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Are gun cases obsolete at this point?
They can protect you against common criminals but they can’t do nation state war at all anymore. It seems like two new technologies are game changers.
Drones defeat guns. You can have a human operated machine gun and you will lose to a drone. But we probably? can not let people own fleets of AI controlled drones.
Government will control your access to mobility going forward. Autonomous cars are awesome. But mobility is key if there is going to be any check on federal power because a free people with guns will resist. The backdoor they have on your electric car will get turned off when you resist.
Technology and the ability to have industrial and post-industrial society has always been an issue the American Democracy and Freedom project.
They're already coming out with dedicated 556 anti-drone rounds.
To indulge in some intellectual masturbation, I'm just going to quote an essay I slapped together one day on the evolution of warfare;
But hey, I'm just a dabbler when it comes to such things, at best. What do I know?
You really think medium term with AI improvements that a human can compete with a drone? And that’s besides in America training a soldier from birth to death on the battle field at 25 has to costs around $1-1.5m and drone tech probably improves to be a fraction of that.
You asked whether guns were obsolete at this point. At this point, no.
Drones will continue to improve. Drone defenses will likewise continue to improve, but I'm pretty sure there are going to continue to be ground units, and I'm pretty sure those ground units are going to want to be able to shoot things rather than just drone them; it's much, much cheaper. Also, those ground units are going to want to shoot at drones attacking them, which again is much cheaper than using your own drones. Almost certainly, they'll want to automate this into something like a mini-CIWS turret, but that turret will probably be using a gun.
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Guns have been obsolete in America for a long time since 'the people' are not willing to use them when it risks their convenient lives.
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Please watch the following footage of Ukrainians shooting down
ShahedsGerans with an assault rifle. Note that he's using an ACOG sight, and not, say, SMASH.Am I misunderstanding you or is the claim that you can reliably shoot down drones with rifles? Because that's not the feeling I get from watching drone strike vids at all. To get around linking that soul devouring crap, here's a YouTuber talking to a guy about drones. This video shows more how hard they are to shoot.
It's also hard to imagine a rebel force contesting the US Air Force for air superiority via prop planes.
What people generally refer to regarding drones are FPV drones. The kind that are extremely hard to shoot down. Couple a few of those together with an ISR drone with thermals and any 'Red Dawn' wargames go out the window.
My claim is that it's more complicated than rock-paper-scissors. Ukrainians (and Russians) are using machine guns to shoot down drones. That's a thing that happens.
My secondary claim is that firearms technology also benefits from technological developments, including the ones that benefit drones.
This is really all a point about how infantry dismounts aren't going away any time soon which is admittedly a tangent to 2A cases.
FPV drones kind of suck and there are easier ways to deal with them right now than shooting them.
This was the entire US MO in the Middle East: we had MALE and HALE ISR drones coupled with kill-drones (Hellfire missiles, and small bombs/rockets). I think we can conclude that the MALE/HALE ISR + kill-drone combination is not by itself sufficient to defeat a counterinsurgency, both because the US lost in Afghanistan and because the US had to rely on infantry for the entire duration of the GWOT.
This is all despite Afghanistan being smaller than Texas (although with a larger population) and the US rolling out a wide-scale biometric identification program to make identifying insurgents easier.
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No, they don't. Guns are effectively a very specialized kind of drone, and the specialization they're good at hasn't gone away. It would be more accurate to say that guns defeat soldiers, but even this is highly contextual so long as we intend to keep having lots of humans around.
Maybe someday, certainly not yet.
You probably won't be able to stop them from owning these for roughly the same reasons you can't actually meaningfully control guns if the public wants them.
Okay. Why are illegal narcotics still a problem?
It is, but for exactly the opposite of the reasons you're thinking. Too much order is probably not the basic problem you should be worrying about. I'm not worried that Wokes or whoever are going to establish a permanent tyranny. I'm much more worried they're going to try, and the way they fail is going to have my kids dead or reduced to eating cat food.
From a more general legal perspective, the point of gun cases is not to secure redress from the government, but rather to build common knowledge that the government is incapable of providing such redress.
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