> Imagine if the US suddenly had a dictator
This is why we have the second amendment. And the constitution as the thing to which office-holders swear allegiance to rather than to "the party" or "the president".
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The argument is not that a rebellious citizenry will necessarily win a war, it's that it will draw out a bloody civil war so long and so expensive as to be a form of mutually assured destruction, the risk of which acts as a check in and of itself.
You don't really need militias. If a majority of the people oppose the dictator and the military man are from these families then your coup is going to fail. That's why dictatorships with strong oppositions try to lure a portion of their population against another portion or hire an army from another country.
In a nutshell, the current US army is not going to attack their fellow citizens anytime soon for the eyes of a dictator.
Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. On paper, none of them stood a chance. How’s everything played out, in your opinion?
The 2nd amendment made a lot of sense when weaponry consisted of horses and rifles, not computer-guided missiles. If there was ever a true US dictator, the 2nd amendment would mostly be used by the oppressed to rob, attack, and oppress one another.
If memory serves me, the Russians gave up against the Mujihadeen forces(who had help from the US; the Soviet Union was also going broke). The US came back with it's tail between it's legs after fighting Vietnam guerillas and farmers. Military might isn't everything.
Practically speaking, I don't think today's Americans are equipped to provide a credit threat against a dictator and may never will.
The US has arguably won only one war in the last 70 years (being at war or at least armed conflict for most of those 70 years) with the largest most powerful military in the world.
Yes, absolutely. If it's a true revolt.
The reason for this is because if the rebels have support of the population then they can get intelligence and material support from said population. They will be able to walk circles around military bureaucracy.
Were as the USA Military is dependent on the USA population for economic support. No economic support means no military sustainability. Sure they have stockpiles of weapons and whatnot, but there is more that is need to run a successful campaign against domestic guerrillas then just stockpiles of weapons.
The reality is that in order to overthrow the Federal government all the American people have to do is just choose to stop paying their taxes and refusing to do business with the Federal government. The Federal government would be dead within months.
Firearms are redundant. What they are useful for, however, is to prevent politicians from getting bad ideas... like using the military against their own population.
It’s not very difficult to attach a hand grenade (or even a pipe bomb) to a quadcopter drone and use it to attack a military checkpoint or a politician’s entourage. It’s simply much harder to defend than it is to attack nowadays, and centralized power is offset by scattered, decentralized resistance.
Finally, you might be able to convince a unit based in one state to attack another, but you’re unlikely to have the loyalty of all generals in a civil war.
And it's likely hard to get troops to shoot their own countrymen.
As direct evidence, over the past few decades the US has been unable to stop a vastly smaller, vastly less armed resistance in various regions of the world.
Maybe you underestimate the power of a few armed people against a military. And in any case, if it came to people vs military (which I do not think is anywhere close to happening), armed people do much better than unarmed.
It is not meant to be used in a stable state. It’s a Hobbesian point of last resort, to be used when democracy has failed and autocracy/tyranny is in effect. It’s a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency, so to speak.
I've posted this here before: The US military has an urban warfare document that states the number of troops required to secure N population. It's based on their experience and the experience of others in past wars in holding urban terrain. If you add up all of the military, police, national guard, fbi, etc... you aren't even close to the number the US military says are required to secure the US. Even if they hired millions of people to do so, they would still leave large swaths of the US unsecured (like the rocky mountains) where insurgents could operate.
I don't know why when this is brought up people imagine citizens would stand face to face with the US military. Like they would be so dumb as to stick their face in front of a gun and ask they be shot.
The US military says they can't secure the US from an insurgency. If you think otherwise, I would seriously like to hear what you base that on.
We’re seeing this play out in the Middle East, most recently with a drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil production.
Here's the thing - from an ethical standpoint, it never makes sense to actually fire it. If you're dead, well, you're dead - there's no sense in murdering millions of citizens of an enemy nation.
At the same time, by its very presence, you've made it very seemingly difficult for your enemy to ever engage in a nuclear first strike because they'd be signing their own death warrant.
Could the US military defeat a bunch of armed citizens? Well, purely by the numbers, probably. It'd be really bad for morale though, and a lot of innocent people would die, and realistically, there's not really much of a country left at that point anymore. Without a check, the Government can do whatever it wants because it always has a cheat card, but with the check, the government has to at least pretend to respect the citizens.
> ...it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time
This assumption did not work out for the Confederacy in the Civil War. What makes you think it would work today?
I think they do- but we are so far removed from people actually caring about providing a credible threat as of now. Once people lose their access to basic amenities though, everything changes. And the type of people that do see the government as a threat now, already have organized militias, rudimentary training, military connections, and stockpile weapons and food. The right to organize into a militia is a constitutional right, and extremist elements have certainly been taking advantage of that.
And logistically speaking, we have very porous borders and inevitably foreign entities that would seek to assist an insurgency. The American Revolutionaries had the support of the French, and the Southern confederacy had the support of the British.
Everybody does not die in a nuclear war. You want your survivors to have a better chance. Leaving whoever nuked you mostly untouched is highly counterproductive to that.
Even if Union's military was to use multimegaton nukes on rebelling cities, and red army kept 100% loyalty, the military would've still lost due to logistical exhaustion.
