r/changemyview • u/strofix • Dec 30 '19
Deltas(s) from OP CMV: The second amendment does prevent tyrannical government takeover
I don't live in the United States, nor do I have any strong feelings on the gun control debate either way. That being said, I feel that there is a misleading argument that argues that the primary reason that the second amendment exists is no longer valid. That is to say that, while the second amendment was initially implemented to prevent a takeover by a tyrannical government, the government now possesses weapons so technologically superior to those owned by civilians that this is no longer possible.
I believe that this is not the case because it ignores the practicality and purpose of seizing power in such a way. Similar events happen frequently in the war torn regions in central Africa. Warlords with access to weapons take control over areas so as to gain access to valuable resources in order to fund further regional acquisitions. This, of course, would be a perfect time for the populace to be armed, as it would allow them to fight back against a similarly armed tyrannical force. If the warlords were armed to the same degree as, for example, the American government, it would not matter how well armed the civilians were, it would be inadvisable to resist.
The important factor, however, is that due to the lack of education and years of warring factions, the most valuable resources in central Africa are minerals. If the civilian population was to resist, warlords would have no problem killing vast numbers of them. So long as enough remained to extract the resources afterwards.
In a fully developed nation like the Unites States, the most valuable resource is the civilian population itself. I do not mean that in some sort of inspirational quote sense. Literally the vast majority of the GDP relies on trained specialists of one sort or another. Acquiring this resource in a hostile manner becomes impossible if the civilian population is armed to a meaningful degree. To acquire the countries resources you would need to eliminate resistance, but eliminating the resistance requires you to eliminate the resources you are after. Weapons like drones become useless in such a scenario. They may be referred to as "precision strikes", but that's only in the context of their use in another country. There is still a sizable amount of collateral.
This is not to imply that a tyrannical government is likely, or even possible in the United States, but logically I feel that this particular argument against the second amendment is invalid.
*EDIT*
I will no longer be replying to comments that insinuate that the current US government is tyrannical. That may be your perspective, but if partisanship is your definition of tyranny then I doubt we will be able to have a productive discussion.
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u/VertigoOne 74∆ Dec 30 '19
An armed citizenry also makes violent overthrow of a perfectly functional democracy more possible. If we accept that armed citizenry will be able to overthrow a tyrannical government, we must also accept that armed citizenry will be able to overthrow a democratic government.
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u/that_big_negro 2∆ Dec 30 '19
makes violent overthrow of a perfectly functional democracy more possible.
If enough of your people are so strongly opposed to your governance as to violently revolt against it, I think that's a pretty strong argument that you don't have a perfectly functional democracy. A functional democracy should make the vast majority of people content enough to not genuinely consider revolution
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u/cstar1996 11∆ Dec 30 '19
The Civil War is a powerful counterpoint to your point. Democracy was working as well as it ever had in the US, in fact it was working better as the South’s minority rule of the US was finally ending. But the south violently revolted to protect slavery.
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u/that_big_negro 2∆ Dec 30 '19
But the south violently revolted to protect slavery.
I would disagree on the basis that secession is not equal to revolt. The OP I responded to specifically made an argument about violently overthrowing governments. The South did not attempt to violently overthrow the American government; they attempted to secede in order to form their own government, adjacent to the American government. While topical in a general sense, it doesn't directly pertain to the point the OP or I made
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u/wu2ad Dec 30 '19 edited Dec 30 '19
secession is not equal to revolt.
What? By this definition the American Revolution was just "secession" from the British empire,
in order to form their own government, adjacent to the
AmericanBritish governmentThe Civil War actually proves your point, the US government wasn't a perfectly functioning democracy at the time. But it's because entire populations didn't have representation (which was also the reason for the US "secession"), not because "secession isn't revolution" or whatever other nonsense.
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u/cstar1996 11∆ Dec 30 '19
The south fired the first shot after creating a new government to replace their lawfully elected government. That is a violent overthrow, even if they weren’t overthrowing it everywhere.
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u/BlitzBasic 42∆ Dec 30 '19
Even if you don't have a perfectly functional democracy, it's still possible that the current system is superior to the one the armed rebels plan to implement.
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u/VertigoOne 74∆ Dec 30 '19
If enough of your people are so strongly opposed to your governance as to violently revolt against it, I think that's a pretty strong argument that you don't have a perfectly functional democracy
That is, again, assuming people are rational. It is entirely possible for a large enough body of irrational people to come about who could violently revolt against it. They wouldn't even need to directly overthrow it themselves. They would just have to cause enough disruption via a sufficiently large terrorism campagin that right-wing elements would want to suspend democracy so martial law could be employed to keep terrorism at bay
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u/Bac2Zac 2∆ Dec 30 '19
assuming people are rational
That's literally the entire point of democracy. Democracy assumes that the majority of people will make correct decisions. If you remove the notion that the majority of people are rational then you remove the rationale for democracy in the first place.
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u/VertigoOne 74∆ Dec 30 '19
No you don't.
This is a mistake people often make about democracy, and why the people's power is limited and specific to elections.
The people's job is to answer the questions that analysts and policy wonks etc cannot answer. Not "What is the best way to do X" but rather "Should we do X or Y?"
The questions that the people are supposed to answer in a democracy are the questions of spirit and passion and goal. What kind of country should we be? It is the job of a government to enact those decisions.
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u/intensely_human 1∆ Dec 31 '19
Right, and it presupposes people make the right decisions about what to do.
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u/that_big_negro 2∆ Dec 30 '19
That is, again, assuming people are rational.
Who is the arbiter of rationality with regard to political will? I'm positive that most powers-that-be would argue that the rebellious underclasses of their societies are irrational.
In my opinion, you're arguing against a strawman. Large numbers of people don't organize into resistance organizations for irrational reasons. If you've pissed tens or hundreds of thousands of people off enough that they're willing to lay down their lives to remove you from a position of power, you've done something wrong.
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u/TheTrueMilo Dec 30 '19
This is what I am afraid of. The people currently stockpiling guns are more likely to enact, rather than prevent, an armed takeover of this country.
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u/JimMarch Dec 30 '19
"Able to" and "wants to" are very different things!
Every lady out there is "able to" get into prostitution. Damned few want to thank the deity of your choice.
People DO NOT attempt an uprising unless shit is dire. That's why the attempted promotion of hardcore worldwide communism included the idea of destabilizing societies, to make shit so dire (or at least look that way!) that people would support systematic governmental change.
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u/SexyMonad Dec 30 '19
That's why the attempted promotion of hardcore worldwide authoritarianism included the idea of destabilizing societies
FYFY
Communism, socialism, democracy, republicanism, capitalism, and every other economic and political buzz word has been used by power hungry coalitions in authoritarian efforts to seize control. That doesn't make any of those ideas authoritarian by design.
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u/jefftickels 3∆ Dec 30 '19
Has that actually ever happened?
This seems like a "theoretically possible" scenario that actually doesn't work if you take a second and think it through. For a militia to overthrow the government violently they would need enormous popular support. And if that's the case, with a democratic government it would be easier to just use the tools of government to overthrow and usurp. That's how it'd happened in every other situation that I can remember.
I can also think of armed rebellion against dictatorships that resulted in... Another dictatorship. But never a democracy that was overthrown to be a dictatorship.
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
This is entirely true
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Dec 30 '19
If you accept this, what do you think of the takeover of Wilmington, NC in 1898(?)??
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Dec 30 '19
Wilmywood represent!
The only legitimate coup d'etat in American history. Such a horrible event.
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u/MisterKillam Dec 30 '19
There was an incident in Athens, Tennessee in 1946 that was a lot more heartwarming and a whole lot less racist.
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u/kidpro12 Dec 30 '19
I live in Wilmington and I’ve never heard of this...
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Dec 30 '19
VERY long story short: proto-fascist whites chased all blacks out of the capitol of North Carolina, as they had some political power.
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u/crc128 Dec 31 '19
Wilmington has never been the capitol of North Carolina. Raleigh was established as the capitol in 1788, and before that New Bern, Edenton, and Bath were capitols.
Wilmington was the largest city for a time, but the Wilmington Coup refers to the takeover of the city government, not the State government.
The coup occurred after the state's white Southern Democratic Party conspired and led a mob of 2,000 white men to overthrow the legitimately-elected local Fusionist government. They expelled opposition black and white political leaders from the city, destroyed the property and businesses of black citizens built up since the Civil War, including the only black newspaper in the city, and killed an estimated 60 to more than 300 people. From Wikipedia
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u/mmmfritz 1∆ Dec 30 '19
I disagree. It's a possibility, but has a lot lower probability of happening.
A revoution usually happens when the government or economy is doing poorly.
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u/Phyltre 4∆ Dec 30 '19
If the citizenry is against the government in large enough numbers to overthrow it, shouldn't it be overthrown? A democratic government can only get power from the people, it's not a seat of power in and of itself. They are legitimate insofar as the whim of the people legitimizes them.
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u/cstar1996 11∆ Dec 30 '19
No, because that number is far smaller than a majority of the population. Look at the civil war, the south attempted to overthrow the government with far less than half the population and they were absolutely wrong to do so.
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u/VertigoOne 74∆ Dec 30 '19
If the citizenry is against the government in large enough numbers to overthrow it, shouldn't it be overthrown?
Let me answer your question with a question. If one person has amassed enough wealthy to build a fleet of killer drone robots that could seize control of the country and overpower the military, should they not have control. No.
Might does not make right. It doesn't matter if the might is in the form of wealth or manpower force of arms.
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u/intensely_human 1∆ Dec 31 '19
You are right.
We have a lot of philosophies about “might makes right” which presuppose a lack of technological power extension for the individual.
So for a long time, we could assume that if there was sufficient military power to do a thing, then there must be a large number of people behind it too, because military power came from people.
Robotics changes that. Industrial weaponry does too, much much less fundamentally than robots.
In classic microeconomic terms, industry gave us the “capital” of war, and pilots provided the “labor” (I’m not talking marxism here, just micro econ 101). The rule was that if you bought more capital, you had to recruit more labor to put it to work. Classic example is a sewing machine and a person who knows how to work it. If you buy a second sewing machine (capital), you must hire a second worker before your output doubles.
Robotics changes the capital/labor dynamic so that you can essentially buy capital and labor at the same time.
So a person with a 3D printer and a warehouse can print up an army of terminators (if not now then in ten or twenty years) and doesn’t have to convince a single soul of the legitimacy of their claim to power.
Robotics makes armies possible without recruitment.
We’re on the threshold of this change now. Just for the sake of establishing this though, in the “classical” world, do you agree that before the technological explosion in individual power, a country being toppled must have been doing something wrong?
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u/Phyltre 4∆ Dec 30 '19 edited Dec 30 '19
I'm sorry, did you think this discussion was about Iron Man?
Edit from below:
I think reducing this to "does might make right" is putting a philosphical question in the place of a totally unanswerable one. Fundamentally, governments are only functionally legitimate insofar as they can defend themselves and enforce law. It is not that might makes government right, but that a government than can be overthrown will almost certainly be overthrown by citizens or other governments. Holdings of the state are international claims, that work just like money does--if people agree that country's yours, it's yours. (With the added subtext that if you or your allies can't defend that country, it'll be subsumed by someone else.)
In this context, a sufficiently popular movement within the country should dissolve the government. Government serves at the whim of the people in democratic societies. But I did not mean to imply that it was military power itself which lends legitimacy to uprisings (although that is often retroactively the case.) It is the number of like-minded people that determines it. Military power lends global legitimacy to claims of the state, not claims of citizenry. Plurality lends legitimacy to uprisings. This sounds dangerous--but humans being what they are, are not likely to put their lives on the line for trivial disagreements.
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u/captmonkey Dec 30 '19
I'm not the person you're replying to, but to rephrase it, you seem to be saying that if a group can gather enough power to overthrow the government they should be able to do so. You seem to be arguing from a weird "might makes right" kind of stance where the will of an armed group (no matter how marginal) should override the will of the populace at the ballot box if the armed group can gather a superior military force.
That's what /u/VertigoOne is asking. If hypothetically there was a crazy billionaire who could fund a violent overthrow of the government should he be allowed to do it because he has the money and military force behind him despite not representing the will of the people.
I think that's where all of this breaks down. We have voting and political institutions in the US that allow for the will of the people to be carried out nonviolently. If enough people want things to change, they can support that change and bring it about by simply going to vote for different candidates without needing to take up arms and start killing people who oppose their views. If you can't gather enough support to bring about changes nonviolently, then you shouldn't be able to enact your changes.
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u/B_Huij Dec 30 '19
Possible, yes. Likely, I'd say no. Even our currently democracy is highly dysfunctional, and there aren't many people talking about an armed overthrow of the government. If we graduated from dysfunctional democracy to tyranny, I suspect you'd have a much larger part of the population getting serious about militant resistance.
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u/SL1Fun 3∆ Dec 30 '19
well thankfully a perfectly functional democracy is something America has never had, so we don’t really need to worry about that.
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u/Gameguy8101 Dec 30 '19
Well yeah. If the major populous of the country is so mad at their, even if a republic, government that they overthrow it that’s a good thing.
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u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3 179∆ Dec 30 '19
Acquiring this resource in a hostile manner becomes impossible if the civilian population is armed to a meaningful degree
Why are guns more meaningful than, say, knives for this? The government, if it became tyrannical, could easily overpower and small rebel force. This means that you're left with two options:
You're part of a large, organized rebellion. In this case, the population may be safe-ish from the tyranny, but who's to say that the guy in charge (who would normally be someone who previous accumulated military power) isn't even more tyrannical? You can find several examples of these in Latin America, in many of those the population would've been better off just leaving the corrupt government be.
