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Notes -
Gun Rights are Civilization Rights
I believe, if you don't trust an independent adult to have a firearm you ultimately don't trust them enough to be in the same civilization or society as you.
There are three categories of people that nearly everyone agrees should not be allowed to own a firearm:
And you'll notice we generally don't trust these categories of people with much of anything. The first two categories of people we insist on them having guardians, or being wards of the state. The third category of people we imprison.
There are two major arguments against gun rights that I think hold the most salience for people.
Argument One: Guns are Dangerous and Unnecessary
They are undoubtedly dangerous. Their purpose is to be a weapon. But there are other things that are dangerous that we don't ban. Cars can be used to achieve mass casualty events. Bombs can be made with some commonly available materials. These other things are rarely labelled as "unnecessary" though. There are also plenty of "unnecessary" things that we don't ban. Plenty of purely recreational items and services exist. Jet skis, theme parks, cruises, large houses, etc (some of these things are even dangerous). Only the most hardcore socialists and communists want to take away all the fun toys.
There is an argument that gun advocates make that gun rights are necessary to keep the government in check. I generally like this argument, and think it is demonstrated by the level of free speech rights in places like Great Britain where guns have been successfully banned for most private "citizens".
But I'll grant for the sake of argument that guns are totally "unnecessary". And that it is the special combination of Dangerous+Unnecessary that leads people to want to ban it. Since other categories of things like Safe+Unnecessary or Dangerous+Necessary go largely unbanned and untouched.
I think the widespread existence of many "Dangerous+Necessary" demonstrates that we can trust most adults to handle dangerous things in a responsible way. We can't trust them 100% of the time. And we can't trust that there won't sometimes be negligence.
The "unnecessary" component of the argument is also a scary slippery slope to be on. People have different desires and wants. There are I think two steady states of being in regards to "unnecessary" things. Either you let everyone decide for themselves on every topic. Or you have a central authority that decides on everything for everyone. If you are willing to bite that bullet, keep in mind that it will not necessarily be you deciding what is necessary and what is not. I believe it is fully possible for such a bureaucracy to mercilessly strip every single joy out of life, and they'll fully believe they are making your life better. You'll eventually be sad enough that you'll come to the second main argument against gun rights:
Argument Two: Guns enable easier suicide
I don't have the data on hand, and I don't really want to get into an argument about said data. But it is my understanding that there is a noticeable and undeniable effect of guns on male suicide rates. This makes intuitive sense to me. Many methods of suicide require you to actively torture yourself for a short time period, drowning, hanging, cutting yourself, jumping from a very tall building etc. Or they present a chance of a failed suicide attempt that leaves you heavily injured, like jumping from not high enough, or getting in front of a moving vehicle, or pills. Guns make the attempt a more sure thing, and present an option that does not involve torturing yourself.
Something about this whole approach to suicide prevention feels very wrong. On an individual basis I think you should not commit suicide, and if someone can be talked out of suicide they generally should be talked out of it. But there are also some cases where I believe it is very cruel to prevent suicide. Medical cases for sure. But there are also people who have drawn a shit straw in life in too many ways. A bit too dumb, constant low level bad health, unable to figure out how to love or be loved, etc. A life of quiet misery. They should have an exit option, and they should have one that doesn't require them to torture themselves on the way out.
Civilization is one big nebulous agreement we have that helps us get along. But I think saying "you can't leave this agreement without being tortured", is just evil.
Forbidding gun ownership means forbidding exit, and it means you lack trust in others to such a degree that it breaks down many of the assumptions we already have about the rights and responsibilities of adults in society.
Some of the implications of my argument that I am already aware of and fine with:
Some areas that I left unaddressed to save space:
Edit: lots of good responses. I've read all of them but I'm unlikely to respond. Most of the responses were better thought out than my original post. I sometimes just have ideas or arguments kicking around in my head that need to be spilled onto paper. And I think better in response to what others say so this has helped me refine my thoughts on the subject a great deal. That synthesis of thought might end up in a future thread.
I do not think that UK libel laws have much if anything to do with their restrictions on gun ownership.
More broadly, I think that the idea to use guns to keep the government in check was fine in 1800 but today is just laughable. Since world war one, the wartime capabilities of states and what US citizens are allowed to own have greatly diverged. How is your semi AR15 with a ten rounds mag going to fare against a predator drone or a tank? In the very best case, you would be fighting a protracted war against the federal government. If you win, it looks like Mao winning his civil war, if you lose, it looks like Hamas in Gaza.
Of course, on the basis of "things should not be illegal if they are fun, even if they are not necessary", we can legalize further things.