Armed forces rely on much more reliable supply train to function effectively than any kind of insurgent force. Armor and air force is useless unless fueled, oiled, armed and well maintained.
Let me make sure I understand your basic premise: the ability to defend yourself against a tyrannical dictatorship made sense until the government developed better technology, now it's pointless so just give up your guns?
Aside from being completely contrary to the American spirit of defending yourself from tyranny, it's based on the bogus premise that the advanced military technology can be used effectively against its own people. Where is the military going to fire those "computer guided missiles?" Into every rural home and every urban apartment window of everyone they suspect has guns, with thousands of civilian collateral casualties? Are tanks and fighter jets going to roll in and level entire economic hubs like cities? Are they going to destroy their own infrastructure? Are you envisioning "the rebellion" would set up a nice neat base in some remote location for the military to aim its tech at? Do you think the real men and women of the military would follow orders to destroy its own hometowns and families? How long before regional coups? How big do you think the US military is, relative to the armed civilian population? You are also aware that soldiers and police wear recognizable uniforms, while "the rebellion" doesn't?
I don't think you've thought this through.
Unlike the Taliban or the Viet Cong, the US citizenry, even armed, would be like chaff.
edit: so many downvotes. I guess I hit a sore spot. I'm sorry the truth hurts, guys and gals. :)
We are very, very far away from a civil war or anything resembling what is going to happen in Hong Kong. But if things do ever start to skid in the wrong direction, we'll end up doing the same thing that others have done.
Put up a fight with or without "militias", and then after it's crushed, when the economy collapses, money is worthless, and crazed libertarian warlords rule the land... mass migration. The irony will not be lost on latin America.
Active duty personnel cannot be considered citizen soldiers because their service is not compulsory and they are full-time professionals, not merely civilians in service.
Reservists might be considered citizen soldiers, if you're a bit loose with the criteria that service must be a compulsory civic duty.
Around the time of the founding, there was privately-owned field artillery (and rifles were still in limited deployment).
The second amendment made sense when calling up the militia/posse comitatus was an essential feature of how the government at all levels dealt with internal and external security threats, such that it was not planning to meet such needs with fully professional forces is most cases.
Note that this was true, in both internal and external cases, for much of the life of the Republic though less so over time; for external security the idea was essentially written off after Vietnam with the adoption of the all-volunteer force. For internal security it's just about as dead, though there's not an equivalent milestone.
While there was a fair amount of war wariness among the public, continued resistance by the Confederacy was not something the North would have tolerated, especially since they clearly had the upper hand at that point.
That's the real (failed) purpose of the second amendment, to prevent the use of a professional armed force for internal and/or external security, with it's invariable separate subculture, so that the views of the masses of the people and those of the armed forces would not be distinct.
The US military is very good at wreaking havoc in places where you can just crusie-missle a square kilometer and not have any problems. That becomes difficult domestically: you can't just arbitrarily wipe your own cities off the map cause, you know, those cities are the ones who generate you income/GDP and have your actual population in them. There's no point in being a dictator of a wasteland.
Army National Guard 345,153
Army Reserve 219,054
I believe a significant number of soldiers also only do 4 or 8 years and then return to civilian life, they aren’t a permanent military class like the Roman legions or whatever. As you mention a lot depends on what you consider a “citizen soldier” though.
And even with that, the American Revolution relied on backing from one of the top two European powers at the time to succeed.
If we descend to such a state where an American president is (a) willing to completely annihilate the population, (b) can either bypass congress or get their approval to do so, and (c) can mobilize our military to perform the annihilation, then perhaps your point is correct.
I wouldn't exactly hold my breath on that.
The VC were utterly crushed, leading the NVA to get more directly involved in the South rather than using them as a catspaw. To the extent that the combined operation had success (which it clearly did) it was because of the NVA—a regular army—and the backing they had even further up the Communist food chain.
Basically, yes. Do you honestly think people would have any chance against probably the most powerful army in the world? Sure, they could try fighting a guerilla warfare, they'd even inflict some casualties against the enemy but it's unlikely that in the end they'd succeed against an army that is professional, highly skilled, better equipped, has better offensive and defensive capabilities, knows a lot more about tactics and logistics and has trained for this type of situation on a daily basis.
> Are they going to destroy their own infrastructure?
Would they even consider it their own infrastructure? Or would they consider it infrastructure currently held by rebels, which needs to be either seized or destroyed?
> Do you think the real men and women of the military would follow orders to destroy its own hometowns and families?
I suspect a lot of them would destroy towns if they we're told that these are now enemy bases. This has been repeated in many parts of the world throughout the history, even recent one. If they wouldn't, they'd be defectors and it really wouldn't matter whether the war was fought with modern weapons or sticks and stones.
Are you expecting the whole US to join this insurgency/rebellion/civil war? Most of the gun owners today already support Trump - a man who idolizes authoritarianism.
Instead of a scenario where the entirety of the U.S. police force quells a rebellion made up of 100% of the gun owning populace, it would be more likely that the dictator gets the gun owning populace on his/her side (not far from today's situation!) as reward for supporting the authoritarianism policies under the guise of democracy.
That's a big if. How many Arab Spring revolutions crumbled under this assumption?