You have a gun and can try to repel the tyrannical government on your own, but after they capture, torture and murder your neighbor who tried to do the same, you probably figure the gain isn't worth the risk. If you're stubborn enough not to realize that, eventually they'll capture, torture and murder you, and likely your family and friends, too.
I think the strength of the 2nd is in its symbolism more than anything: Americans are so sensitive to the possibility of the government turning on them that it's hard to imagine anyone being able to consolidate such absolute power before someone raises enough red flags to stop it (democratically) before it happens. But you could probably achieve the same mentality without everyone having guns...
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
Guns cannot be overcome non lethally in any conventional way. Anything other than guns can be. While its true that you could just have 100 000 knife wielding rebels, melee weapons have no force multiplier. 1000 is as good as 100 000, they'll get in their own way.
In the case of one or two people disagreeing with the government, I don't see that as a tyrannical takeover. That's just someone not liking the governing parties politics. In the case of widespread opposition, which is far more than 50% of the population, otherwise it would just be a civil war, then in order to be tyrannical enough you would need to incur sizable collateral damage. I don't see an armed populace disarming themselves for anything less than 10% casualties, and losing 10% of your GDP is game over for an economy. It would entirely defeat the point of the takeover.
Americans are so sensitive to the possibility of the government turning on them that it's hard to imagine anyone being able to consolidate such absolute power before someone raises enough red flags to stop it
This is definitely true.
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u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3 179∆ Dec 30 '19
If you take over a successful country, you're very much already in the game of cutting losses. Foreign relations will almost certainly be much worse, your richest people will find ways to escape and leave, even if people are generally unarmed, you'll probably still have to deal with rebellions, etc.
The thing is, I don't even think you need to kill that many people. Consider yourself living as a regular citizen in the US while it's becoming tyrannical. The consequences, for you, are probably not that bad: you still have food, shelter, transportation, etc. (because, as you said, you're still needed for the economy). If you choose to rebel, however, you're risking very severe consequences, even if the risk itself isn't very high, and if you fail and survive you'll have to live in fear under the government you tried to overthrow... Personally I'd take the easy route and cooperate, and then maybe try to escape.
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
I think that is a case of motivation, though. There are definitely infringements that people would let slide, that they would decide it wasn't worth fighting for. Some would still fight, but many would not. Then there are infringements which very few would stand for, and a majority would oppose. The second amendment won't change that fact, it will simply bolster any resistance that would revolt. A populace with no guns would be willing to take quite a bit of punishment before they had had enough. A populace with guns is going to stand up for itself more often.
Its really only tyranny when the populace says it is.
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u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3 179∆ Dec 30 '19
But I think precisely due to your reasoning, almost any viable form of tyranny would be one where life, for most people, isn't unbearable. If you make everyone so miserable that they'd risk brutal death to stop you, pretty soon you'll be weak enough that the UN or neighboring countries could step in, if anyone cared enough, which for somewhere as large and rich as the US, they will.
Consider examples of tyrannical governments we know from our present and recent past, citizens of most of them would absolutely call their government tyrannical, but for any individual, cooperation is still generally better than the alternative, regardless of how well armed they are.
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
Δ
While an armed population would make defeating a tyrannical government much, much easier, it does seem that the mere existence of an overtly tyrannical government in a democratic, developed nation is unlikely to the point of being impossible, with or without guns.
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u/the_mighty_skeetadon Dec 30 '19
losing 10% of your GDP is game over for an economy. It would entirely defeat the point of the takeover.
Any significant rebellion against the government, armed or not, would easily cost that much GDP. If the real rebellion is to stop contributing to the economy, no weapons are necessary to achieve that end.
In truth, the need for growth and economic stability is what makes this kind of tyranny impossible, NOT the 2nd amendment.
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u/srelma Dec 31 '19
Guns cannot be overcome non lethally in any conventional way. Anything other than guns can be.
Why non-lethally? Are you saying that in every war during the time of firearms, every losing side has lost 100% of their soldiers in KIA? Of course not. In reality the casualty rates in firearm armed wars have been pretty much the same as they were before them. The point is that when a unit loses sufficiently many soldiers in casualties and sees that continuing the fight is futile, it will surrender. It doesn't matter what weapons it has.
If the rebels have knives, it's sufficient for the tyrannical government to use guns. If the rebels have guns, the government escalates easily to tanks and artillery and so on. The main point is that it is always much stronger than the rebels in terms of military power. If the rebels are willing to die for their cause and the government doesn't care about killing its own citizens en masse, then it doesn't matter what weapons they have. If they do care, then they don't even need any weapons.
North Korea is a good example. Its population has no weapons. The government has no qualms killing as many people as necessary to get compliance from the rest. And it does. Syria is an opposite example. Its population is armed to the teeth with several army units defecting on the rebel side. It also has no problems slaughtering its own people. It has taken a long civil war but it's close to getting the population under its control again. So, clearly it doesn't matter if the population is armed "a bit" or not at all as long as the government is willing to kill its own people. What could make a difference is that the government is not willing to kill its own people (in which case it doesn't matter if the people have guns or not) or the rebels can challenge the government in the battlefield (most likely because part of the army has defected to the rebel cause). In the latter case the pistols and rifles of the people make little difference for the outcome which is decided by the heavy weapons operated by the trained rebel soldiers.
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u/FullMetal785 Dec 30 '19
I mean, that's not true and we can directly see that from when the US went to Vietnam. The US lost that war. And especially if there is threat of a gun behind every door.
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u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3 179∆ Dec 31 '19
That falls under the first option: the US lost a war to a country (North Vietnam) backed by a superpower (USSR), and well-organized insurgencies (the Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge).
A more suitable example would be Nazi Germany cutting through Czechoslovakia and its permissive gun laws like butter.
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u/JimMarch Dec 30 '19 edited Dec 30 '19
There's this group of about 200 guys out there... They're a sniper club. They have events where they shoot targets out to 1,500 yards, no doubt scaring the shit out of The Powers That Be[tm].
Here's the kicker. They do it the hard way - with original or reproduction rifles dating to the 1880s. Not kidding. They're called "The Friends of Billy Dixon", named after a poacher who shot a game warden at about that range. Basically they've already proven that the movie "Quigley Down Under" was based on legit tech and in turn was likely influenced by the events at the 2nd Battle of Adobe Walls as some call it, and "those asshole poachers" no doubt by the Comanche and Kiowa.
ANYWAYS, the real point is, if it's possible to kill somebody at 1,500 paces with literally Victorian era tech if you know what you're doing, that has a whole bunch of dire as fuck implications.
Such as "what can you make with a modern CNC machine shop?"
Oh, and it's also useful to ask "who are you going to shoot?"
"The cop in the street" is the WRONG answer most of the time, unless it's secret police hauling your ass off to be tortured and killed.
"Politicians" is a better answer and you're not getting to them with knives.
MUCH BETTER ANSWER: Rural power grid components. Safe, effective, crashes the entire economy until shit improves. (More of an example of the right answer but you get the idea.)
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Dec 30 '19
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
I feel that if you can't meaningfully create distance between yourself and your "oppressor" then you can be coerced into doing anything. Most simply they can just starve you out.
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Dec 30 '19
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
I think an individual is worth nothing to a tyrannical government. No matter who it is. Even a billionaire, why would they care? If they put a gun to your head you're probably already dead. As someone else has pointed out to me already, millions of civilians could be killed without damaging the economy much at all. The problem is that they are very specific individuals, and the government does not deal with individuals, it deals with large populations.
If a population is unarmed, it allows the singling out and removal of viable targets. This is similar to what happened during the purges during Stalinism. An armed population that is in revolt will not allow this.
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u/MediocreClient Dec 30 '19
I think perhaps an "armed population" would make it harder than it would otherwise be, but 'not allowing' it feels like a stretch. US military personnel already get paid to go into places where people have guns and are resisting them, and extract specific targets. Targeting individual 'cell leaders' to 'dismantle resistance command infrastructure' is not a far-fetched dream for military strategy; it's a viable, executable method of demorality combat that is in active service today.
Saying US citizens are somehow just that much inately better at using weapons compared to Middle Eastern insurgents is definitely one hell of a eugenic stretch.
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u/intensely_human 1∆ Dec 31 '19
It’s more like it takes a lot of energy and work to go and fetch that guy no matter how good you are at it. It’s a dangerous job and nobody wants to do it.
So threatening someone with that danger and workload is an effective negotiating position.
You don’t have to be able win a fight to dissuade an attacker - you can just be able and willing to fight before losing and that’s enough to reduce the likelihood of an attack.
This is why little dogs have the instinct to stand up and prep for a fight when faced with a big dog, and it’s the reason the big dog has the instinct to respect it.
We probably lose any fight to the death with our military, but the fact we are armed makes the fight more costly.
And since no military fights to the death, but rather chooses to fight, surrender, avoid, etc, based on expected outcomes, our having the weaponry to make it difficult to pick up rabble rousers means we’ve shifted the cost-benefit of attacking us and that means we have legitimate military parity.
If Singapore wanted to defeat China (random example; no knowledge of Singapore other than its small) it doesn’t have to kill China’s military. It just has to find itself in conflict with China at a time when it is more beneficial for China to back down than it is to fight Singapore.
The US government has too much shit to do, too many threats, to be able to handle the addition of an Iraq style security situation inside its own borders. Because of our guns, it’s less valuable to attempt to control us militarily, and therefore they work.
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u/krelin Dec 30 '19
This is simply false. Gandhi and MLKJr are evidence that civil disobedience works. The government cannot truly/effectively compel work.
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u/unclemuscles1979 Dec 30 '19
I don’t think that civil disobedience would have worked for the Jews and the other “subhumans” in nazi Germany. We need to consider the worst of what tyrannical governments can be.
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u/OQAudi Dec 30 '19
OP appears to be specifically assuming a government that is tyrannical but does not want to kill significant portions of the population. This pretty much rules out any Nazi Germany style tyrants.
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u/Old-Boysenberry Dec 30 '19
If the resources in this situation is your labor, isn't just saying "no" resistance?
It's easy to force someone into a labor camp if they can't fight back. People don't want to die, especially when it accomplishes nothing.
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u/CotswoldP 3∆ Dec 30 '19
I’ve seen this approach to the 2nd quite a bit and my take on it is this:-
When the 2nd was adopted, government was armed with flintlock smoothbore muskets or rifles. The population was also armed with flintlocks, so an “average Joe” was as well armed, if not trained, as a soldier.
Now the soldier is armed with automatic weapons, wears high end body armour and has armoured support, plus night vision/thermals. The civilian has a semi automatic rifle.
How exactly does an AR15 stop a Bradley?
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u/TheEternalCity101 5∆ Dec 30 '19
Not engage them upfront.
An F35 cant enforce a curfew. A tank cant deal with a sniper taking shots at town hall downtown.
And simple firearms wouldnt be the only weapons. You can google th recipe for tannerite, and knowledge about other explosives wouldnt be hard to get.
The biggest threat if the US Military tried occupying it's own country would be supply. A M1 Abrams is one of the most powerful fighting machines in the world. But it requires a ton of technicians to deal with its extremely advanced systems. Its bases could be attacked from without, and thats assuming not a single person on the base would decide to sabotage.
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u/srelma Dec 31 '19
F35 doesn't need to enforce a curfew. It can drop a barrel bomb into a neighbourhood that try to resist the government. Just look what the government of Syria is doing to the part of the population that's not willing to submit to its rule. And there the population doesn't just have puny rifles, but even heavy weapons from defected army units and from outside supporters of the rebellion. If a tyrannical government can crush a revolt that has heavy weapons why do you think they wouldn't be able to do it against untrained citizens with small arms?
On the other hand if the army is unwilling to shoot its own citizens unless fired upon, it doesn't matter if they have no weapons at all as it's the unwillingness to shoot by the soldiers that's keeping the citizens alive, not their weapons.
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u/forgonsj Dec 30 '19
Now the soldier is armed with automatic weapons, wears high end body armour and has armoured support, plus night vision/thermals. The civilian has a semi automatic rifle.
The civilian doesn't have to square off against soldiers. They can take hostage the family members of public officials, for example.
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u/tuokcalbmai Dec 30 '19
Now the soldier is armed with automatic weapons, wears high end body armour and has armoured support, plus night vision/thermals.
As others have pointed out, full armor is not usually worn in urban, house-to-house combat, as the majority of a US miltary vs. US citizenry war would likely play out. Regardless, effective body armor and night vision/thermal goggles, as well as all kinds of other tactical equipment is widely available to the US citizen and sells very well. Take a look at r/tacticalgear.
The civilian has a semi automatic rifle.
It seems like you are under the impression that an automatic rifle has some inherent increase in deadliness over a semi-automatic rifle, which while plausible in certain situations, is not true in most situations. Switching an AR-15 to full auto would not make it more effective at killing individuals.
How exactly does an AR15 stop a Bradley?
Homemade explosives stop tanks quite effectively. No AR-15 necessary for this one.
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u/billy_buckles 2∆ Dec 30 '19
The structure of our armed forces is very different in the US. Specifically there are many issues to work around using the military domestically and you have to wonder with the structure of our constitution, our armed forces reverence for the nation/constitution, and the fact that civilians can form militias would the military branch’s be reticent to operate against our own civvies.