For example, I imagine that hand grenades are much fun. Or landmines. Watch the stupid coyotes explode when they trespass on your property. Contact poisons are fun. Radioactive substances are fun. So is building your own nuclear reactor. And if we really want to counterbalance the federal military advantage, why not allow citizens to start their own nuclear weapons program? Provided they are not minors, mentally retarded or have demonstrated poor impulse control, of course.
In a country where most people hunt their dinner, guns are a necessity. But this is not sustainable in any but the most sparsely settled areas.
Different people naturally have different ideas about the tradeoffs between usefulness (which includes being fun) and danger. Some want to ban any knives with blades longer than 3cm. Some would be fine if you could just buy hand grenades at the hardware store.
For the most part, people agree with the level of regulation around cars, which are immensely practical in most areas but also account for a huge fraction of accidental manslaughters. So you need a driver's license, your vehicle has to be designed according to certain standards and get regular safety inspections, and you need to obey all lot of different rules while on a public road. This is all very bothersome and expensive, but it also keeps these manslaughter cases on a manageable level, compared to a counterfactual level where everyone could build their own vehicle and try to learn to drive it unsupervised.
My estimate is that in most of Europe (e.g. Germany), getting a hunting license (including the rights to own rifles and a pistol, but not the right to bear them outside your home except when on hunting trips), plus the costs of a gun safe is still somewhat cheaper than the costs of a driver's license. The costs to get licensed to own a gun for sports shooting are lower (no need to demonstrate knowledge of tracking down an injured paper target), but also might require a few years of membership in a shooting club. Few people get the license to carry loaded weapons in public, typically this is restricted to on-duty employees of security companies.
I don't think the OP was referring to libel laws, but rather to laws that make it a criminal offense to mock police officers, criticise immigration policy or dispute that trans women are women.
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You're making me break out the old /k/ copypasta (how do I make the quote one continuous block I don't know how to internet):
will yield
On the topic
I think that your model of tyranny is very different from my model of tyranny. Your model seems to be that the government will be replaced by some entity universally loathed by the civilian population. I think that this exceedingly unlikely to happen -- the ayatollah will not become the US president through some legal loophole and a bad SCOTUS ruling.
Any tyranny which will happen will have buy-in from one of the big political tribes. Probably they will have at least 10% enthusiastic supporters, 20% who still prefer it to whatever the previous status quo was, 40% who are indifferent to uncomfortable and 20-30% who are very opposed. Of course, they also need enough legitimacy so that the military will not oppose them, so all three branches of the federal government will have to back whatever tyrannical actions they are taking.
Possibly tyrannical actions could include violating freedom of speech by making all the arguments of the opposing side illegal hate speech ("mentioning Epstein/migrant crime is illegal"), de-naturalizing and deporting 5% of citizens, effectively abolishing democracy (i.e. an amendment to the effect of "like the pope appointing cardinals, the president can appoint any number of congressmen for life, who will vote alongside their elected colleagues") and so forth.
The 10% strongly in favor of whatever tyrannical acts the feds are committing can probably be recruited as brown- or rainbow-shirts -- earning a nice federal paycheck and fighting with state of the art weapons and sleeping in guarded camps while fighting for your beliefs seems appealing enough.
For the anti-tyranny side (which will still mostly be fighting for tribal object level goals rather than against tyranny per se), things look different. Neither tribe has much of a culture of shooting federal officers or servicemen. The rebels will not make much money, they will fight with civilian weapons and sleep either in the woods (and hope that they are not spotted by thermal drones) or in the houses of sympathizers (who are risking their lives for them).
Also, fighting a guerrilla / protracted war is extremely stomach-churning. Basically, it is a competition of who is better at terrorizing the civilian population into compliance. The government will have an advantage here because they can rely on the trappings of legitimate power. Their goons can afford to have nice show trials where people who provided material aid to the rebels are convicted and then executed -- or just disappear people. It is a lot easier to make a non-psychopathic man arrest a random civilian countryman and put them on a truck than it is to make them shoot them on the spot. To out-terrorize the tyrant, the outgunned rebels would have to murder civilian collaborators without any of these trappings of legitimacy.
(Then you have the problem that tyranny typically comes in thin salami slices, and there is no good Schelling point where most potential rebels would agree that shooting at feds is indicated. Especially since every dictatorship aims to make it hard to create a common knowledge that a certain fraction of the population is willing to violently oppose the government. One might argue that this kind of coordination problem has been solved with the internet, but the internet will be the first thing to go when things heat up. I do not think that most of the population being addicted to their smartphones and social media is going to be helpful for an uprising against a tech-savvy government which can turn the former into bugs and the latter into a database of political leanings. And then coordination of uprisings would have to byzantine fault tolerant, because it is in the interest of the state to lure the most gung ho rebels to start early because they are mistaken about the level of support they have and take them out.)