Besides, look at today's political climate - the majority of gun owners are backing the man who is the most authoritarian. You don't have to be worried about a gun owning populace if they're "voting" for you already.
A) Infrastructure. a huge portion of the US military might is not deployed in the US.
B) Bombings and collateral damage. The military may not give a fuck about the infrastructure of another country but bombing US cities is damaging their own infrastructure. Litterally cutting of their nose to spite their face.
C) Getting soldiers to shoot at other humans is hard. Getting them to shoot at other Americans is even harder.
D) We sure wiped the floor with the Koreans and Vietnamese without the first 3 points right? How hard could a country an order of magnitude larger, with much better armed citizenry be?
War is not rational. People will destroy all sorts of stuff if something close to their identity is under threat.
Blowing up a home or two harboring a "terrorist cell" during a meeting I'm sure will be deterrence enough for a lot of those gun owners.
> Are they going to destroy their own infrastructure?
The infrastructure is the exact kind of ground that can be held much more securely against pistols and rifles using the U.S.'s advanced weaponry.
> Do you think the real men and women of the military would follow orders to destroy its own hometowns and families?
See the Arab Spring for reference on this one
> How long before regional coups?
I'm sure a civilian populace will experience war fatigue waaay before a trained, well paid, well fed military.
You're coming up with a hypothetical scenario where it's the entire US government against the entire populace. In the real world it doesn't happen that way - the populace is divided between the rebels and the government supporters.
Besides, look at today's political climate: most of the gun owners are the one's backing our most authoritarian leader! If, somehow, we were to slide into dictatorship you can be sure the leader would make whatever promises necessary to get the gun toters on his/her side.
Switzerland is a good model. The NRA loves to point at rates of Swiss gun ownership. If the USA implemented all of Switzerland’s gun laws I think you’d be okay.
For protecting against your own government, it really doesn't make that much sense. Your own government has to have support of your own military, which gets its members from the population: the military is made of your own neighbors. If your military is committed to the government and doesn't mind shooting their own family and neighbors, then you have a problem that arming people with small arms isn't going to solve: the rebels just aren't going to be that numerous. More likely, the military isn't going to support this action at all, and will mutiny and either implode as different factions within the military fight each other, or the military will stage a coup and take over the government (this has happened before many times, in other nations). In short, if the military supports the dictator, the armed opposition really has no chance of winning. If the opposition has a chance of winning, they don't need weapons because the military isn't going to support the dictator.
Unless they don't have the support because of the rebellion's guns.
If anyone wearing a uniform is being shot by their neighbors, military support for the dictatorship is going to dry up quickly.
Relying on very expensive advanced weaponry is the modern equivalent of relying on mercenaries, and Machiavelli told us why mercenaries are bad.
Compare
* armed citizenry gathering illegally and getting slaughtered by a superior military force
* weaponless non-violent citizenry gathering illegally and getting slaughtered by a military force (which would have been superior to the citizens if they had been armed)
You've already conceded that the armed citizenry is no match for the military. At best your point about morale is equally true in both cases. At worst arming the crowd gives a boost to military morale because armed opponents gives them a way to rationalize their slaughtering.
Finally: if the slaughter of innocent citizens still matters to a critical mass of other citizens, it's vastly more powerful for them to hear that the citizens had been unarmed. And if there is no longer a critical mass of other citizens to organize against the military, then you're screwed either way.
I just can't figure out what the benefit to arms would be in this case, especially given that there obvious downsides to arming a population.
In 1924 in the Soviet Union all firearms were banned except for smoothbore shotguns which pose minimal In the danger outside of close range. [2] This was greatly expanded with increased penalties and also eventually applied to knives as well. The culling of opponents and directed starvations began around 1929 leading to the deaths of millions of Soviets.
In 1966 China laid out the foundation of their now famously strict gun laws. That was the same year that Mao began the "Cultural Revolution" leading to the deaths of millions of Chinese.
Ultimately their civilians, by the time the worst came, had no way to pose any resistance. And so they died.
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As for our situation, I think we can appeal to the declaration of independence: "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
You're comparing a transient discomfort for a relatively tiny number of people entering the country illegally, to events where millions of citizens were systematically and intentionally killed or starved to death by their governments.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disarmament_of_the_German_Jews
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_control_in_the_Soviet_Unio...
IIRC, the minimum force is 1 soldier per 50 citizens. That's enough for the military to be so prevalent in an area that it would be impossible for insurgents to operate. For the US that would be 6 million soldiers (+ soldiers for the unpopulated areas). Those numbers usually don't include civilian police forces, but even if you did include them, the US military would be millions of people short.
But yes, the insurgency needs support from the people. Not a majority, but a network and general support must exist in order for it to survive.
The only effective bombing campaign that subdued a citizenry outright in military history were nukes, and if we ever crossed that line as a nation where the government nuked it's own citizens to quell rebellion, we are never coming back from that as a nation. It would leave a scar on humanity. Whatever would be left of the United States after that event would curse the people that did it.
So to your point, the 2A is not antiquated, if the US government had any interest in having an intact territory, at some point it would need to get face to face with the people, and the presence of firearms in the citizenry acts as a check against this possibility, and an escape option for the citizens of it ever got there.
Who do think we've been fighting in Afghanistan for the last 18 years? Impoverished farmers with AKs and explosives.