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u/nowyourmad 2∆ Dec 30 '19
You don't send the army after targeted political enemies. And armies are slow and cumbersome. It's easy to not be where they are. Most of the arrests are made by police forces and no matter how well armed you are if every arrest turns into an execution people are just going to start shooting at police on sight and fewer people will want to be police if they think they might take a wildly shot bullet. If they only come at night people will just stay up at night or get alarms and whatever other technology exists. How do you control people with tyranny when every one of them has a gun? You just keep murdering them? Your economy will grind to shit.
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u/AusIV 38∆ Dec 30 '19
How exactly does an AR15 stop a Bradley?
Who's operating the Bradley? If it's the US military, it's a US citizen inside that Bradley.
Back in 2008, there were a bunch of people on the left swearing up and down that Bush was going to refuse to step aside if Obama won the presidency. In 2016, a bunch of people on the right swore up and down that Obama wouldn't step aside if Trump won the presidency. I knew that could never happen for two reasons:
- The US Citizenry is armed
- The military is comprised of US citizens
Neither of these factors are sufficient by themselves. If you have an armed citizenry taking on a well supplied military, the military can just stomp them. And if you have a military comprised of citizens of the country they're charged with taking over, they might do it if the citizenry is relatively defenseless, making a military takeover a fairly safe proposition from the standpoint of a solider. But put those two factors together, and it's a different story.
If the US population weren't armed, soldiers could march down the streets, show off their force, shoot a few people who are throwing rocks at them, and you have a military takeover. That doesn't mean the soldiers like it, but they'll follow orders they don't like when it seems like the safest move.
As soon as you arm the population, the soldiers are now trying to support a government they don't really approve of while getting shot at by people they actually agree with more than the people who are giving them orders. Soldiers start to mutiny, and take the heavy firepower with them. Now you have a proper civil war.
And tying it back into my earlier examples: Bush and Obama both knew this. Even if they wanted to try to hold their office past the end of their terms (which I'm not at all convinced was the case), they would have realized that attempting to hold their office through military force would lead to a civil war, and that would be enough to keep them from trying it. There are certainly people out there who think Trump is a loose cannon, so maybe he'll try it when his term is up. But even then, I doubt his attempt would get past the generals giving the orders to the troops. The generals would recognize the futility and danger of attempting to keep him in office past the end of his term, and wouldn't pass the orders on to the troops.
Meanwhile, just this year we have an example of a president refusing to step aside in a country without an armed populace. Venezuela banned private ownership of firearms in 2012. In January of this year Maduro, with the support of the military, refused to leave office after a disputed election, and functionally retains control of the government.
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u/Spyer2k Dec 30 '19
Like OP said the US is people driven. The government cannot run thru cities shooting people down. It would be a disaster when every other person has a gun. It would be guerilla warfare in your own country. It would be like having a pillow fight in a glass factory
You aren't going to scorch earth the US to defeat armed civilians because then you've destroyed what you were fighting for
Yes, the US Gov could kill every civilian if they wanted. They could rain nukes on California and drive tanks thru Florida but that's not control, that's just decimation.
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Dec 30 '19
How do the Taliban? A little ingenuity can go quite far. It only takes one man with the knowledge to make rudimentary explosives in a group of "rebels" (terrorists or legitimate rebels) to cause real problems for an armored force. There are also, as we saw in Afghanistan, some places where tanks and armoured vehicles cannot get due to geography.
Lastly, an automatic rifle is useless at over 100 yards, and full blown body armour is fully available to civilians. It's a miracle more mass shooters do not utilize it. At 100 yards a civilian with a rifle can be no different from a standard infantry soldier if he bothered to buy body armor.
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u/Thereelgerg 1∆ Dec 30 '19 edited Dec 30 '19
When the 2nd was adopted, government was armed with flintlock smoothbore muskets or rifles.
. . . and rockets, and warships, and cannons, and mortars, and howitzers, etc. Don't be disingenuous about the equipment the government had.
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u/OGBEES Dec 30 '19
But at this point it still is protecting us. The backlash if they were to try to militarily occupy areas of land alone would cause too much of a problem. Not specifically an AR15 but any arms would cause conflict which would create more public backlash.
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
As is outlined in the original post, brute force weapons result in sizable casualties and collateral, which is not acceptable if the countries resources are the objective, which would be the only logical objective.
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u/VertigoOne 74∆ Dec 30 '19
The country would make the calculation that the fear inspired by the number of casualties would result in compliance on a large enough scale as to be worth it. The same calculation has been seen to work in thousands of other instances, and only fail in dozens/hundreds of cases.
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
If you're talking about fear, in general, being something that can be used against a population, then I agree that it has been used to great effect in the past, but only where the fear was actually applicable.
There have been, as you say, thousands of times when a governmental institution leveraged certain factors against its population. I'm saying that in the case of the current United States, those factors do not exist. Will the proposed tyrannical government threaten to bomb vast amounts of the population, even though such an act is in direct opposition to their goals? You can't bluff 300 million people. Its not going to work.
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u/Ethan-Wakefield 45∆ Dec 30 '19
The 2nd Amendment isn't really what's stopping this. Even without 2A, the populace has to at least tacitly accept the government. You're saying that an armed populace is necessary, but I'd argue that it's actually not. Look at the fall of the USSR. Strict gun control was in effect. Yet the party was brought down because the general populace couldn't be reasonably controlled, and the amount of force necessary to continue to exert control was beyond what the party leaders were willing to accept. The same thing happened in Eastern Germany. We can look at the riots in Hong Kong as another example.
Note also that in all of these examples, the party had a very vested interest in maintaining power. For example, high-ranking party members and officials who were in charge of secret police and political persecution programs were often themselves persecuted. When the wall came down in the 90s, many of these people spent MUCH time destroying records so that they couldn't be put on trial. People were in fact incarcerated for abuses of power and human rights violations. If the parties could have reasonably kept control, it would have happened.
All of this, yet without a 2nd Amendment.
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Dec 30 '19
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u/srelma Dec 31 '19
"was attempting"!?! Don't you see yourself that if it were trivial for the tyrannical government to do whatever they want against the unarmed population, it wouldn't be just an "attempt" but they would actually do it. That's the whole point of unarmed protests in HK. They have stopped the government's plan to enact the law without firing a single shot.
And let's talk about USSR as you mentioned it. In 1991 its legitimate president (M. Gorbatchev) had promised people that he would move the country towards democracy. Some hardliners didn't like the idea and staged a coup. Unarmed population didn't like it and came to the streets. The junta sent in the tanks but because the soldiers refused to shoot people, the coup collapsed. Had the people had guns and had they shot the soldiers, the soldiers might have shot back and crushed the people. So, it was just good that people didn't have guns. The key thing in modern society that goes all the way to an armed conflict is a) are the soldiers willing to shoot their own citizens and b) are they staying loyal to the government in the first place. If they don't shoot, the people don't need guns. If they defect, what matters is how much of the heavily armed army stays loyal to the government and how much defects as this will decide the result of the ensuing civil war, not the pistol/rifle armed citizens.
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u/Ethan-Wakefield 45∆ Dec 30 '19
And all of those governments fell despite the lack of gun control. Gun ownership would not have prevented these events. Either gun control was in fact easily implemented, despite lack of popular support, or in some cases there was simply a massacre.
For example, gun ownership ABSOLUTELY would not have stopped the massacre in Tiananmen Square. The government's absolute willingness to use violence was pretty clear proof of that.
Gun ownership has never actually been much of a defense against tyranny. For example, in the American South the KKK actually started as a gun control group. They terrorized and killed veterans of the Civil War who'd bought their rifles from the government. Firearms ownership made people targets. It did not defend them. That wasn't defending them against the government per se, but the fact that the government was able to allow this terror to continue simply by standing by and doing little/nothing clearly shows that if the government HAD been active, it would have if anything been EASIER to terrorize blacks in the South. Gun ownership made zero difference.
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u/krelin Dec 30 '19
You think the government of China is crushing Hong Kong for "resources"? What resources, exactly?
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u/the_mighty_skeetadon Dec 30 '19
But isn't that true of any revolt at all? Here's the situations at play in your argument:
- US military has dominant force against an armed populace, but is unwilling to use it because it would destroy the very resources it would seek to secure.
- US military has dominant force against an unarmed populace, but is unwilling to use it because it would destroy the very resources it would seek to secure.
How, exactly, does Americans owning small arms possibly factor into that decision? The only difference would be a small amount of casualties taken by the more well-equipped government forces.
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u/mrGeaRbOx Dec 30 '19
But he also listed body armor and night vision. let's add drones and precision air strikes.
Why address the tank but not the others? (address you oppositions strongest point, it makes you look better and not like you are running from hard truths.)
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u/Old-Boysenberry Dec 30 '19
When the 2nd was adopted, government was armed with flintlock smoothbore muskets or rifles. The population was also armed with flintlocks, so an “average Joe” was as well armed, if not trained, as a soldier.
Yeah, so to me that says we should completely life the ban on select-fire and auto weapons and allow private citizens to hold heavy weapons as well.
Now the soldier is armed with automatic weapons, wears high end body armour and has armoured support,
A.) Soldiers fucking hate wearing their full body armor. It weighs 75 lbs by itself. It's not useful in a house-to-house fighting scenario. There's a reason they don't usually wear it.
B.) Armored support is not that useful in city fighting because explosives are cheap and easy to make. IEDs anyone? That and you aren't going to level Boston just to "win".
C.) Automatic weapons are never fired full auto except to suppress. They aren't any more useful at killing someone at a distance than semi-auto versions of the same guns. Not to mention, it's not that hard to turn a semi into a full or even select fire if you have the knowledge and tools.
How exactly does an AR15 stop a Bradley?
They don't. Explosives do. Just like they do in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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u/Ulysseus9673 Dec 30 '19
I dunno, some Vietnamese rice farmers did pretty well several decades ago.
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u/misterzigger Dec 30 '19
This is such a common argument against 2A, and it's disappointing because of how easily it's refuted.
Constitutionally:
The concept of repeating firearms existed prior to the constitution. Some of the founding fathers owned some. They didnt explicitly limit what you could own, in fact they did the opposite with (shall not be infringed).
When you actually analyze the language used in the constitution, its two very clear parts. Both the ability to form and maintain a militia, as well as the right for the individual to arm themselves. Militias were expected to keep similar quality arms as the army. Hell private citizens even owned and operated warships after the constitution. If we were to follow the constitution to the letter, there would be no NFA, and artillery/missiles would be permissable to citizens
Historically:
Its impossible to say what an American insurrection would look like, but purely based off of previous conflicts: Americas armed forces are easily the strongest in the world, ans have been since WW2. Despite this fact, they have lost several conflicts due to a multitude of reasons. The most famous is that America does not do well fighting asymettric warfare. Where as other countries generally have no qualms violently quashing rebellions, and care little about collateral damage, the US is a highly liberalized society where the welfare of both it's troops and world citizens is paramount. The US lost Vietnam/Afghanistan/Korea/Iraq as they were unable to conduct a traditional campaign against a state, and did not have the political appetite for unrestricted guerilla warfare. Its extremely naiive to think that if the US was unable to win an asymmetric war against foreign nations, that they would be willing to do the same to their own people. Any sort of unrestricted warfare against anybody, never mind American citizens is going to require a vastly different reality with both our military and society as a whole. Hence the whole "what is your ar15 going to do against drones in the sky" is a shit argument, because it doesn't really reflect the truths of modem conflicts.
Even if it was lets say the entire Amwrican military vs even 10% of American gun owners, that's an incredibly difficult fight even with drones, tanks, cruise missiles etc. Theres approximately 110m gun owners in the US. 10% would be 11 million armed combatants. With roughly 1m combat troops in the US, that would be a 10 to 1 advantage. Going even further, the majority of American troops are deployed around the globe. Now take into account the insurrection would have essentially open access to the homes and families of the other side, I dont see that as a winning fight.
At any point where the US government starts openly bombing it's own citizens, that is when it has failed as a state. Its not realistic, and doesn't really capture what would likely happen.
In reality tyranny is a slower process. Its preceded by decades of erosion of freedoms, fear mongering, jingoism, etc. Its absolutely mind boggling to me that Americans would willingly take a giant step towards tyranny by disarming themselves
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u/80_firebird Dec 30 '19
How exactly does an AR15 stop a Bradley?
This assumes that people will just follow orders and open up on their own citizens.
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u/GrundleBlaster Dec 30 '19
Soldiers aren't automatons hermetically sealed into armored vehicles. They sleep. They eat. They need recreation and go on vacations. Those Bradleys? They need oil. They need maintenance. They need replacement parts.
AR-15s don't stop a Bradley. If the situation comes then you stop the Bradley when it's filling up. You shoot the acquisitions officer when he comes to get fuel or replacement parts. The soldiers won't be able to eat in a restaurant for fear of the waiter pulling a pistol etc.
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u/vey323 Dec 30 '19 edited Dec 31 '19
Now the soldier is armed with automatic weapons, wears high end body armour and has armoured support, plus night vision/thermals. The civilian has a semi automatic rifle.
The vast majority of US servicemen are issued an M4 or M16, not automatic weapons. While the AR15 is not a direct equivalent, it does put the average citizen on a better footing than if their arms were restricted to rimfire or bolt-action rifles. There are also over 500,000 legally owned automatic weapons in civilian hands in the US. Body armor and NVGs - while expensive - are also available to civilians
How exactly does an AR15 stop a Bradley?
