your calls, reads your email/im, knows where you travel and what you buy.
You would be branded a terrorist and detained before you could say "unconstitutional".
Like guns would even make a difference...
The government doesn't actively need to attack people with their own agents. They just need to make it known that someone won't be protected, and let the criminal element do the rest. In some places, weapons for self-defense can be a defense against that kind of government.
First of all, have you seen how much of a fight low tech militias have put up against the U.S. lately?
Secondly, don't forget that the people trained to use that technology are U.S. citizens too and will fight for their family before they fight for their county (most of them anyway).
The trade off is lives saved today versus those lost tomorrow. If WW2 had been fought the same way it may have taken years longer. You do not end support for an enemy until you beat the population that supports them. There is no infinite number in resistance, ww2 proved that.
We should do away with the one we have now.
Like all of the Bill of Rights, it was about constraining the Federal government, not the Podunksville Police.