>>>I truly do not get it.
Insurgents win by undermining the legitimacy of the government, and moving into the vacuums that are created. You don't do that be attempting to fight force-on-force against overwhelming conventional power. You do it by targeting the mayors, governors, police chiefs, district attorneys, tax collectors, etc.....basically all of the key leadership of low-level government, and law enforcement. Without the support or at least tolerance of the population, ANY army will have exploitable vulnerabilities in essentially hostile territory.
Curious how you think that would alter the conclusion? If anything organized resistance would be more effective then, because you already had state militias and rough technological parity with the military.
This demonstrates to me that you understand the political power of an armed citizenry, the same group that you used the first half of your post to discredit by suggesting "blowing up a home or two" would be enough to suppress them.
With supply lines halfway across the globe, and a military most of whose personnel don't speak the language, don't know the country, don't know the culture, etc. And, in most of time we've notionally been trying, only a fairly small deployment compared to our total military force.
I feel like you're treating all guns as equal, when that wasn't true in the civil war and is completely not true now.
Why would you draw that conclusion, when pretty much every available case study (re: drone strikes and terrorism) clearly shows otherwise?
>>>Besides, look at today's political climate: most of the gun owners are the one's backing our most authoritarian leader!
Is he really our most authoritarian? How authoritarian would you rank him compared to Obama, the first President to order a drone strike to kill an American citizen without due process? [1]
I still believe that, even if he failed to persuade the gun owners, a dictator's armies win against an armed populace.
I'm pretty sure I read those case studies differently than you do. Why, do you suppose, the military continues to make drone strikes if they are ineffective?
> How authoritarian would you rank [Trump] compared to Obama
Waaaaay more authoritarian. By his own admission, even. Trump praises, celebrates, and socializes with dictators on a much greater scale than Obama.
And if the single largest signal you're drawing from Anwar al-Awlaki's killing is that Obama is authoritarian, then I think you need to step back and examine that situation more broadly.
You are placing waaaay too much faith in technology. Look at the Saudis: one of the worlds highest military budgets, and stockpiles of first-rate western hardware.....they are getting absolutely routed by Houthis, who run up desert mountains with just sandals, an AK, and a mouth full of stimulants.
>>>Sure, they could try fighting a guerilla warfare, they'd even inflict some casualties against the enemy but it's unlikely that in the end they'd succeed against an army that is professional, highly skilled, better equipped, has better offensive and defensive capabilities, knows a lot more about tactics and logistics and has trained for this type of situation on a daily basis.
What is the data that is driving you to this conclusion? Are you ignoring pretty much every counter-insurgency experience the US has had for the last 50 years? [2][3]
>>>I suspect a lot of them would destroy towns if they we're told that these are now enemy bases.
I suspect you don't know actual American military personnel very well, especially officers and NCOs, and how seriously we take the Laws of Warfare, AND the Constitution.
[1]https://www.snafu-solomon.com/2019/09/pics-of-houthi-rebels-...
[2]https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/02/05/why-america-lost-in-afg...
[3]https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2015-0...
>The Jews of Germany constituted less than 1 percent of the country's population. It is preposterous to argue that the possession of firearms would have enabled them to mount resistance against a systematic program of persecution implemented by a modern bureaucracy, enforced by a well-armed police state, and either supported or tolerated by the majority of the German population. Mr. Carson's suggestion that ordinary Germans, had they had guns, would have risked their lives in armed resistance against the regime simply does not comport with the regrettable historical reality of a regime that was quite popular at home. Inside Germany, only the army possessed the physical force necessary for defying or overthrowing the Nazis, but the generals had thrown in their lot with Hitler early on.
You could even argue that armed push back from the Jews would have resulted in more popular support for their extermination and would have hastened and worsened the Holocaust.
>As for our situation, I think we can appeal to the declaration of independence...
The Declaration of Independence is irrelevant here. We aren't talking about any legal, moral, or ethical reason for opposing despots. We are talking about it from a practical perspective. It is wildly less practical today than it was in the 18th century because the growth in military might of today's government has far outpaced the firepower available to the citizenry.
>You're comparing a transient discomfort for a relatively tiny number of people entering the country illegally, to events where millions of citizens were systematically and intentionally killed or starved to death by their governments.
And just like with the earlier examples, things start slow. The temperate of the political water in the US is rising and like a frog, no one has yet jumped out of the pot. That doesn't spell doom yet, but it also doesn't forecast great things if the political environment continues to worsen.
Certainly an insurgent in a dictatorship has not won back his liberty. Therefore an armed populace, in my mind, does not prevent a dictatorship.
Have you heard of the Viet Cong?
Also have to factor in the massive defections of trained soldiers and officers from the military. The service members I know are not loyal to a person or group, they are loyal to the idea of the republic.
I normally wouldn't respond to a post like this, but if you are thinking about hurting people that you disagree with, please seek out some help. This sentence honestly reads like a warning flag to me for someone who has reached their limit for debating peacefully with others.
If the rich and powerful consolidate autonomous labor under their control, this removes the self-interest of keeping people around, and would allow them to unleash whatever level of violence is needed, all the way up to genocide.