The US won their independence war and the Taliban won against the US because the loser was in a position where they could afford to lose. If the fall of Kabul had meant that the top 1k people in the US government were beheaded, the US would have paid whatever price required in money or brutality to keep that from happening.
A domestic rebellion is such an existential threat to the people in charge. A federal government could not decide to pull out of California or Texas the way the US pulled out of Afghanistan, especially not due to irregular warfare -- once they have established that states can get rid of them by being a pain in the ass for a few years, people in other states might try to emulate that. Better to set a precedent where they glass the cities and turn the rest of the state into Gaza before retreating.
So while I agree that small arms are ultimately essential to control a country, I also think that any likely tyranny could also field enough goons to outcompete the very small fraction of citizens who are willing to give up their creature comforts to fight ruthlessly in an uphill battle.
--
A different argument can be made that uprisings can also serve to deter unpopular measures even if they are ultimately crushed simply by imposing costs. This might be a steelman of BLM: property destruction, unlike peaceful demonstrations hit the government where it hurts them (a bit, at least -- it is not like the US would declare bankruptcy over one or two billion dollars). The convictions of the four cops involved in the Floyd killing (whatever you think of their culpability) certainly was helped along by the fact that any verdict other than guilty would have resulted in another billion dollars going down the drain.
Still, I would argue that gun ownership was not central to the George Floyd protests or their prevention. 19 people killed is an extremely small number when compared to a billion of property damage. The state was not interested in escalation because they (correctly, IMO) feared a snowball effect: shooting looters would have fanned the flames. BLM, for their part was also happy to stick looting. Mostly unopposed looting is much more lucrative than deciding to murder cops or whites and bleeding to death after a shootout.
Also active guerrilla warfare success tends to rely on pre-existing networks of ethnicity, religion, family or whatever else. Plus significant foreign support. You can red/blue tribe all you want but these are ideological causes and not literal tribes.
Americans are not for the most part built like that. Red Dawn arguments are generally a spurious circlejerk.
I don't know about that. First, there are the literal ethnic tribes in America that, while not all on the same page ideologically (to say the least), would all form independent loci of insurrection. See, e.g., roof Koreans, Sikh convenience store owners, etc.
Then you have the thousands of gun clubs, thousands of veterans groups, thousands of local police departments, and hundreds of tight-knit, rural red-kneck communities, all armed to the teeth. And that's before we get to any of the actual, honest-to-god militias and private military contractors around the country, or the sizeable proportion of the US military and national guards (or state guards like Texas's, which literally just won a standoff against the federal government over border policy just recently) that would surely defect against a tyrannical central government. Or the many thousands of veterans with first-hand experience in how to conduct an insurgency.
These may not be ethnic tribal groups, but the US has no shortage of well-armed men with deep fraternal ties to each other, often formed on literal battlefields.
Of course, many of these guys are weekend warriors who would melt into mush at the first sign of real oppression, but don't forget that America has spent most of the past 25 years at war, and it doesn't take that many people to actively resist before a territory becomes ungovernable. Look at the results when less than 1% of the Iraqi population actively participated in the insurgency against the US. Or the infamous statistic of how supposedly only 3% of Americans took up arms against the British during the American Revolution.
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Look at occupied Ukraine. A sufficiently determined police state can eradicate 99.9% of armed resistance.
Anyone who is a potential insurgent passes through a filtration camp: the sheriff, his deputies, the preacher, the judge, the chairs of every club, the PT coach, the history teacher, every member of every board, the boyscout leaders, every veteran, every hunter, the crazy prepper, etc.
The detainee is moved to a filtration camp (think Alligator Alcatraz) and forced to unlock his phone. Then, if there's even a shred of suspicion, he gets Gitmo/Abu Ghraib treatment until his wife and children cough up every gun and every cartridge they can find and he himself identifies every suspicious contact plus two extra potential insurgents and explains why.
Then he is released and limps back to his family with a rooted phone and waits for the hematomas to heal. His off-road pickup is confiscated, just in case. If he's caught doing anything suspicious, well, he had his chance.
Ukraine is a little different: I can instead choose to leave the occupied areas and walk to unoccupied Ukraine.
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The occupied parts of Ukraine are primarily ethincally Russian and speak Russian. Even if they don't support occupation, they aren't going to be the most hardcore zelensky supporters.
