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Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen what proportion of Americans own firearms?

If we are talking about treason - which hanging politicians from a lamp post would be - it won't be crowd control with tear gas and riot shields. It will be some police/military with guns vs citizens/police/military with guns.

Fortunately this law will not require that level of trouble. It is so draconian that it will not pass - so long as it is made public. The only way the government can control us is through secrecy. When something is so obviously against the public interest it won't be passed if enough people fight against it. The reason the Patriot act and others stood was because they just didn't effect enough people. If you start talking about losing your internet because your son posted a YouTube clip, voters will get mad.

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Please stop assuming this is just about America. One of the reasons people are so worked up about this is that the US is trying to force its idea of expression control on the rest of the world.

And what makes you think this is driven only by the US?

I guess it's the citizens owning lots of firearm part.

Perhaps the rest of the world should find out who's supporting this (shouldn't be too hard) and perform a distributed denial of service by sending spurious copyright-notice takedown demands to all the ISPs hosting all their pages; especially revenue-oriented pages.

You've made it clear that you haven't been acquainted with modern riot control technology.

tear gas and shields is the OLD stuff. The new stuff hasn't been widely utilized, but it IS widely in place and police and military have been trained on it.

The purpose of these non-lethal riot control methods is to destroy the power of assembly without losing the hearts and minds of the masses.

LRAD is one of the most widely known riot control technologies that is totally TV-friendly. The TV can't even tell that it is being used - in fact unless it is used on you you don't even realize it is being used.

This can be deployed from all kinds of platforms that impersonalize it.

If the public doesn't complain about waterboarding they aren't going to complain about LRAD. And yet LRAD will totally destroy a peaceful demonstration.

You're right that we should be able to get former military and police on our side, but we better hope they mutiny and are able to steal technology.

I don't think you've been acquainted with the business end of a large rifle. Shoot whatever ray you want at a large crowd of people, if it comes to treason I'll be with my brother and cousin at night in the woods with some high power rifles and shotguns. Considering both have been military trained I don't think we're too far behind the curve. I'm not the kind of person who believes in conspiracies or has a bomb shelter, but the patriot act made me think that maybe I'd use the gun in my house against the government just as easily as I would against someone breaking and entering. I'm not talking about carrying a gun to a rally, I'm talking about defending myself. Look at that nut job in Buffalo who took out a bunch of swat team members last year. He was crazy and it certainly was a terrible tragedy, but it shows that it IS possible.

Sometimes engineers forget not every problem has a technological solution. Picking the right out cropping of rocks to defend yourself from has more value than millions of dollars in tech if you can extract the right price from the people attacking you.

But if you are going down that road, it is just a matter of how many people you take out before they get you. I won't be getting that enraged about copyright law, ever. If they start infringing on my right to complain about the copyright law, then we're getting warmer but even then not so much. People over react to the problems we have today, when you start infringing on the average person's rights a lot more than this people like me who are generally calm and don't freak out about small infractions will start getting mad, and thats when it will boil over and either a political or violent adjustment to the direction of the country will happen.

There is a big difference between Al Qaeda style resistance and collective resistance. Sure, Hamas and Al Qaeda exist but... they are losing and they will inevitably lose.

They can hold out for a long time with their low tech, but they still take losses at a 50:1 ratio.

You have AR-15s but do you have UAVs? Do you have tanks? Do you even have nukes, for that matter, that ancient 60 year old tech?

You can't win as a collective which means you can't win. Unless you can deploy an army that will actually DEFEAT the opposing army you are talking about Hamas-style resistance. The Palestinians are not winning. They are conquered. It's already over. They are bad people to take advice from.

I totally disagree; your analysis is flawed. The reason movements like Al Qaeda will lose is because their ideology doesn't have the right support. When you try to sidestep the right to freedom this country was founded upon you are picking a fight that extends into the core of the people, including the intellectuals that made all that high tech weaponry possible. Also, our all-volunteer military is made up of our people - our brothers, cousins, sisters etc.

The intellectuals are pacified by their McMansions and $150,000 student debt.

Your brothers, cousins, and sisters don't understand what is wrong with censoring the internet. They think it's a good thing because they're afraid of pedophiles.

The whole point (as I explained) of modern non-lethal weaponry is that it can be used to enforce bad laws without causing a public uprising. Brothers, cousins, sisters, etc think waterboarding is okay because they watch too much 24. They think anyone who flees in pain due to LRAD is a pussy cause it's just like loud music.

You really think intellectuals would be content holed up in their McMansions while a struggle for liberty was raging in this country? And our family and friends which make up the military wouldn't know which side to stand on? I'm not talking about censoring some silly media, I'm talking about if it came down to the difference between liberty and tyranny, of infringing assembly and free speech.

