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Even under the current SCOTUS, this seems plainly false. You do not even have the right to keep the means to fight the ACW. And warfare changed a lot in the past 150 years. Automatic weapons are not the biggest deal. But what are you going to do about armored vehicles? Really hard to kill a tank with your AR-15.
Realistically, any Americans having a beef with the US military would resort to tactics of insurgency: hiding among the civilian population, striking from hiding and hoping that the feds will value the lives of civilians enough that they do not simply flatten your city block. In other words, war crimes.
The days of Washington when an armed, motivated local population could defeat a great power (though not on their home continent) in open battle are long over. If you want to update 2A for the last century, you would have to allow private citizens to engage in mutually assured destruction against the US, like the USSR did. I have heard few people argue that this would be a good idea.
Why would you need to kill a tank with an AR-15? AR-15s are for shooting the people who have control over where those tanks go; a tank that doesn't show up to fight is no different than a dead tank, a voter that doesn't show up to vote is no different than a dead voter.
I will remind you that this actually happened to the guy who is currently in control of those tanks.
More generally, it's why soldiers in third-world countries all wear face coverings. Sure, maybe the drug cartel can't get through the tank, but they can definitely kill the families of the people driving those tanks, or the families of the people those tanks are used to provide cover for.
That's why the personal firearm is so powerful in terms of political change. Your enemy doesn't need to defeat the military; what it needs to do is to defeat you. And your enemy, if he's mad enough, can thus appear at any moment and delete you- yeah, it'll cost him, but that won't fix being dead.
Therefore I suggest that you structure your rule in such a way that the enemy (and his delete button) chooses to stay home. Because 2A means him deciding he's had enough, for any reason, is ultimately on the table.
Which gets us back to the existential angst about mass shootings, and my claim these are one-man civil wars. So, we could rule in such a way that people don't want to do that- which is what we want- or we could just ban the guns because we're too lazy and selfish to do that (and in so doing discard our ability to be that kind of political actor- naturally, those who believe in mob rule/Democracy and fancy themselves in charge of that mob are most in favor).
Yeah, you don't even need guns for that (though some AR-15s were indeed used here). If you want to resist the Federal government deporting the collection of humans you illegally trafficked, all you have to do is complain real loudly about it.
The problem with that is that this means the influence of any particular group is proportional to both how many there are of them (good) and how omnicidal they are. Basically, ten jihadists will have more influence on what rules are enforced by society than a thousand quakers.
This will advantage memes which are ready to defect against society at the slightest provocation over memes which are more pro-social. It seems really hard to make a society out of people each itching to prove that they are a crazier motherfucker than all the others around them.
Yes, but that smuggles in the assumption that jihadists are bad and Quakers are good. All the Quakers need to do is send 10 of their own to face down 10 Jihadists, so if the Jihadist wants the consent of the Quakers to govern them, maybe he should consider respecting their ways.
All progress depends on the unreasonable man, so it's probably OK if he is in charge.
Once it stops being progress, you have a bunch of mechanisms to make sure there's always room for the next guy to take charge- he's not allowed to stop that process, that's why you're allowed to freely denounce him, retain the ability to wage war on him, refuse to quarter his army in your house, hide plausibly-deniable resistance to him, never have to witness against yourself if you run afoul of his law...
Yeah, a society full of insane ideologues would definitely never amount to anything- such a system would never work, much less grow so powerful it dominates the entire world.
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Who would be mad enough to try open battle with small arms against the US Military when it's been consistently defeated by guerilla warfare for decades?
Nobody can defeat a GP on their own. It's all about staying alive long enough they either give up or you get support from their rival GPs.
The problem with guerrilla warfare in urban settings is that it generally involves war crimes, e.g. fighting out of uniform, relying on your opponent to have qualms about killing civilians by accident. Or getting your opponent to kill a lot of civilians in the process of fighting you, thereby earning a propaganda victory (like Hamas did).