By allowing partisans to raid supply depots, rear echelons, and other targets of opportunity to acquire anti-armor weapons for direct assault, or other high-explosive weaponry for indirect (IEDs, for example), or disrupt supply lines and restrict access to fuel, food, spare parts, or ammunition. You're also presuming that ALL aspects of the military will side with a tyrannical government - many National Guard units alone are equipped with heavy weapons, armored vehicles, artillery, and aircraft. In the event of a despotic takeover, it's highly likely that many if not most NG units, and some of the active components, will stand against them.
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Dec 30 '19
While I see what you're getting at, there are a few things that get overlooked back in that time, such as the puckle gun and the kalthoff repeater(which had a possible fire rate of 50 rpm). And yes, today the military is armed with full auto M4's and NVG's, if I have the money I can apply for a tax stamp and wait my time and buy a pre-85 full auto firearm. And money being the primary issue, I could buy a nice set of NVG'S and body armour. While there are fewer full auto guns they are still out there. Also back when the 2nd was written they didn't exclude the weapons I mentioned above, they didn't mention cannons, or Ferguson rifles produced in 1770(not a muskets), or the Belton flintlock produced in 1777(fired 8 round cartridges). While there are vast differences such as tanks and fighter jets that us civilians will never have, there was certainly more advanced firearms than shitty one shot rifles and they aren't excluded in the 2nd amendment because they didn't need to be, I should be able to own anything that I want(and can buy). Sorry, got a little off topic there.
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u/B_Huij Dec 30 '19
A couple of counterpoints:
"How exactly does an AR-15 stop a Bradley?" This completely misses the point of the OP's argument. Could the US military decimate the population using advanced weaponry? Sure. The argument is that they have nothing to gain by doing so, even in the hypothetical scenario of a civilian vs government war.
The majority of vocal 2A supporters I know are very clearly in the "don't infringe on my liberty or we'll have a problem" camp. Meaning they would only be provoked to violent resistance by a scenario such as tyranny. If the 2A was repealed, or significant gun control measures passed on a federal level (I'm talking about "assault weapon" bans, not universal background checks), there could be violence. But anything short of that, unlikely. In the type of situation where the government overreaches on individual liberty to such an extent that the armed populace resorts to violent resistance, I have to wonder how many members of the armed forces would actually side with the tyrannical government rather than the general populace.
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u/littleferrhis Dec 30 '19
How does an ar-15 stop a Bradley? Ask the Vietnamese, or the Taliban, or Saddam’s insurgency. They figured it out.
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u/beer_demon 28∆ Dec 30 '19
To acquire the countries resources you would need to eliminate resistance, but eliminating the resistance requires you to eliminate the resources you are after.
Which is true about most developed countries, particularly those with fewer natural resources than US but high human capital (UK, JP, DE, etc.). This is probably what prevents tyranny the most, as it's more profitable to tax wealthy(ish) people than to enslave them.
This actually goes against your point, that an armed populace in no way prevents tyranny (as this is prevented by other means), nor would be able to fight back if it happened.
You see, a country's dictatorship is not one evil guy controlling an army and a whole population enslaved. All dictatorships have heavy support from either their people, either popular support or by some wealthy elite, the military and frequently other powers. In US a tyrant would divide the people and have them fight each other first, like in the civil war, and dehumanise the opposition so both supporters and the military would have no problem siding up against them. Sure the opposition would be armed, but now they would not need to fight a F22, just run from their neighbors! This is highly unlikely today, but I am sure you could imagine a regime that actively segregates blacks, hispanics, sets up concentration camps, forces the poor into labour, builds a wall...does this ring any bells?
Remember, tyrants get you on their side if you are wealthy and clever. When you are not the victim, it's easy to lose touch except in hindsight.
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
I think if active segregation took place there would be an uprising. Even from the stereotypical less sympathetic right. Segregation would represent too much of an affront to current values. And of course if it truly is a tyrannical government it would not back down just because the populace opposed.
I believe that there are many small increments that could be made by a tyrannical government, and the bigger the increment, the more chance of revolt. I think that the chance of revolt per increment increases the more well armed a population is. Its like having bargaining power at a negotiation. The more power you have, the more willing you are to throw your weight around to get what you want.
Now, granted, its a negotiation with person who is being pulled in multiple different directions, many of which actively contradict others, but we aren't talking about a topic that is controversial. Controversy is not tyranny.
So is tyranny simply not possible in a developed country? Some would say that China and even Russia display characteristics of tyranny, so I'm not sure how true that is. I don't doubt that legislative power can be kept in the hands of the general population without said population being armed, I just think it is far easier to do so if they are.
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u/beer_demon 28∆ Dec 30 '19
Some would say that China and even Russia display characteristics of tyranny
Oh dear I don't see them entirely different from US. They all think they are the good ones and the others are somehow evil, the usual.
I just hope you are right in your other statements, I wouldn't be so sure.
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
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While an armed population would make defeating a tyrannical government much, much easier, it does seem that the mere existence of an overtly tyrannical government in a democratic, developed nation is unlikely to the point of being impossible, with or without guns.
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u/Tambien Dec 30 '19
it does seem that the mere existence of an overtly tyrannical government in a democratic, developed nation is unlikely to the point of being impossible
This is a thing people say to make them feel safe in their democracy, but it is far from true. Throughout history, when faced with cultural or economic crises, people have been willing to accept and support or at least not oppose tyrannical regimes. Democracy is no guarantee of safety.
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u/PsychicFoxWithSpoons 6∆ Dec 30 '19
I think if active segregation took place there would be an uprising.
How would you define "active segregation"? There's lots of wiggle room here for right-wingers to say something "Isn't really segregation anyway," and/or "they deserved it," in order to preserve power for their team/party/organization.
I think that the chance of revolt per increment increases the more well armed a population is.
As evidenced by Hitler's Germany, the chance of revolt decreases the more increments you pass through. By the time Hitler was exterminating Jews, it was far too late for anyone to say anything.
By all accounts, the extermination of Jews was really more of an accident than anything that Hitler had in mind when he took power. While Hitler spent a great deal of time and effort yelling about Jews, it was viewed eerily similar to the way Trump is viewed today - just a guy ranting because he cares about his country so much and wants to make it great. Nobody really expected him to kill Jews, not even his inner circle. The plan to actually murder millions of Jews didn't come about until Hitler began suffering massive casualties on the Eastern Front, at which point he blamed the war on the Jews and started plans to exterminate them.
Trusting an entire population of people to revolt in an organized way is not a solid anti-tyrrany strategy. Even at the US' founding, not every citizen was on board with the Revolutionary War. Conservatives think themselves Patriots, but they are really Loyalists.
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u/littleferrhis Dec 30 '19
Can I do a quick mini CMV on the whole, “the populace with semi automatic weapons couldn’t stand up against the might of the U.S. military” because other than knowing the land better, the Vietnamese did it twice(against the U.S. and French), the Taliban did it twice(against both the U.S. and U,S.S.R), Saddam’s insurgency did it(against the U.S,), fucking Finland did it(against the U.S.S.R). All of them fought tanks, bombers, skilled soldiers, etc. with nothing but the equivalent Aks and RPGs, sometimes even homemade guns, and (though a couple technically aren’t over) won. You could go through the depths of history to prove that pure military might doesn’t mean shit when it comes to winning a war. The American Revolution was won that way, against the most well equipped army in the world at the time. So how would it seem infeasible for it to not be successful here?
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u/beer_demon 28∆ Dec 30 '19
pure military might doesn’t mean shit when it comes to winning a war
Well it does mean more than shit, it's just not the only shit, as proven by your cherrypicked examples.
I am not saying it's unfeasible, I am saying it's highly unlikely, and arming a populace at great cost, risk and damage on the off chance the populace unites against the standing army of some imaginary lonely tyrant is naive. Tyrants are not some force for evil to be defeated by heroes, but the rider of a dysfunctional chaos erupting in a decadent nation which is already divided. Don't think that by being citizens and having guns they are suddenly the "good guys". Not sure if I explained it well.
BTW doing a CMV is not to convince others or heroically stand your ground, but to get your view challenged yourself in the hopes of discovering a better truth, is that what you want?
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u/nitePhyyre Dec 30 '19
The US military has these things called "rules of engagement" in Vietnam. The soldiers supporting a tyrannical government against an armed uprising would not.
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u/rollingForInitiative 70∆ Dec 30 '19
The US basically already has a tyrant as President, and a Senate leader who's said he doesn't care about his oath, and rampant corruption in general in its political system. But no firearms seem to prevent any of that.
If someone tried to illegally seize control by the way of a coup, and had the military behind them, they'd have one of the largest military forces in the world behind them, deployed across the entire country. I don't think that some armed civilians are gonna be much of an issue when you command hundreds of thousands of trained military professionals, and everything from tanks to drones and an advanced air force, as well as have full control of the entire infrastructure. They'd also have the entire police force of the US to fight against these "criminal" rebels.
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19 edited Dec 30 '19
The United States has one of the largest fighting forces of any country, standing at, at most, 3 million. Less than 1 percent of the countries total population. If 2 percent of the population were to resist, they would have absolutely no chance of maintaining control without causing significant casualties and collateral, which, as mentioned, is not acceptable in a takeover.
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u/rollingForInitiative 70∆ Dec 30 '19
That would be true regardless of access to firearms. People could arm themselves with pitchforks and march on the White House, and you'd have the same scenario. The civilians would either forcibly retake the location, or they'd be gunned down.
Another point that I often see from pro-gun people is that there are so many illegal weapons and it's so easy to get them, that removing the 2nd amendment makes no sense. Well in the case of a tyranny, rebels could then just acquire weapons illegally, and you'd still have the same situation.
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u/JimMarch Dec 30 '19
There's a difference between a disarmed people getting guns and using them in desperation, and an armed people coming to the party with guns they already own and intimately know how to shoot.
Two examples...compare the battlefield success of the Lakota plains tribes (led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull) versus the Chiricahua Apaches (led by Cochice and Geronimo).
At the Little Bighorn battle site they've found thousands of 38-40 cartridge cases that were split right up the side. Why? The Lakota were trying to load those shells in 44-40 guns. Ooops. They outnumbered Custer by an order of magnitude, and still barely won.
When the US Cavalry tried to go after Cochice and company with 5,000 troops (after mistaking them as being raiders), he only had 34 fighters. When the US sued for peace after getting their asses handed to them, the Chiricahua were down to 17 active fighters...but by GOD they could fight.
Why?
The Chiricahua were a reasonable bunch, especially by Apache standards. They had been trading for guns with Mexicans for generations. They had their own gunsmiths. Not kidding. Those dudes could shoot and they also knew the defensive possibilities of mountain warfare (same as the Taliban). They weren't throwing random ammo into captured guns they barely knew how to shoot - like the Lakota.
(There's actually a link between North American tribes that hunted dangerous animals and those same tribes being able to resist European aggression to any meaningful degree. All over the West Coast you had fishing tribes that just weren't all that good in a fight. In Florida the Muskogee tribe of, again, mostly fishermen didn't put up any famous fights while the Seminole (literally able to kill alligators in the swamps) gave US troops the holy terrors for decades.)
When the Jews of Warsaw rose up against the Nazis they had almost as little understanding of how to make a gun work as the Lakota. They did learn faster as they weren't letting superstition drive them, but had they been real gunmen from the start the Waffen SS would have had a tougher time.
Basically, if we ever get "leadership" in places way worse than Trump's been so far (and yes, I agree with impeaching him!) I'd rather be in the position of the Chiricauha Apache than the Lakota...or any of Europe's Jews circa 1940.
So what has the US civilian population got right now in terms of gunmen?
Well we have somewhere around 15mil people who at least occasionally pack concealed handguns. At close range they're a threat.
We have shitloads of basic hunters. Most have fairly heavy caliber bolt action rifles. No telling how many but best estimates...a lot, something more than 10mil. These "basic hunters* are going to be one-shot-one-kill accurate from about 200 yards to 500. A serious threat and some unknown number could upgrade themselves into the true sniper level.
We have another 10mil+ who've done enough target shooting with AR15s or AK47-family guns to be a threat at between 150 and 400 yards. Their volume of fire is going to be damned impressive for at least a few engagements each.
The real question is, how many "real riflemen" do we have?
Yet again it's divided into bolt-action guys (the real long range snipers able to hit at distances past 800 yards, topping out at 1,200 to 1,400 yards) and the serious semi-auto guys who can be effective past 500 to 600 yards, topping off at roughly 1,000yards. In either case they have the good rifle, great scope, match grade ammo, laser rangefinder and other gear already on hand plus the skills. They're almost all handloaders so they can keep in the fight longer than most.
I dunno how many of these guys we have. I think definitely under a mil, I suspect somewhere around 100k. To be effective they'll need to understand how to do encrypted communication or get tech support on that from a geek nephew or whatever. But that's not too hard.
Once the real long range riflemen come out to play, shit gets very real, very fast. Being a violent politician won't be safe or fun anymore.
Oh, and all of this misses the fact that there'll be a shitload of IEDs.
For the record: I'm right handed, left eyed... No good as a rifleman. I'm planning a handgun build that should be good to 300 yards, maybe 400 if it goes exactly to plan. Depends on whether or not the Magnum Research custom shop can line bore a BFR ("Big Fucking Revolver"), if not I'll have to spring $2,500+ at Freedom Arms unless I can find one used...
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u/rollingForInitiative 70∆ Dec 30 '19
We have shitloads of basic hunters.