>You really think intellectuals would be content holed up in their McMansions while a struggle for liberty was raging in this country?

WTF has been going on for the last 40 years? There has been an accelerating decline in liberty since about 1970.

Your sisters, cousins, etc have proven themselves to be easily manipulated idiots.

Intellectuals have proven themselves to be spineless lovers of comfort who will complain but never put anything tangible on the line.

I meant if a line was crossed. I don't think we've crossed any line. We've come close, but the people still hold power.

pretty much. Do you really think we'd take our cheeto-stained hands off the keyboard and start shooting at people? I know I'm not ready to get shot for some abstract idea. Sure, I'd maybe spend some time and/or money, but I don't think anyone but the crazies would start shooting.

Besides, I think that shooting back is rarely effective in modern warfare; it's all about 'hearts and minds' these days, not about who can kill more of the other dudes.

Iran seems to be demonstrating the limit of what's achievable by winning 'hearts and minds' alone.

It's pretty difficult to invade another country and win any 'hearts and minds' - I mean, no matter how shitty the previous government was, you are a foreign invader.

I think Iran (and Iran's success against the USSR) is a prime example of how 'hearts and minds' is much more important than guns and bombs in modern warfare.

It's definitely important. But the current situation in Iran suggests that Hearts and Minds alone isn't sufficient.

lol. I'm going to shut up. I re-read this and I probably make no sense as I wrote iran rather than Afghanistan.

>There is a big difference between Al Qaeda style resistance and collective resistance. Sure, Hamas and Al Qaeda exist but... they are losing and they will inevitably lose.

Isn't that what they said about the Viet Cong?

Who eventually did lose to an extent. By the '70s the war had moved into a more conventional phase with the NVA doing the majority of the fighting. When Saigon fell it was not to VC guerillas but NVA tanks.

Have you seen vietnam? They definitely didn't win anything from that war.

It sure is a hollow victory if your entire country and way of life is destroyed and all your descendants are horribly mutated, etc.

If winning means getting what Vietnam got, I'll take surrender and slavery.

What happened to land of the free, home of the brave? Are you sure you're American?

Why would he be?

I don't mean to troll, and perhaps I missed the tongue-in-cheek element, but this kind of corny quote means nothing. Canada did not fight a war for the "land of the free" and is doing quite fine in its slavery to the British crown, thank you.

>You have AR-15s but do you have UAVs? Do you have tanks? Do you even have nukes, for that matter, that ancient 60 year old tech?

You don't need any of this, In guerrilla warfare mechanized infantry (tanks) are really only good for expensive body armor and neither side could use nukes if they had them (you would just be bombing yourself). Utilizing either would cause to many civilian casualties and the nasty part of guerrilla warfare is that for each 1 killed their are 50 recruits that have seen family and friends die (hardcore). Once this happens you have one of three choices surrender, withdraw or genocide.

I feel like we're going in circles.

1. You can't win through pacifism because of modern anti-protestor technology.

2. You can't win through conventional warfare because you have no collective ability to project power except through the incumbent government.

3. You can't win through guerilla warfare because guerillas never win wars. They just make life really suck for everyone.

... It will be some police/military with guns vs citizens/police/military with guns

I agree that it won't get to that. but if it did, barring massive police/military mutiny, who do you think is going to win that one? If both sides have guns, I'd say it will likely be the side with more training, experience, body armour, huge ammo stock piles and armoured vehicles. Unless the majority of the police/military mutiny I don't think even the US civilian population with your ridiculous amount of guns could prevail.

In equal numbers the military prevails.

I'm not worried about the police force. They have shotguns and pistols just like everybody else, and in most cases the enthusiasts have just as much skill as the police.

And the military is tiny, less than 1% of the population. About 50% of the population owns at least 1 gun, and most who own at least 1 own several. If they can barely secure Iraq, there is no way they will secure the USA.

Well, they still kill something like 10-100 enemies for every soldier felled. I'm all for preventing it from getting to that point in the first place (not that I'm implying you are).

Side note: While I agree this particular article is relevant to HN, its starting to bring out the crazy a bit. Can we have a moratorium on political articles for a day or two to cool it off?

I totally disagree with a moratorium on anything that threatens liberty in the USA, especially when resulting discourse is among intellectual minds.

Um, I meant this article is okay, but we need to restore balance to the force afterword.

Guerilla warfare?

If the population collectively goes against their government there can be no doubt as to the outcome: The politicians lose.

Swat teams are only effective against small groups and individuals - they can't kill 300 million+ people.

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