Even so, as far as I can tell gorilla groups are still able to operate in occupied ukraine and mount attacks.
Guess which parts of Ukraine voted for him the most. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2019_Ukrainian_presidential_election,_round_2.svg
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Yeah but you and the guy writing the above aren't the mujahideen you're Americans who enjoy creature comforts. It'd be three days of chicken tender embargos and you'd be giving your guns up
The army can't afford to guard every single Combination KFC Taco Bell in the country. The daily fast food raids are going to be hard fought but I think the insurgents can pull it off.
There really aren't that many of them left. This guy goes over their history and estimates there are less than 500 left and they are actively trying to get rid of them.
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The only meaningful difference in a protracted civil conflict is mountains.
America has a ton of motivated political irregulars of many political stripes, and loads of impractical terrain not far from farmland.
You could run a guerilla for a very long time if you wanted to and had enough civilian support. And that has actually happened many times in American history. With extremely bloody outcomes.
You are a fool to think Americans can't be driven crazy enough to be the men in black pyjamas when that shit happened many times in a small scale up and including within living memory.
Also the I-70, I-80, and I-90 freeways run through some very mountainous territory full of some of the most conservative groups of Americans. Rebels in the mountain west could literally cut the northern part of America in half. All interstate transit would have to be on the I-10 and I-40 through Arizona.
Or at least I-10 after the Navajo Nation blockaded I-40 from Gallup to Flagstaff.
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The states and nigh-rural cities where Boy Scouts (and their Evangelical Christian analogues) actually earn those camping and forestry badges. The states where lighters and pocketknives are still daily carry.
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But doesn’t that require that the population be willing to actually fire back? That might be easier with guns, but modern suburban Americans are not the same stock as Muslims in MENA. Insurgency works if you have a population willing to fight. Arabs in the Middle East sure, they’re raised to fight, to wish for tge deaths of their enemies. White suburban Americans are not made of that stuff. They’ve been tamed from birth, raised to be nice, to prize comfort and safety and peaceful living. I just find it hilarious that people expect suburban professionals who meekly obey every dictate from corporate America and schedule their two week vacations during which they do work emails are suddenly going to rebel and shoot government workers. It’s not going to happen because most of us would be under the bed afraid of the cops.
All that matters is spreading the idea that they can get away with it. Soccer mom by day, assassin by night.
Antifa is a bunch of sheltered rich kids, yet they've committed dozens of felonies each because they keep getting away with it.
Yeah but Antifa are essentially given soft handling veering on explicit carte blanche by the powers that be.
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Yes, because the government has been allowing them to get away with it. And in our fictional universe of Fascist America, those same people and their acquaintances are being beaten and thrown in jail for the first rock thrown, and thus relegated to menial labor jobs once finally released a decade later. This is what happens to rock throwers in actual police states. What middle class or upper class person is going to stick a gun in the face of an actual policeman if it means that for him and his family, their future is thrown away? What person in that situation would allow their kids to hang around the kind of people who are throwing rocks if letting it happen means the rest of the family loses their position and lives in poverty? If it meant that your other kids can no longer dream of going to college and getting a decent job afterwards?
Maybe the lower classes with little to lose would try it. But the control the modern world has is such that it’s less a fear of getting shot and more a fear of the social and economic consequences to follow of stepping out of line. They fear HR more than anything.
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Oh, I agree with you 100% that Americans don't have the temperament required to fight back against a tyrannical government. But that is a very different argument from "we can't fight tyranny because they will have tanks and fighter jets". I don't get the sense that @ChickenOverlord was trying to claim Americans are going to put up a fierce resistance, just responding to that specific argument.
The median American doesn't need to fight though, only a small percentage does. The same was true in Afghanistan, Syria, and in any other guerilla conflict you can think of. In fact the "3%ers" (who I assume are mostly glowies) are named after the supposedly only 3% of colonial Americans that fought in the Revolution.
I just looked up the numbers for Iraq and even if you take the figure of how many people aided and supported the insurgency, rather than actually took up arms, you're still at less than 1% of the population. It really doesn't take that many violent young men to make a nation effectively ungovernable.
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I think there's a further epicycle here- the blue tribe would, when facing government oppression, roll over, lawfare, and flee to Canada. The red tribe is the one that might go kinetic(still very unlikely). And they staff the security forces.
The black tribe also might go kinetic but its internal problems prevent that far harder than anyone else.