"The means of defense against a foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home." —James Madison[1]
"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." —Thomas Jefferson[1]
"What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." -Thomas Jefferson[2]
[1]https://theshalafi.blogspot.com/2010/07/few-quotes-by-foundi...
[2]https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United...
It’s likely any successful revolution or insurgency would have outside backing.
Vietnam was backed by the USSR, the taliban receives support from Pakistan, the insurgency in Iraq was supported by Iran, and so on.
Just like we ourselves destabilized Syria and Libya by supporting insurgencies there.
As demonstrated by the 2016 elections, there are other countries out there even now who are eager to interfere with the US.
In a theoretical future US dictatorship, perhaps support for an insurgency might come over the border from Canada and Mexico. We are dealing with a hypothetical situation far from what today’s international and national politics look like, of course.
I love numbers so let's talk about those using the Iraq war as an example.
Here's an estimate of the number of casualties in the Iraq war: https://www.iraqbodycount.org/
Roughly 200k civilians, 90k combatants.
According to wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-National_Force_%E2%80%93... 5k western coalition forces died.
Even if these numbers are wildly inaccurate, I don't like those odds. Yes, it is difficult for the army to actually completely squash the insurgency, but there is a very messy grey zone between "winning" and "losing" where those in power relentlessly oppress the rest at relatively little cost to themselves.
I'm not saying, by the way, not to resist oppression, I am simply saying that the weapons that civilians cannot buy are very very scary, and it is probably wise to pick one's battles.
Which sounds like a deterrent.....until the insurgents use autonomous vehicle technology to pilot dump trucks full of fertilizer explosives into the enforcers.
https://hugokaaman.com/2017/02/14/the-history-and-adaptabili...
https://hugokaaman.com/2019/03/13/islamic-state-the-cross-pr...
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/Eng...
Wiki provides numerous examples of early commentary here. [1] I find the most compelling and clear to be that of Judge Thomas M. Cooley, which I'll include at the bottom due to its length. In brief form: he posits that if the law were constrained only to the militia, and not the masses of people that may comprise it, then it would be quite a pointless amendment as the very government it seeks to protect individuals from could undermine it by inaction or neglect in regards to the formation of that militia.
What happened in 2008 was DC vs Heller. [2] After DC banned guns in 1975, a police officer found himself in a situation where he was able to have a gun during his line of duty but was left unarmed in the increasingly dangerous and deteriorating neighborhood that he lived in. He petitioned the NRA for help fighting the law. They refused, so he went to the Cato Institute. They (Heller along with 5 other citizens) filed suit, it made its way to the supreme court, and the supreme court unambiguously affirmed that it's indeed an individual right.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller
Full quote of Judge Cooley:
"It might be supposed from the phraseology of this provision that the right to keep and bear arms was only guaranteed to the militia; but this would be an interpretation not warranted by the intent. The militia, as has been elsewhere explained, consists of those persons who, under the law, are liable to the performance of military duty, and are officered and enrolled for service when called upon. But the law may make provision for the enrolment of all who are fit to perform military duty, or of a small number only, or it may wholly omit to make any provision at all; and if the right were limited to those enrolled, the purpose of this guaranty might be defeated altogether by the action or neglect to act of the government it was meant to hold in check. The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is, that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms; and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose. But this enables the government to have a well-regulated militia; for to bear arms implies something more than the mere keeping; it implies the learning to handle and use them in a way that makes those who keep them ready for their efficient use; in other words, it implies the right to meet for voluntary discipline in arms, observing in doing so the laws of public order."
You're right, I don't. But, if Americans don't need to fear that they'll have to fight the US Army, why have the 2nd amendment at all? Who would they need to protect themselves against?
Like cutting the head from a hydra, this would spawn dozens of new "terrorist cells" in response. Military is made from the citizenry, and without moral authority, command would lose power and become opposed by many of their own forces (in addition to the general populace)
That's not what I said. I said the military probably wins numerically. For what it's worth, numerically the civil war should have been over in about 6 months and an entirely lopsided victory by the Union. "Probably" should most certainly to be understand as "the most likely but not certain outcome". The US probably would have won Vietnam if they had continued fighting another decade - would it have been worth it though?
And the time element is part of the issue. It turns out if you show up, massacre of a bunch of unarmed folks in a day or two and then do a halfway decent job of suppressing it, well, Tiananmen square.
In the US, when we've had the military fire on citizens, the response was a bunch of upset, armed citizens said "We'd really like to see due process happen." And then unlike Tiananmen, the perpetrators were arrested and tried in a civilian judicial system because that was less terrible than an armed population getting rather upset.
Remember, this is the whole reason why the founding fathers were pro individual ownership of firearms - they had been the victims of military massacres, military troops being quartered in private houses, and eventually their own government hiring mercenaries to enforce the peace through force. Part of why the British chose to hire foreign mercenaries for swaths of the war instead of use their own troops was because they were concerned about morale and defections. Likewise, the first thing the British wanted to do once things started going south was to lock up all the ammunition and arms so the citizens couldn't put up any trouble.
No, clearly not. Iraq and Afghanistan are proof of that.
The argument that the US military could so easily wipe the floor with a domestic insurgent militia that Second Amendment is obsolete hasn't been credible for 20 years. Widespread gun ownership does block several mechanisms of descent into dictatorship.