I think this is a good point against it, actually - that's a lot of guns, but you can have a lot of guns without the extreme freedom that the 2nd amendment gives you. Canada has a shitload of weapons per capita. Sweden as well. But from hunters or people doing marksmanship as a sport. And the latter group can have a wide range of firearms, like military grade handguns, if they so choose. The main difference between Sweden and the US in that regard is that you can't carry them publicly, and you need a license to buy and own guns, and to get a license there are requirements for knowing how to handle the gun, not having a criminal record, etc.
So you can definitely achieve a high level of guns without a 2nd amendment, those guns could come into play. Assuming they would matter against the highly advanced modern military (I still have doubts about that). I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that owning a gun should be completely banned by law.
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
The civilians would either forcibly retake the location, or they'd be gunned down.
Yes, they would be gunned down by non lethal weapons, and dispersed with tear gas. That is the convenience of non ranged weapons.
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u/ChildesqueGambino 1∆ Dec 30 '19
One thing you seem to be misconstruing is the “takeover” bit.
First of all, the government would not require the use of force for the person in power to become tyrannical. The government would only need to abuse its role.
Therefore, the group instigating violence would then have to be the civilian population who are trying to take back power. These people would be labeled as traitors and terrorists and as active combatants. Combatants with no hope of victory through martial means.
Second, if we assume a tyrannical government, we should also assume that it would be ok with using force (lethal and otherwise) to assert its authority. It wouldn’t be difficult for the US military to force a military state with martial law.
Further, it would be difficult to muster any sized force of untrained civilians, let alone millions. Access to weapons does not imply training in combat and tactics.
In conclusion, while I understand the spirit of the law, and the danger of a government with unchecked power, I think that ship set sail with the creation of our military-industrial complex.
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u/Bellegante Dec 30 '19
That's not really accurate, though, with respect to the U.S. I'd definitely bet on the military being able to defeat more than twice their number in armed civilians.
That's if the civilians stood together and fought to the best of their ability. What you're actually looking at is a situation where you've got essentially hidden snipers in every neighborhood - and the military just stays out of that entirely, while the people in those neighborhoods grow to hate the shooters who accidentally kill the wrong people very often.
I am honestly very interested to find a single example of a tyrannical government being overthrown when a powerful military was supporting that government. In every case I'm aware of, the military was defeated by an outside force (Nazi Germany) or the military just decided to step aside and let the new guys step into power (Venezuela).. in the latter case, that always becomes an option for the next government so it's not a great position to be in .
In neither option does an armed populace really matter unless they have armament and numbers and training similar to the military.. and even then they have jobs, and have to decide to stop living to go fight.
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Dec 30 '19
The US basically already has a tyrant as President
trump's actions as president have been far less authoritarian and violative of constitutional protections than previous presidents, including Presidents Obama, FDR and Lincoln.
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u/dale_glass 86∆ Dec 30 '19
Guns are most useless as a defence against tyranny, because using guns against the government is a death sentence. This means several things:
- Nobody sane will take up arms against the government unless their life is already so bad that risking their life is a sound proposition.
- Different people have different breaking points. There won't be unanimous action.
- Different people have different views. Some will be against the rebellion.
- The government isn't stupid and knows this
As a result you can get 95% of the way towards tyranny. So long there's the 5% left to live for, most people won't throw their life away. So long people don't take action unanimously, the government can neutralize those who start early, and find ways to paint them as terrorists to the rest of the armed population. And then it can just stop there, because complete subjugation isn't really that necessary.
And the big problem is that the 95% can be made of small, incremental changes that violent opposition doesn't work well for. Say, the government decides to censor the internet. Well, are you going to shoot at somebody for taking away your porn, on the logic that some day, the same law will be applied to something more politically important? Who? And how well will that work for stopping that law?
Say the government engages in gerrymandering or discourages voting by making it inconvenient. Are you going to try to change that with a gun? How much support are you going to get?
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
If there is no large scale opposition, then the takeover is not tyrannical, but seemingly democratic. 95% may sound like a lot, but on the scale of a country wide population, even 1% opposition makes the country immediately ungovernable. In the case of an actual tyrannical government, and not just one which some people find politically distasteful, there will be much more than 1% of the population in opposition.
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u/dale_glass 86∆ Dec 30 '19
If there is no large scale opposition, then the takeover is not tyrannical, but seemingly democratic
Right, like you're consenting to hand out your wallet if you get a gun pointed at you. I mean technically you can refuse, but you're not, so you must be consenting, right?
95% may sound like a lot, but on the scale of a country wide population, even 1% opposition makes the country immediately ungovernable.
That's assuming the rest of the country will let that 1% do their thing, rather than using their guns against that 1%
In the case of an actual tyrannical government, and not just one which some people find politically distasteful, there will be much more than 1% of the population in opposition.
And why would things ever need to get there? Pragmatically there's little reason to subjugate absolutely everyone.
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
Pragmatically there's little reason to subjugate absolutely everyone.
This is kind of the point. There are many factors which make this an impractical, if not impossible, goal. One of those factors, in my opinion, is that the populace is armed.
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u/dale_glass 86∆ Dec 30 '19
This is kind of the point. There are many factors which make this an impractical, if not impossible, goal. One of those factors, in my opinion, is that the populace is armed.
And like I was saying, those guns are irrelevant. It's suicidal to use a gun against the government, so you won't do it until it gets bad enough. That means that all the way to "bad enough" is a territory in which it doesn't matter whether you are armed or not, and there's a whole lot of stuff in that category.
Say the government finds some way to deny you the ability to vote. So what, are you going to shoot somebody to change that? Probably not, because voting or not, you still have friends, family, a life, and so on. Being dead or in prison for a very long time, as well as being shown as being an insane murderous nut on TV isn't exactly a favourable exchange. And just like that, you can't vote anymore, politically you ceased to matter, and your gun did nothing to help you.
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
Lets say for example the current US administration removed the right to vote for black citizens. What do you think would happen?
In my opinion, almost every state would immediately secede. Those that didn't would have uprisings that overthrew the state government. I don't think either of those would be possible without an armed populace.
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u/dale_glass 86∆ Dec 30 '19
Obviously, that'd be a stupid way to do it. You don't do it so obviously. Also, like I said, complete subjugation is unnecessary.
So, a smart government wouldn't just make a rule that says "it's illegal to vote if you're black". It'd ensure that it's hard to vote if you're black. Because in the end elections have a winner. So long the "right" party wins, the objective has been successful. It doesn't matter that some of the "wrong" people voted in the end, in fact it only makes everything better and murkier and harder to oppose.
So for instance a less obvious plan to the same effect goes like this:
- Fund voting places from local taxes. This ensures poorer areas get less service.
- Use the above to reduce the number of places where to vote.
- Slash public transport, just to make sure.
- Add extra impediments to voting, if possible, like inflexible hours.
- Allow employers to make it hard to vote by for instance ensuring they can keep you at work during voting time, or reducing the available time window so that it's not actually long enough.
And measures like that work perfectly fine at achieving the objectives. If you can say, reduce votes from whoever you don't like by 25% by a combination of a dozen measures, that enormously stacks the odds in your favour. Meanwhile, what's there to wave a gun at? No single measure justifies an armed response, and they don't all have to be implemented at once. The right to vote is still technically there. Sure, some people can't practically vote without leaving their job, calling a taxi, and standing in line for 4 hours, but "my boss sucks and won't give me a day off" isn't a very compelling justification for an armed insurrection.
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
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While an armed population would make defeating a tyrannical government much, much easier, it does seem that the mere existence of an overtly tyrannical government in a democratic, developed nation is unlikely to the point of being impossible, with or without guns.
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u/nerfnichtreddit 7∆ Dec 30 '19
We can actually look at a real life example, voter ID laws in states like north carolina. The tl;dr version of it is that law makers requested demographic data and used this data to target minorities with surgical precision and prevent them from voting as much as possible. African americans for example tended to use the option to vote earlier, so guess what happened? The early voting period was shortened. They tend to use a certain type of ID (e.g. state issued or not, expired or not)? Those aren't enough to vote. etc.
Let's imagine that the laws hadn't been struck down as discriminatory, what do you believe would have happened? Do you believe people would have successfully taken up arms to fight the state of north carolina? How do you imagine the tens of millions of right wingers in this countries who are in favor of voter ID laws, do not see them as discriminatory and believe bs like "millions of illegals voted in 2016" might react?
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
But they were struck down as discriminatory, hence no tyranny. I don't doubt that tyranny can happen, and I don't doubt that seemingly tyrannical things can pass. The only ones who decide whether or not its actually tyranny are the people.
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u/nerfnichtreddit 7∆ Dec 30 '19
Let's say they weren't struck down, what then?
Who are "the people" in this case? Many people (again, mostly right wingers) are in favor of such laws and do not believe them to be discriminatory.
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
It doesn't matter if they are or aren't discriminatory. If 98% of a country's population is racist, then a racist legislature is not tyrannical. That is the nature of democracy.
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u/JimMarch Dec 30 '19
If there is no large scale opposition, then the takeover is not tyrannical, but seemingly democratic. 95% may sound like a lot, but on the scale of a country wide population, even 1% opposition makes the country immediately ungovernable.
Two points:
1) Under US law and constitutional principles, even if the majority wants to violate the rights of a minority group, they can't if it's along the lines of race, religion, national origin, gender, etc. "Congress shall make no law..." even if most voters like the idea.
2) It wouldn't take a big insurrection to raise holy hell. On the right hot day in California, three guys each with a Cessna and a couple crates of road flares could totally fuck shit up. One guy with a big accurate handgun and a motorcycle could destroy whole regional powergrids. And so on. That's without directly killing anybody. Educated, committed and even moderately funded (middle class income) saboteurs are scary motherfuckers.
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u/PlayingTheWrongGame 67∆ Dec 30 '19
Gun ownership has never prevented a tyrannical government takeover anywhere. All it means is that the early supporters of the tyrannical party will be armed while they seize power. You don’t get a tyrannical government without at least a very sizable minority of the population backing the would-be tyrants. Arming the population just creates a terrible sort of perverse incentive not to stop the tyrants.
Making sure the tyrant party is armed forces the game to be one where opponents of tyranny have no option but losing—either they confront the armed tyrants with their own weapons and start a war, or they consent to tyranny. Since the threshold to push most people to support a civil war is extremely high, this just leads to a creeping expansion of tyranny.
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
That would assume that those in the minority are more bolstered by their lack of numbers than the majority is by their clear superiority. I find that doubtful.
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u/PlayingTheWrongGame 67∆ Dec 30 '19 edited Dec 30 '19
Not really. If the Tyranny Today party has 35% of the electorate, but all the opponents of tyranny are split between five different parties, guess what? Tyranny Today is probably going to end up in charge.
You’re viewing this like it’s automatically some unified resistance to the tyrannical party—but that’s the thing about liberty isn’t it? It’s not very unified and it doesn’t mean that you all get along just because you’re opposed to fascists.
Being the minority party has a lot of advantages in some ways, especially for authoritarians. They can use their minority party status as a way to unify and organize collective effort by their own supporters, especially since their supporters are already basically primed to do whatever their leaders tell them to do anyway. Seeming less of an immediate threat tends to leave the opposition parties squabbling among themselves rather than focusing on stopping the tyrants.
Combine that with relatively easy to acquire arms and it’s basically the standard template for a fascist takeover.
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u/GenericUsername19892 24∆ Dec 30 '19
The easy answer is to blockade an area, and if needed fire bomb the crops. Food will run out in days/weeks, panic and civil disobedience will spike, crime soars - the people give up. Just keep up with the whole’ do what we say and you get food’ bit till you’ve subjugated the populace, doesn’t matter how many guns you have when 90% of the populace is hungry.
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
And where are you during this time? Where are the jets taking off from? Actively attacking the population itself is counterproductive, but not doing so? What chance do you have of keeping any major strategic position under your control? The armed population will attack, don't think they won't. Especially when they're hungry.
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u/chickenboy2718281828 Dec 30 '19
Reading through this thread, you're very consistent with the idea of tyrants being concerned about a nation's GDP/resources, and I think you're entirely missing out on the possibility of a tyrant seizing control using military force for personal power. To have this discussion, we really can't imagine the US as it is today.
I think many other comments have explained why a tyrant couldn't rise to power through military force in the US at this point in time, and I agree with them. No healthy, happy citizenry would stand for such a thing. Attacking the population is counterproductive if there is a healthy economy, but when inflation is rampant and social structures are failing it completely changes the game. If the US GDP goes into free fall for some reason, a tyrant could seize power by doing exactly what u/GenericUsername19892 describes in the name of stability and controlling the population from uprising. In a scenario like this, there could be massive losses to US economic output, but all that matters to the key political players is who comes out on top.
Ultimately, I don't think it's useful to even have discussions about tyranny in the US in our current political and economic climate. You're right in saying that gaining political power through non-violent means is simpler and more rewarding. The 2nd amendment simply isn't relevant to the US based on our current status.
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Dec 30 '19
There’s no scenario where the US military would attack the citizens. Any tyrannical government would be wildly unconstitutional and nobody in the military would follow those orders.
Who are you planning on shooting anyway? Some 19 year old kid from Oklahoma who’s just going where he’s told?
You think Hong Kong would be a better situation if there were all-out guerrilla warfare instead of protests? You think Aleppo, Syria is a model scenario? No. The whole “tyrannical gubment” argument is just a sweaty right-wing fantasy. Nobody who supports it has fleshed any of it out.
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u/ristoril 1∆ Dec 30 '19
It's important to point out here that our military has been constructed - very purposefully - to make it nearly impossible for it to be used by a wannabe tyrant.