To have a brutal authoritarian regime in the US requires red tribe buy in. And you can do it through rum millet, I suppose, or cleruchic grants. But realistically red tribe ethnogenesis is more a thing that needs to be taken into account than a thing that can be really controlled so you can't get too oppressive to red interests without losing state capacity towards the uncooperative fast.
When the Feds ordered military and national guard units to desegregate the South with armed force, they did so unquestioningly, despite those units being staffed by decidedly unwoke Southerners.
This is not 1955. Both left and right wing Americans would do well to remember that.
Yes, Americans have gotten softer, weaker, fatter, and far more pacified since then.
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Could you elaborate on the difference? The armed forces personnel back then were more virulently racist and reflexively anti-Washington than probably most people alive today. And yet they didn't hesitate in turning their guns on their fellow Southerners in the name of racial equality.
You think some infantryman with a Lebron jersey in his barracks room is going to counter this trend?
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Hamas is still kicking in Gaza, the Taliban are in charge of Afghanistan. Unless the US government is willing to glass itself semiauto pistols and rifles pose a significant challenge to imposing a tyranny.
I've often seen similar arguments. It, i think, often stems from an ignorance of what actually the gun laws are. In most places in America, it is much more difficult to obtain the licenses to take a gun to the store or post office than it is to get one to drive there.
And do you want to live in Gaza? "Guns would allow us to overthrow a tyrannical government and restore a real democracy with first-world living standards once the unrest is over" is a decent pitch. "Guns would allow us to survive indefinitely outside the tyrant's control as starving guerillas in a bombed-out wasteland", not so much.
Gazan's are such an incompetent set of people that when given almost 2 decades of self rule they did absolutely no economic development, no infrastructure construction, etc etc. Instead they dedicated all that time towards scheming up new terrorist attacks.
If Red America was given a similar gift they would be on the moon and the US gov would be afraid to attack the free enclave because they might lose.
Yes Gaza sucks to live in, because it is full of Gazans.
Oh no, you are not fair to them. They built a lot of infrastructure. Every school, hospital or mosque had under it a bunker for storing arms, hiding troops and supplies for Hamas. Every schoolyard and hospital grounds double as missile launching site. Miles of tunnels have been built, and not just some rat holes, but tunnels you can live in for months, with ventilation, facilities, food storage, multiple exits in private houses and businesses all over the place. It's a lot of infrastructural work, and they have been very busy for two decades. It is true that this infrastructure has only one goal - war with Israel - and is completely useless otherwise, but I don't see the citizens of Gaza to mind too much. Surely, when they are losing the war, they don't like it, but the whole concept of being in eternal war with Israel, even if this means living in medieval conditions and spending all the money on building more war infrastructure and sacrificing all their kids to the war effort - they are completely fine with this concept. They actually want this, more than anything. Maybe not 100% of them, but about 90% for sure. Their only problem with the war is that they are currently losing badly.
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Total blockades and a lack of local ressources does tend to hamper economic growth.
I'm not about to defend Hamas, but if you were a Gazan businessman in the 90s, there really isn't a lot you could do when trade is functionally impossible.
Can't buy machines for industry, couldn't even export the production, tourism is a no go, can't even have 3G cell towers or any sort of proper internet so no weird internet business.
It's a prison. The inmates are making shanks and trading cigarettes. As you would expect.
They had tons of resources, and there never had been "total blockades". How do you think they built miles of tunnels and thousands of rockets? Where do you think all their weapons are from? Did they magic it out from sea water and sand? No, they used the materials that came for declared civilian purposes, and money sent by petro-emirates, Iran and other deep-pocketed Muslim sponsors and they used it exactly for what they wanted - preparing for war. And what they coudn't get in openly, they got clandestinely via border tunnels, which were numerous and virtually ignored by Egypt. They had all the industry they wanted - it's just the industry they wanted is making rockets, not tractors or computers. If Hamas wanted to turn Gaza into Taiwan - there would be billions of oil dollars available for them to do that. But the whole point of Gaza is to be a problem for Israel, and the whole point of Hamas is to wage war on Israel, everything else is secondary. And since the population of Gaza does not seem to have any problem with that goal - they have what they have.
It's a weird kind of prison, where offering to leave is called racist and genocide, and asking to at least stop making weapons and lobbing them over the fence is taken as crazy talk. I don't think there's another "prison" like that in the world, where the inmates have full control, regularly try (very often successfully) to murder the guards, and the guards respond with providing them free food and offering them to leave whenever they want, which is always rejected.
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There are hurdles. If Gaza was full of Americans it would be a paradise and Israel would be afraid not of terrorist attacks, but of being surpassed as the local economic power.
How'd that work for Liberia?