It should be noted that the Bill of Rights was originally interpreted to only limit the actions of the federal government, not the state governments. It should also be noted that one of the major events on the road to the American Revolution was the British government's attempts to disarm the militias in Massachusetts, which resulted in the Battles of Lexington and Concord, so the theory that the government might permit the militia but outlaw its arms was not mere theory but an actual historic act well-known to the drafters.
The modern controversy is whether or not the right in the Second Amendment is a right to keep arms is inherently a military right [1] or if it protects personal arms entirely separate from military contexts. The text isn't particularly helpful, and I suspect in large part because for the people who wrote it, there wasn't a separation between the right to personal use versus the right to military use--if you could use them, you were a member of the militia.
[1] I'm using military as a catch-all term here, which would include militia, civil defense, police, and other similar occupations. In the 18th century, these duties would have been performed by the military or the militia, as dedicated police forces had yet to be invented.
It's astonishing how many people these days have suddenly become armchair generals to push back against the very foundation of the freedom of the United States in the form of this tired argument.
The firebombs and the nukes didn't subdue the citizenry. They were still willing to follow their cause to the death. You can't win against that unless you're going to kill each and every last one of them.
The nukes showed their leader that his people would be destroyed with little cost to the enemy and convinced him to call it off.
Tyranny always has public support. The evil wizard lord of a kingdom scenario has never and will never occur in reality - someone despised by everyone cannot come into power... That doesn't mean the tyrant has the majority of public support, but I'd find it hard to believe any tyrant has less than 30% when coming to power.
Does he really want to do that, seeing as how I have a gun and he doesn't?
One of the few things we can say for certain is that tyrants don't like having their targets armed. Would having arms have saved the Jews, the Soviets, the Chinese, etc? That's impossible to answer. But it'd certainly have given them more options and opportunities, rather than fewer.
You realize everyone in this comment thread can see my comment, right above yours, right? Willfully misinterpreting what I've written to seem hostile when in reality it's you who suggested Americans should kill each other.
You must need a win, and we've all been there, but insurgency isn't what the 2nd Amendment was about, it never was, and lying won't change that fact.
A small armed resistance in the US would be incredibly ineffectual. At best preforming unless but inspiring attacks, but more realistically simply dying in droves.
You can look at hundreds of past insurrections for inspiration, but grassroots military might has almost nothing to do with their success.
PS: Just look back on the US Civil war which included actual defection of large chunks of the military etc. They started with territory and an actual military including trained officers, cannons, and warships yet still lost. Now picture what would have happened if the southern military had stayed with the north.
On the other hand, if your battle plan involves using up an entire truck for each enemy soldier (or squad?) neutralized, I feel like you're gonna have a hard time scaling that up to open warfare.
By deterrence, did you actually mean motivation?
Killing someone's family and friends often radicalizes them, and I would say it very rarely pacifies them.
I mean look at the example of the HK protests: the police didn't stop them by kicking some people's teeth in [1], they actually fueled them by doing that.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/100000006702862/hon...
One of the big differences between US gun culture and Swiss gun culture is that in the US we believe in a certain right "to enjoy arms", to keep and bear them in an undisciplined and disorganised way.
You assume that all members of the US military would fight on behalf of the government. All members of the armed forces swear an oath to the US Constitution, not the federal government, so it's pretty much certain that a non-trivial proportion would defect from the will of the government if the orders were contrary to the oath sworn to the US Constitution. At that point, that superior training, discipline, logistics, intelligence, force projection, everything is also in the hands of the insurgency against unconstitutional orders.
Whatever rights they wanted to give the states in the Constitution, they gave to "the states". The right to bear arms was specifically given to "the people", to prevent disarmament.
It doesn’t matter how advanced your technology is, there’s a certain point where numbers win.
You’re also assuming that military personnel themselves wouldn’t defect and side with their fellow citizens in such a situation, which would also make a lot of the same technology available to the hypothetical resistance.
When you look at those numbers, it becomes clearer why pushes to disarm the population when there isn’t a problem present such a huge threat to the country.
But they wouldn't get access to the ammo needed to use those guns, which are stored in a central community location to combat an unwanted suicide problem (and aren't they semi-auto anyways?).
They also aren't bought, but part of ones' militia service. You know, that first clause of the USA's 2nd amendment that the pro gun lobby says to ignore.
The militia is always in its construction open to everyone, whereas the gun community is seen as a kind of subculture today.
The militia brings people together in a context where the underlying story about arms is not one of power, violence or even self-defence but rather one of duty, personal discipline, safety and cooperation.
The militia provides a way for people to learn a lot about firearms and firearms safety before buying a gun, as opposed to the situation in the US we have today where often the requirements for an intro course include one's own gun.
As a social institution, militia would not necessarily have to be government funded.
That said, your point is important and something many people don't seem to understand: those foreign leaders we in the West like to describe as tyrants, dictators, despots, strongmen, etc, are generally at least popular at home, and often adored.
There are several things wrong with the above statement ...
First, in many (most) states of the United States, you can indeed purchase a fully automatic weapon / suppressor / grenade launcher / "destructive device" / etc. You'll have to pay a $200 transfer tax, submit to registration and fingerprinting and either get local CLEO signoff (Sheriff, Chief of Police) or purchase as a trust. Interestingly, you also sort of give up your fourth amendment rights as you grant the BATF right to check on the "device" at any time, for any reason.