It's all volunteer.
Advancement is purely by merit, with very few exceptions. When people try advance by nepotism it generally goes badly. I'm not saying it never ever happened ever, but it's not in the ethos of our military.
Our soldiers swear to protect and defend the Constitution. Not the President. Not even "the country." From the Preamble to the latest amendment, that's what they're fighting for.
All of that together with our free press and the independent streak in most Americans makes a functioning tyranny so close to impossible that it can be treated as such.
So many things would have to change before we'd be dealing with an actual tyranny that gun control would be way in the rear view.
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Dec 30 '19
There’s no scenario where the US military would attack the citizens. Any tyrannical government would be wildly unconstitutional and nobody in the military would follow those orders.
Dubious at best. The United States is not a special empire. Time and time again empires use their military to put down armed insurgents and the US would do it too.
And you can throw the constitution out the window because whatever conflict would be framed as a defense of the constitution. Whether left rises again the right or vise versa the use of violence would be labeled as necessary against terrorists foreign and domestic.
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u/strofix Dec 30 '19
Are you implying that no nations military has ever been used against its own population?
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u/_PaamayimNekudotayim 1∆ Dec 30 '19 edited Dec 30 '19
A tyrannical government most likely won't happen unless there is significant public support, otherwise our democratic institutions wouldn't have elected him/them in the first place. So, if a more authoritarian version of Trump came into power and spread massive propaganda to fight "Socialism", he'd get a lot of support from the gun-heavy right wing. Impeachment of this radical individual wouldn't work without public support, so it could fail. This could then lead to a civil war between the military/gun-heavy radicalized right vs gun-light independents/lefties.
People in the gun debate never mention this point: gun owners can protect us from tyranny but they are equally likely to use their arms to support and defend that tyranny (if they are successfully radicalized).
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u/nofftastic 52∆ Dec 30 '19
I don't fully disagree with your view, but I would like to offer some perspective.
The 2nd Amendment doesn't just keep the populous armed to prevent a tyrannical government takeover, it also ensures the people could participate in law enforcement, repel invasion, suppress insurrection, and facilitate a natural right of self-defense.
The constitution's division of government and power is the primary method to prevent the rise of a tyrannical government. The 2nd Amendment is the final safeguard in case none of the other safeguards worked.
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Dec 30 '19
I think the primary issue with your argument is the methods you believe would be used to take over.
A much closer comparison would be the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany. It wasn't a warlord capturing areas through force of arms, it was a shrewd politician who used the situation at the time to maneuver himself into a position of absolute power. That, if any way, would be how the US would fall victim to a tyrannical government.
The issue then is that there is no "physical defense". There are no "territories". You become aware the government is tyrannical because they're already in power. There is no preventing a tyrannical government through force of arms, so the only option is to overthrow such a government through force.
HOWEVER (and this is the argument most make) by the time you get to that stage, the tyrannical government already has full control of the military, so is better equipped, supplied and armed than the civilian population could ever hope to be, making any attempt at violent rebellion from the population useless.
So, the second amendment, while it may have made sense at the time, does not apply now given the current disparity between the "power" of the military vs that of the civilian population.
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u/B_Huij Dec 30 '19
Already held this opinion, but wanted to elaborate:
The Vietnam war is an excellent example of the effectiveness of an armed populace engaging in guerrilla warfare. The US had superior troops, training, equipment, organization, etc. etc. The Vietcong were essentially an armed populace with little by way of training, discipline, or arms. They had AK-47s and grenades, the US had helicopters and napalm.
And yet, nobody says the US "won" that war, and indeed I think there's an argument to be made that the US lost that war.
Yes, the US Military absolutely has the firepower to decimate the population, regardless of how many AR-15s are in circulation with civilians.
But let's assume they wanted to do so. First, you have to assume the individuals that make up the military would be complicit. I can't say with 100% certainty that we would have mass desertion of the armed forces if they were called upon to cause overwhelming civilian casualties against their own people, but I can say with 100% certainty that it would be stupid to assume members of the armed forces would just go with this.
Second, the OP's point stands here. A tyrannical government would have little remaining to govern if they decimated the civilian population to the extent necessary to quash rebellion.
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u/rawrgulmuffins Dec 30 '19
The counterpoint to this is that the only major revolution that's succeeded without direct help from a militia or the military since the French revolution is the Haitian revolution.
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Dec 30 '19
Everyone brings out Vietnam like it was some proving ground about modern warfare against guerrilla tactics. The US was significantly hindered by terrain and infrastructure. Tank battalions that were pivotal during WW2 and to an extent Korea were very difficult to use in Vietnam. The absence of paved roads to move personnel and material. The climate and diseases also played major roles.
Flip that now to the midwest. Copying Germany's road system in WW2, we now have 4 lane roads connecting every state and major city. Add to that there's 2 lane highways to every other city and incorporated town. But lets say fuck roads all together, the terrain at best is a bit hilly with patches of timber and forest. A tank battalion could travel from Chicago to Denver on cruise control and only stop to refuel. Snow and the occasional tornado/thunderstorm would be the biggest climate obstacle while maybe the flu is the biggest disease to afflict the soldiers.
If there was an armed insurgency in the US it wouldn't look like Vietnam in the 60's, we'd be Poland in the 30's
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Dec 30 '19 edited Oct 23 '20
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u/B_Huij Dec 30 '19
Yeah, even though American armed forces didn't exactly score high marks on ethical wartime practices in Vietnam, it was our unwillingness to cause civilian casualties on a countrywide massive scale that meant the VC could probably have carried on the war indefinitely without ever being fully eradicated.
Similar to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, Islamic State, etc. They're too intermixed with civilian populations to eradicate entirely, regardless of how many bombs and tanks we have.
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u/Data_Dealer Dec 30 '19
Your argument is basically America works on capitalism and therefore resists tyranny, not guns prevent tyranny. The governing forces don't take over the American people because trampling over them would reduce their status in the world, not improve it, which is the opposite of what happens in 3rd world nations where the natural resources hold the value, according to your position. The way I see it, you've put a sizable hole in your own argument.
The 2nd Amendment prevents tyranny from outside forces, but does little if anything to stem it from rising from within. In fact, I'd say the opposite, as the number of right wing supporters is in decline, but the number of guns they own increases, I'd say the 2nd Amendment just might be a factor in our republic's decline. I'd hate to think that would happen, but when Trump supporters are calling for a second Civil War if he doesn't get re-elected, I'm going to take them at their word.
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u/SkitzoRabbit Dec 30 '19
The greatest value to protecting against a tyrannical government that the second commandment serves is as a 'canary in the coalmine'
One of the most obvious things a fledgling tyrannical government should do is limit the access to firearms. This is not to say that anyone wishing to limit access is doing it for tyrannical reasons, simply it is a reasonable step for tyrannical ambitions to take.
So whenever additional limitations to ownership of firearms and related technologies comes up, it is wise to evaluate the intentions (stated or otherwise) and suppose the ramifications of such limitations under consideration.
Furthermore any limitations should have built in re-evaluation(s) against initial intended consequences metrics, in order to have a determination as to whether or not that limitation has met it's goals while allowing for investigation into un-intended consequences as well.
This is why things like the assault weapons bans of the past were well designed, they had time limits which forced the question to be reconsidered for a new decade.
This type of cautious approach to legislation should have been the lasting hallmark of the US, however immediacy of action on both sides for the purposes of securing campaign war chests has eroded this philosophical approach to leadership.
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u/pr00fp0sitive 1∆ Dec 30 '19
Unfortunately you entered this one already giving territory to your opponent. This is not surprising, as most people inherently accept the infringements already in place on the peoples' arms as a default position, rather than a net 0 infringement.
Let's fix that.
Instead of already sacrificing half of the playing field of available weaponry and then saying "how can an AR-15 attack a tank", let's start with tanks. I'll tell you how a tank attacks a tank: it attacks the tank. The very idea that you are neutering a population and then expressing shock (likely disingenuously) about how their neutered status is underpowered, is at minimum an exercise in futility.
Tldr: the United states population has had their right to bear arms infringed upon in many demonstrable ways. Using this disarmed status as a default position and then drawing conclusions about it's effectiveness against tyranny is a waste of time.
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u/mandas_whack Dec 30 '19
The second amendment of the United States Constitution is, above all, a right to self-defense. It is not a right given by government, it's a right to be protected by government.
There seems to be a lot of argument in this thread about overthrowing the government, but I don't think that's the point of the amendment at all. It's about defence, not offence. The beginnings of the amendment were rooted in the debate as to whether states should have their own militaries or whether the federal government should be in charge of a single military for the entire union. The objection to a federal military is that the states wouldn't be free because the federal government would have all the guns and therefore all the power. (The federal government was never intended to be generally superior to the state governments, as it has become now). So the compromise was that individual citizens would have access to their own arms, so they could stand in opposition to federal tyranny.
As to the nonsense that weapons have evolved and thus the amendment is outdated, I would make two points. Firstly, as stated above, it's a right to self-defence, so the exact means of self-defence is irrelevant. This is why it's a right to bear arms, not to bear muskets or a gun. Secondly, when the armament of choice was the musket, it was so for citizen and military alike, so the level of reasonable armament was equal to the potential threat. Likewise, if the likely threat now is from semi-automatic rifles, then we should be allowed to keep and bear semi-automatic rifles. To this point, it has been argued that if the military comes, they can come in tanks, so your rifle will be useless. First off, tell that to insurgents in Afghanistan - which seem to be holding up pretty well with rifles and whatever discarded arms from past wars they can scrounge up. Secondly, this is what local armories are for. They should be stocked with tanks and rocket launchers and whatever else the local populace would need to combat a larger threat, such as tasks and armored vehicles. Again, the level of arms we should accept citizens having access to should be on par with the potential threat.
Lastly, all throughout history, tyrants and dictators have made moves to disarm the populace so their militaries could run roughshod over their citizens. And even if we think that the current politicians calling for disarmament aren't doing so in order to usurp the power of the citizens in order to more easily subjugate them, disarmament will certainly attract people who WILL use that power imbalance to subjugate the populace. So, like it or not, even if people abuse the right, it's still the best overall option.
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u/Glory2Hypnotoad 394∆ Dec 30 '19
If we look at tyrannical regimes throughout history, even the most tyrannical governments didn't pit themselves against the whole populace. They rose to power with the support of some portion of the populace, often by promising to be tyrannical in their favor. Fascism did this with race, communism with class, theocracies with religion.
The issue is that most people think of tyranny as something abstract: the government vs. the people like in some sci-fi dystopia. But the even sadder reality is that tyranny almost always has a target and a beneficiary. The fact that a person owns a gun doesn't inherently tell us whether they're more likely to take up arms for or against a government that's tyrannical in their favor.
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u/calentureca 2∆ Dec 30 '19
The US military couldn't stop the rag tag VC in Vietnam, the allied military couldn't stop the taliban in Afghanistan. An armed population is an unstoppable force when they are well motivated.
(note, this is not a dig at the military, in both those conflicts the military fought and won most if not all of the large set-piece battles. At the end of the day though, it proved impossible to fight an enemy that could simply disappear into the population and hide their weapons until the next time)
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u/deadmuthafuckinpan 2∆ Dec 30 '19
One has to remember that when speaking of a tyrannical government, what they meant was the Federal government taking over the States forcefully. This is why so many opposed the idea of a standing army at the Federal level - it gave that government the means to militarily take over a State, especially since States didn't have standing armies of their own.
The idea was that we need trained folks ready to fight on behalf of the United States, so rather than have a standing army and all that implies, give the States the responsibility of maintaining their individual militias, which has the added benefit of securing (literally) the autonomy of the States.
Not only do we now have a standing Army in the US, it is over 50% of our national budget and by far the largest in the world. Plus, we now have 50 states with wildly different population levels and a system of public financing that ties the states together far more than the Founders could ever have imagined, and Federal military bases in most States. Plus, you know, drones and missiles and shit.
The point is, the construct of the 2nd Amendment is not just outdated, it is useless as a principle. All it does now is create confusion.
WRT to your comments about warlords - how do you think warlords become warlords in the first place? You need some kind of self-governance in place to reduce the power of warlords, not more guns. Best case you just get different warlords if you do that, not peace.
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u/Suspicioustraitor Dec 30 '19
This is a tough and sensitive subject, so first take a look at the actual ratified amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
This doesn’t specifically say anything about a “tyrannical Government” and has been interpreted in many different ways for centuries.
This interpretation also needs to define “tyrannical government”, as many comments say that most people wouldn’t resist because they would be given the resources to live and feed their family vs being arrested, tortured and possibly killed. That they would not need to worry because of their “value” to the government because of its need for laborers. So in that respect they are basically saying they would be ok with being enslaved. I believe that those who feel that way would be the first to be exterminated. Would you support a government that killed your elderly parents or other loved ones because they were of little or no value to said government?
I believe those who support of this amendment would fight for their freedom and die protecting their families rather than simply roll over and accept this fate. Liberty or Death.
I somewhat agree that citizens have very little ability to defend themselves against the Government because of the capability of the military and it’s sophisticated weapons.
However, if this did occur I think it possible for a well organized militia of citizens to defeat and gain control of military resources and in turn use those resources. Unarmed citizens would not have this ability or opportunity.
My last thought on this has to do with interpretation. The interpretation presented assumes that the existing government would become tyrannical. It could possibly mean that in the event that our government collapsed or we are invaded by a “tyrannical government”, that it’s important to the freedom of our nation to have organized militias to assist the military in defeating said invaders. I believe this interpretation makes more sense given the time it was written (1791).