Sure, that sunset of Americans might also have trouble.
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Well, no, I don't want to live in Gaza, but the threat of Gaza can keep governments from turning (more) tyrannical.
Sometimes you have to be willing to punish defectors even at great cost to yourself, otherwise nobody has an incentive to play nice with you. That's why we evolved the revenge circuitry in our brains; a deterrent is a deterrent.
Or, as the meme goes, "I swear to God I'll kill us all if you fuck with me".
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The threat of turning the place into gaza is the deterrent. And the power to go nuclear is important.
The Soviets and Americans didn't want to live in a nuclear wasteland yet they still built thousands of nukes.
Is it? I mean, sure, that's the steelman. It works. But is it actually the mainstream Red Tribe belief? I feel like most gun owners who cite the "safeguard against tyranny" argument think of it in terms of the Spirit of '76, not mutually-assured destruction. And I don't think support for one necessarily implies support for the other.
Red tribers don't need to believe that Gaza is the outcome for it to be an effective deterrent. Red tribers could think that rebellion is sunshine and rainbows, and the deterrent would still work because the actual outcome of rebellion would be Gaza. And that Gaza would extend to blue territory as well.
As long as the elites in charge are smart enough to understand MAD, the dumb boomers who think rebellion is easier actually contribute more to MAD.
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Most of us refer to the relative laxity of US covid restrictions due to the heavy armament of the US anti-covid restrictions crowd. Ain't nobody gave me shit over a mask while I was open carrying.
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?? I have both, that is not so(and btw carrying a gun in the post office is illegal everywhere in America unless you happen to be an on-duty police officer). There might be places in the US where it is more difficult to get a CHL than a drivers license but it's not 'most' places in America.
It is certainly true in almost all major blue states. It is also true in many purple states like Ohio, PA, Virginia, and more. Your admission that people can't take their gun into the post office anywhere is also telling. What that means is you can't GO to the post office if you have a gun on you while you are walking around, or if you are in your car, you need a safe in which to store your gun lest it get stolen when you go into the post office. Even many red states have municipalities that ban firearm possession on public transit, meaning many people are effectively disarmed during work hours.
DLs, OTOH are basically universal and trivially easy to obtain. No one actually fails the driving test anymore, I doubt they ever did. And you get multiple screw ups before privileges are revoked. Indeed they can be re-obtained even after DUIs. OTOH, 1 fuck up with a gun typically means permanent deprivation of your gun rights, subject to rapidly ratcheting prison sentences.
I live in PA, and getting a CCL here is trivially easy, even in deep blue areas. The only minor impediment is that in some counties you have to submit the application in person, while others allow mail or online submissions, and in all counties you have to pick up the permit in person. Compare this to getting a DL, which requires a physical exam, written exam and eye test at the licensing center, ID plus Social Security Card plus two proofs of address, and then a road test to cap it all off. The procedural hurdles for driving are significantly higher.
Don't forget the requirement of two references, including at every five-year renewal.
In PA the sheriff is allowed to ask for references, and it's on the standard form, but not allowed to contact them. I can't speak of other counties, but in Allegheny County the (Democratic) sheriff doesn't require them and the form they distribute has the fields pre-filled as "Not required".
Columbia County's online application states that an applicant's references must call the sheriff's office within five days of the applicant's applying.
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The US government would be far rougher with Red Tribe than it would with the Pashtuns or the Palestinians.
Even if they are, Red Tribe Americans are smarter and better trained than those two groups plus one would need to account for military defections. Like I said, they'd have to glass everyone. You can't hold a mid sized suburb with drones and a few tanks. You need to be able to go door to door.
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That would be a devastating demonstration of the difference between "fargroup" and "outgroup", and you're probably right. But on the other hand, it's harder to profit from being rough with people when their sympathizers are a decent fraction of your soldiers and your family isn't ten thousand miles away.
To this day you can start typing "fort h" into Google and its recommendation before you get any farther will be the "fort hood shooting", with the 2009 one on top of the results. Taliban fighting other Afghans in Afghanistan had about a 1-to-1 kill ratio, and were an order of magnitude worse at killing Americans, but it just took one Taliban sympathizer in Texas to rack up 13-to-1 (well, 13-to-0 so far, but as of March 2025 it looks like he's now more likely to die of execution than old age). Like most military bases, Fort Hood has way more Red Tribe sympathizers than Taliban sympathizers, and it's a very good thing that we've never pissed off the former nearly as much.
Red tribe defection doesn't look like random acts of terror. It looks like loss of full civilian control of the military. It looks like cops saying they 'can't figure it out who did it' a lot. It looks like general refusal to cooperate with the federal government, even by people for whom that is their actual full-time day job.