Second, military (automatic) weapons in Switzerland are distributed by the Swiss Army and are kept in local possession under those auspices. A swiss cannot simply walk into a gun shop and buy an MP5 on a whim - regardless of background check.
Finally, and most importantly, Swiss gun laws were dramatically reworked in the past year as part of a general normalization of Swiss and EU regulations. There was a referendum and it passed - many aspects of Swiss gun laws that you may romanticize are now a thing of the past.
Possibly says a lot about what the government does or does not consider a threat.
You dropped this when you quoted me. I wonder why...
To think that we should resort to violence instead of using the systems in place for peaceful negotiations is insane.
Also, interesting how you only quoted slave-owning inspirations of Southern Democrats, who buried their heads in the sand, preferring to talk high mindedly in their ivory towers about the Constitution than actually fix the immense problems facing the people they purportedly wanted to help.
As such, dictatorship and imposition of rule through force has to be considered in light of other political options. Oppressive government does not generally start with an all out war to subdue the populace, using strategic weapons like missiles and bombers. Insurrections are managed with lighter arms not because totally destroying the enemy is not a military option but rather because it is not consonant with the relevant political goals.
The right to bear arms isn't about what you do for all out war -- that's when you move from citizen soldiers to building armies -- it's about trimming the distribution at the lower end and improving the odds of the citizenry being able to make it up the food chain in a reasonable amount of time. (Knowing what guns are actually called is a surprising advantage there.) Even Hitler started small, and disarmed the citizenry early.
In short, until the 14th Amendment (and even for some time afterwards), it was generally held that the Bill of Rights only bound Congress. The 1st Amendment starts with "Congress shall make no law," explicitly limiting it to the federal government. While the other amendments don't explicitly mention Congress or states, the original proposals did explicitly include mention of states in some of them, which were struck out before being accepted by Congress.
Trying to warp this specific Amendment written 220+ years ago to serve as guidance for modern times is a farce, and has been manipulated by special interests into causing the murder of hundreds of thousands of people.
Thomas M. Cooley recognized that, but didn't draw the better conclusion; that the Second Amendment needs to be revoked.
2008 was a substantial setback, but it isn't the end of the conversation. The Second Amendment will be the thing our grandkids shame us most about.
You're going to have to go much further right than you seem to think to arrive at a conclusion of, "I need to commit acts of terrorism against my own country because I believe the US government is tyrannical."
Wars are comprised of many battles, which may or may not cause one side to "win." Wars are over when both sides agree to stop. What compels a side to agree to stop? Many, many things. The US won every major battle in Vietnam, yet there isn't a clear cut winner. The CSA probably would have been an independent nation had Lincoln not been reelected in 1864, a victory Lincoln himself didn't think would happen.
The point being, an insurgency, yes, ultimately wants to "win", but winning includes things like protecting food / water, freer movement, slowing down an advance, creating safe areas, disrupting the enemies ability to wage war as effectively, or just general annoyance of the enemy. If this can go on until the opponent ultimately loses the will to fight, or offers acceptable concessions, it's a victory. It doesn't have to be an overwhelming, parade-in-the-streets type victory, it just has to make the enemy lose the will to fight the insurgency.
Lastly, popular support is from the factions, not the people - in medieval europe most of the people had no factional representation politically, all the power had been entirely concentrated in the various estates.
1. See Lord Vetinari in like every discworld book ever.
Why does the USA order strikes on terrorist targets, knowing full well there will be blowback? Because, on the whole, the strategy works.
Good article on this:
https://www.mic.com/articles/24210/gun-control-myth-the-seco...
This is being dishonest. Since the registry was closed in '86 there have been no additional automatic weapons added to circulation (for civilian owners) so prices start around $10k. They are basically unobtainable for people who don't have $10k to drop on a hobby and don't want to commit a felony with a coat hanger.
During Tet, the VC was crushed and ceased being an effective fighting force in the south. The NVA was forced to pick up the slack.
The eventual takeover of south Vietnam was by conventional military forces.
Of course, the text is vague enough that everyone will simply draw out whatever meaning they find reinforces their biases. Given that the most fervent upholders of the amendment today were draft dodgers back in the day, it is safe to say that protection of country is no longer important in their reading of the amendment.
At any rate, even if we accept that the clause is prefatory, that doesn’t make it meaningless, it has an effect on how gun rights should be maintained (so that the populace can overthrow the government or protect against foreign invaders, it is not protected for self defense, sport hunting, target practice, etc...).
The militia wouldn't have been mentioned if it wasn't relevant, and it's only relevant if it's a limitation to the individual right to bear arms.
Yeah, that "how little you've respected honest discourse and conversation" comment seems a little self-revealing especially when coupled with that latest edit.
This is definitely "I was just threatening you as a hypothetical, bro!" territory
The militia certainly are relevant but how they are relevant is the question, not the answer. There are a lot of ways to argue about that, but the right of keeping and bearing arms is literally called the right “of the people” — it isn’t assigned to any other body and the founders certainly had the language to do so if they wanted to.
