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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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When it comes to the idea of Russians barreling to Finland Ukraine-style, I would much rather put my trust to the Finnish army than to civilians with guns to hinder the onslaught.

I realize that as a Finnish person, you are confronting this reality far more closely than I, but my immediate reaction is por que no los dos? In your shoes, I would like to have an army, an armed populace, many allies, and space lasers if I could get them, or at least as many of those as possible!

Finland has comparatively high levels of small arms ownership, which is good for defense - precisely in the sense that people who would eventually, in a crisis situation, defend the country as conscripts in the army can use their guns for practice (and the Finnish government has explicitly defended an opt-out from EU gun legislation for this reason). However, in the event of an actual invasion, this wouldn't do much good, since the purpose and intent is to leave no civilians remaining in any potentially occupied territories, ie. evacuate them to other regions before Russian troops might get there.

If you really might need to arm the civilian population to mount a desperate defense, you just need the government to hold a large stockpile of small arms

Which is faster in the event of hostile invasion:

  1. the government must recognize the need to arm the populous, organize the logistics, and execute the distribution of arms to the populous amidst the invasion

  2. the populous is already armed

Which of the following provides a greater degree of military efficacy:

  1. after arming the general population, the people so armed must either be trained or use the arms without training

  2. the populace already has some degree of training

As it happens, Finland has the tenth most civilian guns per capita in the world. What we don’t have (and what nobody here wants) is US style unlicensed access to guns nor allowing guns for self defence.

”Arming the populace” is a non-issue anyway, since nothing prevents doing it once the war is in progress.

nothing

Never?

nobody

Citation needed.