Would Greg Abbott have succeeded in preventing the border patrol from holding the border open if they hadn't been Texans who strongly disagreed with the Biden admin's policies?
It demonstrably can: look at Oklahoma City. But I think you're right in the general case.
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I really never understand this argument, particularly not the way it is made with smug certainty.
Many people did not think this argument was fine in 1776. The patriot militias were very much understood to be out-gunned and under-equipped. Pragmatic loyalists argued in the continental congress that the colonists lacked artillery, a navy, a cavalry, etc. To say nothing of the divergent quality of firearms: many observers noted that the rusty muskets pulled down from over minutemen's fireplaces were no match for the cleaned and oiled Land Pattern Muskets of the redcoats. This argument has been made against every guerilla army, and while guerilla warfare isn't a win-now button, it has been proven effective.
Hamas in Gaza did not allow private firearm ownership. Gaza, under Hamas, probably had around 20,000 civilian firearms across about 2,000,000 people, a 1% ratio. The US has an estimated 30 million "modern sporting rifles" (the NRA's preferred designation for things like AR variants) for a population of 330 million. If 10% of Gazas preward population had owned an AR, Israel never would have invaded. Which is the real function: it prevents government tyranny by making it impractical to enforce through violence. Once the shooting starts, the people in the military aren't vidya game pawns that go to the directed square and do what the commander said. They're going to reconsider their options, rapidly.
What are you talking about with 10 round magazines? In most states, you can currently purchase any size you like. Just 16 restrict it.
One also imagines that the sort of person who is willing to wage asymetrical violent civil war against the government of the USA might also have something of an itchy trigger-finger for his cordless drill -- making this argument indicates that the person doing so does not have the knowledge to make any serious comment on the broader issue, either.
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IIRC at the point Israel invaded Gaza the alternative was not "abandon the campaign and go home", it was "continue bombarding it until there wasn't anything left standing large enough for a Hamasnik to hide behind".
I think Gaza is in the reference class of "A government which is willing to commit genocide and has access to tanks and bombing planes can defeat an insurgency regardless of however many small arms the insurgents have."
But where's the defeat though?
You might be able to say this once they've successfully occupied the area and destroyed Hamas. That hasn't happened yet.
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All these years of Israel genociding the Palestinians, and yet there's more of them than ever.
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The advantage in weaponry back in 1776 is like two different sized water bottles, the advantage in weaponry now is a water bottle vs a giant lake. Guerilla armies thrive nowadays for a number of reasons, but a lot of it is that the big armies don't go all out.
The stark difference between say, the US during WW2 vs the US during the Iraq War suggests we have a lot of extra capacity we could throw at any issue if we wanted to. We just don't really want to, Americans don't want to feel actual meaningful sacrifices from the nonsense going on in the Middle East, so we throw a fraction of overall power at it. Israel doesn't want to (or at least are held back from) just rounding up all the Palestinians and shooting/bombing/etc. Hamas only operates by hiding in civilian cover and even then they still don't inflict much meaningful damage back. Their fight for survival is us scratching an itch on our backs.
Even when wars are more equal, it's often because they have the support of other great powers. Look at Russia vs Ukraine rn, they're both getting equipment (and sometimes even troops) from various different sources, and according to Trump Russia still seems to be facing a 14:1 ratio against Ukraine. and this is Russia
Ukraine is getting a pittance of western firepower compared to what we could do (we're not even at Iraq levels of sacrifice) if we really wanted to go all out and they're holding on strong against the Russians.
I'm sure a bunch of rogue American militias could go around shooting up theaters or something and terrorizing government siding citizens, but as long as the military stays loyal they don't got a chance if we actually wanna go all out.
The better hope here is that the military is made up of normal Americans, many who will side with the citizens if it ever got to the point where most Americans wanted an uprising to begin with.
All the high tech weaponry in the world doesn't matter for counterinsurgency purposes. Modern combined arms warfare is optimized for defeating peer and near peer adversaries in a stand up fight, not for blowing up a bunch of goat fuckers with rifles. If the enemy doesn't have anti-tank missiles or tanks, a multi-million dollar main battle tank is no more combat effective than a pickup with armor plates welded on and a cannon in the back. If the enemy doesn't have radar, your multi-billion dollar supersonic stealth strike fighter is no better than a crop duster with bombs strapped on it. Of course having armor and air support at all is super important, but the overmatch eventually doesn't provide any additional value.