How we keep and bear the arms is a great question. To my own mind, it would be better if training were more front-loaded. Right now, you buy a gun to be able to get training — seems backwards. It could also be much better if more people held guns through equitable ownership of trusts with firearms homed at a range or other secure location. The net effect would be fewer, more varied and better maintained firearms. The trust also provides a locus for training standards, liability insurance and cooperation with law enforcement.
This isn't the scholarly debate people make it out to be; there is a clear meaning, and it's been muddled over the past 30 years by special interests who have corrupted the original intent of the law.
The problems the second amendment was written to solve don't exist anymore, so the second amendment shouldn't exist anymore.
There isn’t anything scholarly or muddled about reading the “the right of the people” to reference a right held by people and not by states or the federal government.
Once you've done that you will realize that it was VERY specifically written to deal with a problem going on at the time. Hell, there are even comments in this very submission that also describe.
Google this. Get a factual basis under your feet and our conversation can continue. Figure out what Britain was trying to do at the time to the then-colonies, what laws it was passing. Go read federalist paper #46, understand Madison's contemporary writings of the time to get a better view of the mindset of the author of the Second Amendment. Read other contemporary writings, read opinions on the various Supreme Court decisions.
Do some homework, then ask the question again because while I could give you this lesson with my viewpoint already embedded, you need to arrive there on your own if your mind is actually going to be changed.
Your belief is contradicted by recent evidence.
> Why does the USA order strikes on terrorist targets, knowing full well there will be blowback? Because, on the whole, the strategy works.
No, it doesn't. They've been doing that for 20 years in Afghanistan, and we still have headlines like:
"Afghan government controls just 57 percent of its territory, U.S. watchdog says" (2017)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/02/02...
"As talks to end the war in Afghanistan continue in Qatar this week, and amid continued political disarray in Kabul, there seems to be one clear trend on the ground: The Taliban are consolidating control. The longer the war drags on—now in its 18th year—the more the balance of the conflict tips in the insurgent group’s favor. While there has been fierce debate in the West and in government-controlled areas of Afghanistan about what peace talks with the Taliban mean for women’s rights and the future of Afghan democracy, the view from Taliban-controlled areas suggests a harsh reality that few in the international community seem prepared for: If peace talks succeed, the Taliban will effectively formalize, and likely expand, their control over vast swaths of the country. If peace talks fail, however, the outcome will likely be far worse, with renewed fighting and a precarious government in Kabul."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/04/afghanistan-taliban-pea...
There was nothing particularly egregious about that particular statement. I didn't feel a response was necessary.
>>>To think that we should resort to violence instead of using the systems in place for peaceful negotiations is insane.
Soap box --> ballot box --> ammo box.
There is a spectrum of methods for effecting change. If people are reaching for the ammo box, it SHOULD only be because all attempts to utilize other methods have already conclusively failed.
>>>Also, interesting how you only quoted slave-owning inspirations of Southern Democrats
They were the first ones I came across in a 30-second Internet search for "Founding Fathers on the Second Amendment" or "Founding Fathers on tyranny". A further search for non-slaving owning Founding Fathers reveals [Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams, John Adams].
"In a state of tranquility, wealth, and luxury, our descendants would forget the arts of war and the noble activity and zeal which made their ancestors invincible. Every art of corruption would be employed to loosen the bond of union which renders our resistance formidable. When the spirit of liberty which now animates our hearts and gives success to our arms is extinct, our numbers will accelerate our ruin and render us easier victims to tyranny." ~ Samuel Adams[1]
Thomas Paine doesn't have many juicy tyranny/2A quotes. John Adams seems to take the position that the militia should be an extension of the state security apparatus (my reading of his quote).[2]
But anyways, this is all getting away from why I replied at all: you stated there was "no such thing as an American spirit of defending yourself against tyranny" and implied anyone stating such is a liar. That is a blatant falsehood. Positions from the nations founders on tyranny are so easily accessible and, IMO, fairly clear on the subject. So what sort of information have you been exposed to that would ever lead you to hold such a strong, and objectively erroneous, position?
[1]https://www.azquotes.com/author/99-Samuel_Adams
[2]https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Adams#A_Defence_of_the_Co...
With the level of saturation, not providing safety education is the most irresponsible course.
Where you say, “The problems the second amendment was written to solve don't exist anymore, so the second amendment shouldn't exist anymore.”, you present a claim in a vague way, difficult to argue for or against, because you don’t say what the problems were or how you know they were solved.
This is not about me doing my homework or lacking necessary knowledge — my unwillingness to fill in the gaps in your argument is not indicator of some insufficiency on my part. Telling me to “Google this” and get a “factual basis under my feet” is simple rudeness, and besides the point.
The only reason you perceive what I've written as rudeness is because you're bringing your ego to bear on this conversation, not your intellect.
Further, what you are attempting to do is akin to a zip bomb. "Spend hours crafting a response for me so I don't have to do any research or provide any understanding of my own, please!"
Gladly, but my rates are ~$500/hr. Let me know how you'd like to proceed!
If you do nothing else, please watch.
The one that got basically wiped out despite foreign backing (though the regular army that was their most direct supporter—the North Vietnamese Army—intervened and ultimately won the war after they were crushed)? Yeah, heard of them.
They kind of prove (or at least demonstrate) the point the grandparent post was making, though.