From Mao's protracted war to Vietnam and GWB's adventures, the general rule seems to be that the winning strategy is to give less of a fuck about the civilian population than your opponent. This leads obviously to a race to the bottom.
Besides, the means to fight a modern insurgency against the US are IEDs, not guns. If the NRA were serious about killing the enforcers of a tyrannic US in the future, they would forgo small arms and focus on legalizing the ownership of C4.
Obviously blowing up US troops with your mobile along with civilians while you hide among the civilians is not exactly as glamorous as the Rambo fantasies some 2A proponents might have.
So when I say that almost all Americans do not have the stomach to effectively resist the US government, I mean that as a compliment. I know that I would not have the stomach for that either, and I am thankful for that.
That was one of the observations the US made when they invaded Russia. You can read some of the accounts of the Americans talking about how surprised they were, never before encountering anyone else who seemed to take life at a lesser price. It’s barbaric but it wins out and throughout multiple existential wars, Russia has proven this time and time again.
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They sell explosives in small town grocery stores here.
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If you think such a conflict would neatly contain itself to uniformed troops on one side and irregulars on the other, you are very high and should put the bong down. The military is not likely to break cleanly for one side or the other. The military cannot effectively police the north American continent. Everyone involved in such a war would understand it to be a tribal war from the start.
War is about inflicting harm and misery on the other side. There are many, many, many ways to do this that do not involve getting in a fight with a tank, especially given that there are not remotely enough tanks to go around, and you can't actually live in one if you have one.
Americans need electricity, and will experience its absence as harm and misery.
Ditto for food.
Ditto for water. American cities are not designed to survive sieges generally.
Most decisively, nobody has to go into this thinking they're ending the concept of peace nationwide for the indefinite future. There's lots of little steps people can take thinking they're just making a statement, that only in retrospect will be recognizable as striking matches in a dynamite factory. Some would argue that this has already happened. It only takes a few, and then a few more. It doesn't have to involve killing at all, though notably political killings with mass public support are something we've been seeing on the left for some time now, with no evidence of reversal. Moderate, reasonable steps can get us there just as well as mouth-foaming radicalism.
We have actually had a lot of examples of examples of confrontations between government forces and disgruntled civilians lately. A lot of these examples have not gone well for the Government forces, and some of the more extreme ones are notable for the public support the insurrectionists have received. You do not appear to have a conceptual linkage between these many, many examples of the exact sort of thing you're arguing can't happen and the scenario you're trying to describe. I think you should rectify that lack.
"It does not matter that the military outguns the civilian population by 1:50 (on money spent per year, order of magnitude), because they will fracture in a civil war." -- Yes, but then the civil war will be decided by US military fighting US military, with private gun owners watching from the sidelines.
The only way private gun ownership would dominate is if the US military (including national guards etc) made a decision to sit the war out. This is almost certainly not going to happen. If armed insurgents are fighting police for control of a city, everyone on any side will expect the US military to get involved.
I disagree. War is about achieving strategic objectives through military means. Attacking the will of the other side can be an instrumental goal, but it is not the only or even dominant strategy. Inflicting misery can sometimes be effective at eroding the will, but other times it can be counterproductive.
Populations do not simply have a morale bar and once you have killed enough kids it drops to zero and they surrender. World war one lasted for years for years despite tremendous costs in human misery. Germany only surrendered when the Hindenburg line was breached and the occupation of Germany would have been inevitable. The IDF leveled Gaza, and still Hamas is a dominant political force there. There is a lot of ruin in a nation.
In our enlightened times, we also do not generally consider inflicting misery on the civilian population supporting your opponent to be legitimate tactic of waging war. Typically, states ban tactics which are cruel but not very effective for them. This is why small arms are legal for warfare and chemical weapons are widely banned, for example.
Take the anti-ICE protests. To the degree that they are successful, they follow the playbook of non-violent resistance.
If instead they were aiming at maximizing the misery on their opponents, for example by bombing the families of ICE agents, they would be an utter failure. A vast majority of the US population is against bombing American kids, and they would quickly find themselves slightly more less popular than Al Qaida.