During WW2, China lost nearly all its modern equipment and trained forces in the early days of the war, leaving them to fight the remainder of the war with only obsolete or crudely made small arms, against an enemy with machine guns, trucks, tanks, artillery, and air support. An enemy that was also willing to go gloves off and genocide the as many Chinese as necessary to win. Yet even with collapsing state capacity and morale against an overwhelming enemy, the Chinese still managed to stubbornly cling on to territory and inflict serious losses to the enemy, while only taking 3:1 casualties in direct confrontation. Actual gorilla warfare which does not even attempt to meet the enemy's attach head on would achieve a much more favorable kill ratio.
In the end a lake is more powerful than a water bottle, but a bucket will do the job just as well. Yet insurgencies have succeeded in the past even against determined and far more powerful opponents.
The Allies (primarily the US) provided a total of something like 650,000 tons of materiel to China via The Hump, at the cost of nearly 600 aircraft and around 1700 crew lost. There were also notable Allied air units (and some ground units) in China during the war.
Which isn't to diminish their accomplishment, but it wasn't completely a solo effort.
The origin of the meme "Never get involved in a land war in Asia" is that various WW2-era generals (of whom Montgomery was the first to go on the record in 1962) thought that Allied assistance to China in WW2 had been a mistake - presumably because Chiang and Mao preferred to use the aid to fight each other and not the Japanese.
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I do love autocorrect sometimes.
oh no, I've gone to great lengths to make sure I always turn autocorrect off.
In that case I have no choice but to concede. Actual gorilla warfare would have the Japs on the run.
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Wait forget everything else: do those casualty numbers in Ukraine have any credibility or is this a map sharpie moment?
It's not really possible to know too well, Trump just shits out words and claims at random. But decent chance it's real and he just said it was because he was briefed quite recently. Would also explain the pivot on Russia if he thought they were losers for such a drastic ratio.
But even if he was making it up and it was lower, even half with 7:1 ratio would still be fantastic.
I'm more interested in the raw numbers of dead Russians, plus the severe life-ruining casualties on top of that. Maybe it's been a very bad year so far, but I haven't gotten that impression, across the course of the war that's gonna be something like half a million dead so far out of about 30 million Russian men between 14-45?
Ukraine is probably in even worse shape, though it says something if Trump is repeating pro Ukraine fake news these days.
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First off, as a technical point, the ARs will have a lot more than ten rounds (30 round is the standard magazine, lots of people run drums with 50 or 100 rounds).
Secondly, gestures to Afghanistan the US army is capable of losing a war to an opponent with small arms and IEDs! I've never understood the "the US military would crush an armed populace" line of arguing because it had a chance to do that in the last two decades and failed. (And of course laying the blame on Iran or Pakistan or whoever is cope – do you think China or Russia would fail to arm insurgents in the US if there was a civil war?) What I find much more questionable an assumption is that the US armed populace would act like the populace in Afghanistan (or Northern Ireland) but if they did, it seems likely from history that the US armed forces would in fact lose. Wars are political endeavors and technology does not change that.
Thirdly, in most civil wars, the military and national security apparatus is not actually monolithic. Let's say that it's true for the sake of argument that the "armed populace" is not capable of "beating the US military" (I actually agree this is a fantasy because even if the "armed populace" could beat the US military on a giant featureless plain that's...not how real wars work.) In many, perhaps most civil wars, the military fragments alongside the rest of the populace. In which circumstance, it can be really helpful to have an armed populace even if there is no irregular warfare because they are likely to be better marksmen, more likely to be able to contribute to arms stockpiles, etc. In a prolonged civil war situation, the side with the support of the armed populace will be favored to win all else being equal. Which means there's a certain incentive for ideologies to promote firearm ownership (on their own team) and to attempt to convince the other side to disarm.
(As an aside, for this reason widespread firearms ownership is actually extremely beneficial to the US state. The US military recruits disproportionately from certain areas for reasons that are not but are correlated to firearms ownership.)
All of these are, at least in the right circumstances, legal in the US, but the hand grenades and nuclear reactors at a minimum require paperwork.
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At least for Germany that seems not to be true. From my experience, the required course and the cheapest safe available equal roughly the cost of a drivers license (~4000€). The comparison lacks another crucial detail. Obtaining a hunting license requires a background check. That would be fine if it the check would only pertain criminal record and mental illness. But it doesn‘t. As things stand, being in a non-prohibted (ie legal) right wing party may be an excluding factor. In other words, having the wrong political opinion may prevent you from obtaining a hunting license in Germany, even if you have no criminal record, are not mentally ill and have passed the licensing exam. The same applies for a sport shooting license.
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