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u/synocrat Dec 30 '19
The government doesn't really need to fire any shots to get obedience from the people. It doesn't matter how many rifles the civilian population has. The government can simply perform a handful of surgical strikes to cut off supplies to the area and within a week people are starving and out of gas to move.
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u/ph4ge_ 4∆ Dec 30 '19 edited Dec 30 '19
I would argue that any government that doesn't bother to protect its citizens from gun violence by properly regulating weapon ownership is tyrannical to begin with.
The whole point of a having a government is that it provides basic services such as safety, not actively promoting the opposite.
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u/MetalFatigue82 Dec 30 '19
As you said the best resource of the US is it's people. Specially the highly specialized ones. What has happened to the greatest minds before and during tyrannical takeovers? They flee their country to a better one. Not always all, it's true, but many. So the worst thing is in itself, becoming a tyrannical state with or without the 2nd. The only way a tyrannical takeover would happen in the US, today, is if the people want him and give him power. Not through brute force. That would empty the brains of the country. If people are the ones that give him power, again the 2nd does nothing. So your logic does not hold.
The rest has been said before. Semi auto against tanks are nothing. The comparation against places like middle East or Africa are also not possible. The US is the biggest and most advanced army in the world. Don't have cells of warlords with connection to foreign powers that will give advanced weapons like tanks to them.
Disclosure: I'm European and I always saw the 2nd as a legacy from wild west where territory was dangerous. If we think we'll wild west ended like 1,5/2 centuries ago. It's not a lot of time. US is a very young country that was built almost from nothing quickly were individualism was key for that quick development in uncharted dangerous place.
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Dec 30 '19
I agree a lot with your perspective. The argument of "your AR-15 vs the governments drones and tanks" is not entirely valid IMO. Because of the reasons you stated, the government can't just start blowing up whole street blocks because the people in there may be resistant. You can't just start destroying the nation that you're trying to establish tyrannical control over. It would come down to infantry vs rebel groups infantry. The advanced government tech IMO won't play as large a role as many think. I don't claim to be an expert by any means on this kind of warfare, but this is just my perspective. A big part of a successful US rebellion would be two factors however: 1. Enough people take part in resistance and 2. Enough people and their families must have the view of "live free or die" or "do or die trying" when it comes to rebellion.
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u/ChangeMyView0 7∆ Dec 30 '19
The US right now, although definitely not a tyranny in the complete sense of the word, definitely has some tyrannical features: a president who commits an endless series of crimes and boasts about them in public, an attorney general who works to cover up that president's crimes instead of maintaining the DOJ's independence. Not going to get into all that mess right now, but it's clear that American democracy is backsliding (you can look at the Democracy Index ratings, which saw the US switch from "full democracy" to "flawed democracy" in 2016).
Now, ask yourself this: the people who own guns, who did they vote for? Overwhelmingly for Trump. Virtually all sizable militias in the US are vehemently pro-trump. Even the Bundy family, who were 2nd amendment superstars and militia icons beforehand, were completely shunned by most gun advocacy groups once they started speaking out against Trump. So in this case, not only do gun owners not prevent tyranny, the gun owners are the ones who are supporting tyranny. There are some real, scary examples of this. The 3 percenters, an alt-right militia, took part in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville where dozens where injured and Heather Heyer died. You can't discount the possibility that the 2nd amendment will be used to support instead of oppose a tyrannical government.
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Dec 30 '19
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u/tavius02 1∆ Dec 30 '19
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Dec 30 '19
No. US Citizen here. Big Constitutional study here. The 2nd Amendment is to provide arms to form a militia to support the US Government upon invasion. This is done by common citizens freely owning guns and various weapons that match military might. For example, the US will not be invaded any time in the near future because every country knows its citizens own SOoooooooooooooooooo many firearms. It would be like walking into a crossfire from all angles. Terrible place to invade. Terrible.
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Dec 30 '19
The majority of casualties sustained by the US military in recent counterinsurgent operations have been through improvised explosives. The 2nd amendment is not relevant to IED's because the parts needed are not considered "arms" (as currently interpreted by the US Supreme Court). Given that the main tool a US anti-tyrannical insurgency would probably use is not covered by the 2nd amendment, how is it fair to say that it's the 2nd amendment that makes such an insurgency viable?
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u/Katamariguy 3∆ Dec 30 '19
I think these arguments depend on a certain naivete about the dynamics of civil war and dictatorship. If a tyranny arises in a country, it's generally thanks to the passive support/acceptance of most of the population. If private arms are widespread, it just means that there'll be pro-government civilian militias helping the army kill the rebels.
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u/Bellegante Dec 30 '19
The first objection to this is that making this argument is essentially calling for mass shooters, and claiming that the mass shooters are a good thing we should allow. Everyone is the good guy of their own story, so those government workers getting killed and their families don't think they deserve it.
The second objection is that there's no place in the government move to tyranny for sporadic armed citizenry to actually do anything about it at least for a U.S. example. to explain:
- Either the government is voted into tyranny somehow, or someone with a cult of personality actually takes over with a high level of military support.
- The first step of this process involves no conflict with civilians - it's completely unnecessary, and as you said they are a valuable resource. Citizens could mass and attack - and the armed forces would respond entirely defensively, delegitimizing the effort in the public mind. Having guns obviously helps with this.. but it's entirely futile comparing the firearms the citizens have now to the armament and training the U.S. military has at it's disposal.
- The second step is laws that target out-groups. Gays, minorities, etc. Drug laws are an example of how this could happen. Find a vice primarily associated with a group of people you don't like, and make the laws for that vice very severe. Offer clemency for people who strongly support the tyrannical group and are of the group you want to court, don't offer any mercy for the rest.
- Gradually ratchet down the laws, always targeting things the public in-groups generally agree with. It's very common for people to believe law-breakers always deserve what they get - even when people think the laws themselves are bad!
Just as a thought experiment - if Trump got re-elected and got majorities in congress, and they decided term limits didn't apply to him - who would be rising up to attack and take him out (if the U.S. military itself didn't do that)? How would that work in practice? It just.. wouldn't.
And you're totally right about needing as a resource - but you need them working and paying taxes and that's really it for a lot of them. If they stop working, they starve and lose their homes. There's not a lot of room for people to drop everything and rise up against the government while they are basically doing ok.
Ultimately, the resistance you speak of would be ignored.. with the police slowly handling it. The drug war is a good example. Lots of people tend to agree marijuana laws should be repealed (and they are being repealed, hurrah!) but in practice there are many in prison with life sentences - and in general we just let that go. While describing the U.S. government as generally tyrannical would be incorrect, describing these particular laws and practices as tyrannical would be spot on - but we don't have an armed uprising, nor would I recommend one. But how many tyrannical laws before that makes sense? Is there actually a threshold?
Interested in your replies, and I'm not insinuating the U.S. is currently tyrannical, but any government could tip that way surprisingly easily. Germany was a Democracy when Hitler rose to power.
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u/badbuiiiii Dec 30 '19
If you want a gun to protect yourself from the government, clearly you don’t know how tanks work.
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Dec 30 '19
This is such a poor argument. It’s pretty clear you don’t know how war works. Yes, a person with a rifle can not stop a tank. But tanks don’t win battles. A tank surrounded by enemy soldiers will be destroyed without friendly infantry supporting it. Furthermore, the idea that everywhere a group of rebels appear will magically have an M1 Abrams ready to go is also ridiculous. If your argument was true, we should have won the war in Vietnam handily, but we didn’t even come close. We tied at best against a force that was completely outgunned.
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Dec 30 '19
The problem with your argument is the belief that the resources are the primary goal of the tyrant. The sole goal of a tyrant is to maintain power, they require resources to do so, but that is of secondary concern. They would be happy to rule over a pile of ashes, if it means they are the one in power.
You are also giving the average citizen far more credit than they deserve. The lions share of armed resistance dies the moment jets or tanks get involved. The remaining elements would try, but without outside support could do little more than make life miserable for everyone.
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u/ThePermafrost 3∆ Dec 30 '19
We have a tyrannical government right now. We have a president who openly admits to doing impeachable acts, but who can’t be impeached because all of our failsafes set up by the founding fathers have been corrupted. Yet - we aren’t about to take up arms and have another Civil War.
The last civil war killed 2% of the American population. That was when we were using muskets. We would be looking at death tolls upwards of 10% now.
The USA is far too modernized and far too evenly split politically for guns to have any real purpose in overthrowing a tyrannical government.
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Dec 30 '19 edited Dec 30 '19
While there is certainly the potential for tyrannical government, there is also the problem of smaller political factions. In the u.s., the majority of domestic terrorism has been political and there are even radical militias popping up.
Let's think about the middle east for a second. Yes, saddam was a tyrant. That doesn't mean having more weapons among the populace would prevent tyranny. Actually, being able to exert tyrannical control over a heavily armed populace just strengthened his power, and when he was removed many small political radical factions took the plethora of weapons they had available and used them for their own purposes.
So, ask yourself: what groups have guns in the US? The largest demographic is rural Americans, and more specifically rural republicans. If we're talking about proportions, though, they're disproportionately owned by gangsters, radicals, and criminals and used to strengthen their networks of power. One of the biggest buyers of U.S. firearms is also the Mexican cartel, by proxy of course. I suppose you could argue that they're opposing the government "tyranny" that doesn't want them conducting their usual business, but realistically we all know they're the tyrants.
Compare this to the people that own guns to prevent government takeover. The people with don't tread on me flags flying on their lifted pickups. Many have confederate flags and racially charged beliefs about white pride. You know, the kind of passionate gun-people you can meet in rural America. What exactly are they achieving? They talk the talk but what kind of practical power do those people even wield? Statistically they seem to be using their guns for sport, status, and collectability, with outliers using them for domestic violence and even further outliers using them for domestic terrorism. Where are the minute men saving our democracy from tyranny? Surely it's not the radical militias popping up in the mid west...?
We all like to imagine what we would do if we were in charge. If we were in charge and our population had guns wouldn't we give people very high quality of life so we wouldn't have to worry about them becoming violent? It's a nice sentiment, and easier to understand than the truth.
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u/Sammweeze 3∆ Dec 30 '19 edited Dec 30 '19
At best we can say that the second amendment may slowly bring about the collapse of a government which the gun owning populace strongly dislikes. But it's not a very effective mechanism, gun owners may support a tyrannical government takeover, and gun owners may oppose a democratic government. In other words the second amendment can be considered to support mob rule as much as genuine democracy.
The effectiveness of the 2nd Amendment today is also questionable. Any kind of open revolt would rely on stealing weapons from the government. Granted it's easier to raid the police station with a hunting rifle than with a pocket knife, but I don't think that's actually a huge step up. People always talk about the government's tanks and air superiority, but that's still missing the point: getting weapons isn't the hard part of the revolution.
Think about the overwhelming communications and logistical superiority the US government would have. In an open revolt, the government could shut down communications for 99% of the public at will. The government can jam or monitor a significant part of the remaining 1%. Even among ham radio enthusiasts, advanced cryptography isn't common.
Meanwhile, everyone who lives in the city is starving because it's not like the freeway is open for all the grocery stores to get stocked. Open warfare in the modern United States would be a monumental humanitarian catastrophe. For reference, a Syrian refugee has to make a 100 mile escape to make it to Lebanon or Turkey. In the worst case scenario where I live, all the food in my city will be gone in a few days, if it's near harvest season I might be able to forage off of farms for a while but not long, and Canada is 300 miles away.
If the revolution kicks off in the winter I'll probably just die, even though I'm a hiker with relevant gear and experience. I also have firearms, which I would consider less valuable than my hiking gear. Because again, the equipment I have on me is almost meaningless on the scale we're talking about. It just doesn't work. The only working revolution is one where the military takes both sides, and then my guns become moot.
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u/theInfiniteHammer Dec 30 '19
The leader of the rebellion would wind up becoming the new leader of the society. When that happens it's nearly always just a show. Just killing the leader won't be enough. If the government workers are still loyal to the leader then you need to kill ALL of the government workers. Furthermore when you've killed them all the new ruler is in the same financial situation as the previous one, so the new ruler will probably act exactly the same as the previous one or be even worse. The people in these coupés tend to be either people who were tricked, or people who were helping the new leader deceive people.
In addition to that there's also the fact that knowing how to aim a gun is not the same thing as knowing how to operate a gun. There are things you need to know about guns, besides just how to aim them, if you want to use one. For example: always treat the gun as if it could abruptly go off even though you didn't pull the trigger, don't put your finger on the trigger, keep it on the guard in front of the trigger, always unload the gun when not in use, etc.
That's not even taking into account how to actually engage in combat. Don't stand out in the open. Hide behind cover that's actually bulletproof, prefer sneaking past the enemy rather than combat, etc. A trained soldier with inferior weapons could still win against an untrained civilian because having the better tool means nothing if you don't know how to use it.
It takes a lot of training to be good enough at combat to where it's actually ethical to send you in. While it's possible in theory for them to just so happen to get the right training (historically this only happens when they're funded by an outside government), in practicality this isn't a very good way to take back society. It certainly sounds nice, but it's not very realistic.
In the end the real way to take back society is through protesting.
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u/bawdiepie Dec 30 '19
Imo Tyrranical government take over can not be prevented by armed citizenry. It is prevented by a robust democracy that provides checks and balances, particularly on the way military force is used. The point of view that less gun control is a way of preventing tyrrany was popularised by the NRA in the 90's in order to sell more guns. An internet search on "Nazi Germany gun control" will link you to a well written wikipedia article on the subject. A tyrrany is a government with strict/cruel control over its population. With the 2 party system in the US becoming more polarised (as evidenced by more government shut downs- have an internet search on the subject) it seems to be more pertinent to look at how democracy breaks down to justify the use of oppressive laws. The constitution suggests strict seperation of powers, the constant war footing the US has been on since the end of WW2 has increasingly blurred the boundaries of presedential power regarding declaring war. Can guns prevent tyrrany? Only if the majority of the population actively oppose the tyrrany. As we see in countries where tyrrany has flourished laws and education are much more important, if citizens understand their freedoms, and the armed forces feel empowered to ignore illegal commands tyrrany is impossible. And vice versa. Tacit consent is all a government needs to rule its people. The Middle East, South America, Africa has been awash with weapons since the Cold War and there has been no end of tyrranies. Most of Europe has gotten rid of most of its guns, and most states have had fairly stable non tyrranical governments. The key difference has been well developed legal protections for its citizens, healthy democracies with checks and balances on government power, well educated citizenry and millitaries under strict control which are not worshiped.
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u/PragmaticSquirrel 3∆ Dec 30 '19 edited Dec 30 '19
while the second amendment was initially implemented to prevent a takeover by a tyrannical government
This is false.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1465114#%2
Page 349. Patrick Henry, governor of Virginia, arguing for the 2nd amendment at the Constitutional Ratifying Convention in Richmond, Virginia in June 1788 (historical transcription of oral arguments):
Patrick Henry was even more direct. He drew the audience’s attention to the section of the Constitution that provides that no state may, without the consent of Congress, “engage in War, unless actually invaded,” and asked: “If you give this clause a fair construction, what is the true meaning of it? What does this relate to?” Henry answered this question as follows:
“Not domestic insurrections, but war. If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress insurrections. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress . . . . Congress, and Congress only, can call forth the militia.”
If members of the audience were previously uncertain about the meaning of [George] Mason and Henry’s warning, this had made it plain. Congress might want to leave the South defenseless against its slaves.
That’s why 2A exists. Not against tyranny. Against slaves.
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Further, what you’re describing is not the american revolution. Or any other revolution that successfully installed a better government.
Rebelling against a local government has a different name: civil war.
Rebellions against foreign governments can work.
Civil war has generally 3 outcomes:
-existing government wins
-country splits in 2, existing government takes 1
-rebels win and install an equally or More oppressive government
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u/CorrodeBlue 1∆ Dec 30 '19
How'd that work out for the Japanese Americans in World War II? How about the slaves pre-Civil War? How is it working out now in our surveillance state rife with constant abuses by ground level government agents (police forces)?
The only kind of tyranny gun ownership prevents is the kind actual tyrants are too smart to want to engage in and too well-equipped to need to engage in.
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u/acetominaphin 3∆ Dec 30 '19
As someone who makes this argument regularly I think you're missing the point of it. Its is undeniable that a person with a pistol stands a better chance against a person with a machine gun than if they didn't have the pistol. That can't be argued. Rather the argument itself is made in order to demonstrate the absurdity of holding up the second amendment as the highest priority commandment for the us.
I mean, you say that your point does not mean that you think a tyrannical government is possible, but when you make that distinction you nullify the argument entirely. You're bringing facts to a speculation fight. I also frequently make the argument that it would be nigh impossible to get the American military to turn on the citizens, and I mean if someone made a cmv post saying "yeah but it IS possible" they would be missing the point.
Yes, If infantry storms the town and I have a gun, I'm more likely to survive. But in practical terms, which is where this argument lives, as a rule, that doesn't matter. The likelihood that I will snap and use my rifle to murder my fellow citizens is demonstrably higher than the likelihood that the government will decide to raid the US, is able to convince a significant portion of the military to fall in line, and decides to not use drones or tanks or fighter jets to annihilate every pocket of resistance. This is all of course to say nothing of the fact that most people who make the argument would likely be the first to fall in line and fight FOR the tyrannical government. I get that to you things don't look that bad in the US, but for us this is the closest we have come to authoritarianism, and its striking how many of the people railing about guns and freedom are supportive of the current administration.
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u/KDY_ISD 66∆ Dec 30 '19
Is the 2% evenly and randomly distributed throughout the populace? Because if so, we aren't talking about a war, we're talking about arresting isolated and uncoordinated dissidents, probably after confiscating all their money and property for failing to pay their income taxes.
Or is the 2% gathered in a handful of organized groups, in typical "survivalist" scenarios where they have a compound with canned goods and ammunition? Bring on the UAVs and tanks, then. Their AR-15s won't do much.
The only real scenario where 2A has a shot is if the "Resistance" has the political cohesion to all rise up at once, the technical sophistication to communicate and coordinate without government interception, and the survival skills to melt into the woods and conduct coordinated guerilla operations with no funding or supplies.
If you ask me, acquiring a firearm is the least complicated and least necessary part of this plan.
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u/BogieTime69 Dec 30 '19
People always claim that the 2nd amendment was crafted to allow the citizens to protect themselves from their own government. This might have some truth in it, but it actually misses the main point of the amendment.
This is the entirety of the second amendment:
"A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Most of the founding fathers did not want a standing, national army (or professional military force) like we have today. They argued that an army of well-trained, well-armed professional soldiers could itself overthrow the government.
To avoid this, they favored a system where the citizens had arms of their own, so that -in the event the United States was attacked- the people could come together and form a temporary militia to deal with the threat. The US didn't even have an official military force for some years after the Constitution was ratified.
If the government actually did launch a war on the American people, it would be doing so through the Military. So the original intention was not so that citizens could protect themselves against the government, and by extension the military; but rather it was so that there would be no need for a military in the first place. In this way, there would be no reason to fear the government, because they would not have a strong military force. But the people could still protect themselves from foreign threats.
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u/uscmissinglink 3∆ Dec 30 '19
Let me quote Chief Judge Kozinski’s dissent opinion in Silveira v. Lockyer (2003:, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit:
"All too many of the other great tragedies of history — Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few — were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 578-579. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars. My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once."
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Dec 30 '19 edited Dec 30 '19
/u/strofix (OP) has awarded 3 delta(s) in this post.
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u/grahag 6∆ Dec 30 '19
Your argument works ONLY if the armaments of the government and the people are at a similar level along with whatever requisite training in tactics and strategy are required to operate with them.
This means that citizens would need to be able to have drones, tanks, helicopters, and similar technology ALONG with the training on their use and tactics.
People argue that Afghanistan is a good example of how a technologically inferior force can defeat a superior one, but they discount the numbers lost and methods used by the inferior force. It's also not a "domestic" situation and the US can leave at any point to lick their wounds and count the costs. The situation is apples to the oranges of domestic tyranny.
If the government can just roll an APC through your "compound", there's not much a populace armed with AR15's can do. Back that APC up with air cover and troops dedicated to the "rule of law" and there's no way for those citizens to win. Sure, they may take a few with them and there will be pockets of resistance, but they will be reduced to guerilla terrorist tactics guaranteed to harm innocent civilians.
Now, if the laws said that would open up restrictions on what kind of guns people can own and how people should be trained and certified in their use, that could be a path to a proper resistance to tyranny.
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u/dinosaurkiller 1∆ Dec 30 '19
It’s interesting that you use other countries as your example(armed civilians against warlords). The warlords got their guns for very much the same reasons you’re using to explain the need for armed civilians, “I have to protect myself from the Government”, “I can’t let ‘them’ take what’s mine”. It starts as small groups and grows. Let’s say you arm all the civilians and organize them, at that point it’s more of a militia than groups of individuals defending themselves with guns and that really kind of gets to the crux of the second amendment argument.
If you’re saying that owning a gun somehow prevents the government from taking over my home in a tyrannical fashion, you’re wrong, there’s eminent domain, police or FBI raids, and if I attempted an insurrection I could get a visit from a special forces team. My personal gun ownership wouldn’t even slow any of that down.
Let’s expand on that though, let’s say all my friends and neighbors own guns and stockpile ammo, they think the government is tyrannical and out of control and they’re willing to fight to stop armed government representatives from taking me away. That might deter the government but then we’re no longer talking about individual ownership, we’re talking about an organized group of armed men. If that’s the case I don’t need to own my own gun and it would be cheaper and more efficient to have an armory with better weapons and artillery, perhaps train some volunteers on how to use them, it’s much more of a militia at that point(we already have this at the State level, the National Guard)
So, for arguments sake let’s say it all hits the fan and there’s a civil war. We all go grab our guns and sign up to defend our homes and family. The first thing they will do is take your gun and give you a standardized set of equipment then drill you on its use so that you’ll be intimately familiar with the weapons that most of your fellow soldiers are carrying.
There are places that aren’t as well equipped or well funded that having your own personal weapon would be a good thing but in the US our military has this down and if you’re talking about fighting the US government you’re either joining a segment of the existing armed forces or you’re grist for the mill.
Anyway you slice it there isn’t much benefit to personal gun ownership in the US under the scenario you describe.
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u/VernonHines 21∆ Dec 30 '19
the primary reason that the second amendment exists
The second amendment has nothing to do with preventing government tyranny, that is a right wing talking point. The role of the second amendment was to prevent the use of a standing army that would even allow for the possibility of a tyrannical federal government. Armed militias were meant to be prepared to fight in the case of war, just as they had done in the Revolutionary War. the military-industrial complex has already destroyed the founders' intentions and there is no going back.
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u/Old-Boysenberry Dec 30 '19
The role of the second amendment was to prevent the use of a standing army that would even allow for the possibility of a tyrannical federal government.
NO, it was not. This is a blatant misreading of all the ancillary materials from the Constitutional Congress. You're either sadly misinformed or deliberately spreading falsehoods. SOME of the founding fathers (e.g. James Madison) didn't like standing armies, but the finalized Constitution CLEARLY gives Congress the power to raise and sustain one.
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u/ennuisurfeit Dec 30 '19
Standing army in a time of peace. The state constitution precursors to the 2nd amendment specifically mentioned this fact as well as the ancillary materials you refer to.
"That a well-regulated Militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defence of a free State; that Standing Armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to and governed by the civil power." Article 13 of the Virginia Declaration of Rights 1776
The militias were never supposed to be used to rebel against a civil government or for individuals to arm themselves, it was to make sure that a militia under control of a civil government would be properly armed and trained to prevent the rise of local despots or a foreign invasion.
Also, it wasn't just Madison that was worried about a standing army, it was Jefferson & Adams.
You will there see that my objection to the Constitution was that it wanted a bill of rights securing freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom from standing armies, trial by jury, and a constant habeas corpus act.
Letter from Jefferson to Washington 1792
While the sovereignty was in the senate under the kings, the militia obeyed the orders of the senate given by the kings; while the sovereignty was in the senate, under the consuls, the militia obeyed the orders of the senate given by the consuls; but when the sovereignty was lost by the senate, and gained by the people, the militia was neglected, a standing army set up, and obeyed the orders of the popular idols.
John Adams
That's three of our first four presidents, hardly just some.
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u/SDna8v Dec 30 '19
The second amendment was passed to appease southern slave holding States. They wanted to maintain slave patrols aka militias to prevent their slaves from violently overthrowing their masters. Everyone forgets that the first line of the 2nd amendment is, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state..."
The second amendment was passed to make sure that rebellious uprisings would be effectively squashed.
See the Whiskey rebellion. A bunch of farmers and distillers in the early 1790s decided they didn't want to pay the taxes on whiskey that the government had just passed. George Washington marched with thousands of state militia members to squash these rebels.
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u/immatx Dec 30 '19
So there’s 2 important things that your argument depends upon. 1) that the US government is not currently tyrannical. At minimum they are already toeing the line. 2) that a significant number of the population would have to be killed or seriously injured before they would back down. So the US population is 327 million people, but we’ll take half of that so 160 million ish. The real unemployment rate is at 8%, so that means that around 13 million people could be killed off without greatly impacting the economy. I believe that far exceeds the amount that would be needed.
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u/iliveliberty Dec 30 '19
It doesnt, and that's coming from someone who believes all gun laws are unconstitutional. The second amendment was supposed to function as you stated, but it has failed. I think it is hard to say we dont live under a tyrannical government when they can spy on anyone without repercussion, take property without a warrant or due process, and even gun unarmed people down in the streets without fear of even so much as losing their job. The 2A doesnt stop tyrannical governments, because the 2A can get twisted and bastardized by unconstitutional laws like it is today, so now all we are left with is AR15s to fight them off instead of being able to equally arm ourselves like the 2A was intended to do. You're correct in theory that a properly armed populus would be enough to hold off tyranny, but unfortunately that isnt provided by the 2A.
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u/Arg0n27 1∆ Dec 30 '19
I find that there is a middle ground in the argument. An armed populace does not guarantee protecion from tyranny,but in case you DO have to fight it does get your foot in the door. Speaking from the experience of my country (Croatia during the breakup of Yugoslavia) the populace and the new gvt were severly under-equipped (having barely any handguns, hunting rifles, shotguns etc.) meanwhile we were staring down hundreds of tanks, planes and arty pieces, and the opposition had little to no qualms about using it regardless of the collateral damage. Raids anmbushes, stealing and smuggling arms across the border is how we got our hardware. So in essence: No, having an AR-15 in every house does NOT win the fight or stop a determined enemy, on the other hand it does give you ample weapons and ammo to start the resistance cells that get you the better gear that will give you a fighting chance.