The winning strategy is not excessive violence, but baiting your opponent into using excessive violence. You do not need 2A for that. The only anti-ICE victory related to 2A rights is the Pretti shooting, which is very much not how 2A proponents would have imagined to influence policy.
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An armed, motivated local population, another great power (France), and two middle powers (Spain and the Netherlands). Even if the American colonists could have defeated the British forces in America without French help, they couldn't have defeated the much larger combined land and naval force we could have sent if we hadn't (spectacularly wrongly as it turned out) believed that North America was the least important theatre of the three-ocean world war that began in 1778.
Spain was still a great power at the time.
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He said that 2A states it, not that SCOTUS agrees with it. Rocket launchers (including MANPADs) are arms that can be kept and borne; a literal reading of 2A covers them.
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It's not like we are witnessing the advent of drone warfare in which a cheap $1k drone armed with a wired grenade beats a APC or a Tank for $200 Million.
Democratizing the use and ability to manufacture weapons-capable drones is the new frontier of the 2nd Amendment. Thankfully the bureaucrats in Washington are stupid and slow on the uptake.
Does 2A protect armed FPV drones? Any cases yet?
Not rules as written. At the same time FPV drones are only regulated by the FAA and no where near the level of regulation of firearms. Realistically any domestic civil insurgency against the US Government will be predicated on drone-based arms. The success of the new UAV paradigm against traditional combined arms and mechanized infantry is plain to see for anyone paying attention. We'll see if the FedGov ever finds a realistic option to ban civilian UAVs but the conversion from civilian UAV to military UAV is as simple as attaching an energetic to them with a detonator. I think it will be border line impossible to to ban them.
Just because the cowards in the government don't want to be at the mercy of the people at whose consent they govern doesn't mean the intent of the 2nd amendment isn't clear. UAVs meet that intent. The rules just haven't caught up yet.
FPV drones are for most intents and purposes illegal to fly (you can technically do so with a spotter keeping it in line of sight, or with a hard to obtain license). However, there's no law against building one, and the FAA has not nearly enough enforcement capacity to do anything about it if you do fly it. Rigging them to drop things is legal, though actually dropping something from it isn't, but again, no enforcement capacity. The Trump administration banned many drone parts using the FCC, but this too is unlikely to actually have any effect. The limit remains getting the grenades.
FPV drones can be flown, just with in line of sight. It's pretty much just a usecase deployment bottleneck, which would already be too late for FedGov interference. You can still test and develop your FPV drone if you just stand in a field and fly it.
I might be misremembering but wasn't this mostly a DJI company ban? Drone parts themselves are producible, and manufacturable/craft-able. You just can't order cheap chinese drones and deploy from those. Only American-Made(TM) domestic weapons.
Yes agreed. I'm shocked we haven't seen a jailbroken LLM finetuned on chemistry textbooks and old anarchist-explosive making books developed for the purpose of democratizing energetic creation and particularly blasting cap development. I suppose they could exist out there but aren't being publicly advertised.
The DJI company was banned, but also all new models of non-American UAS (drone) parts. There's a lot of drone parts that American companies simply don't make, or don't make except for a few small companies who do it for the defense industry only. Transmitters and receivers, flight controllers, servos, and motors. Motors probably don't need FCC certification, servos are general-use items, but flight controllers and transmitters are pretty drone-specific.
The problem isn't the knowledge; you can get that anywhere. The problem is
1) Getting precursor chemicals.
and
2) Not blowing yourself up making the stuff.
Number 2 is probably the larger. Electronics is easy, chemistry (especially explosives chemistry) requires a lot of washing and temperature control (often cooling and heating at the same time, as with nitroglycerin) and very careful control of impurities (e.g. if you're making an azide propellant, it doesn't take much lead getting mixed in to end up with a primary explosive. Which might be a good thing, but only if you intend it). Anyone using AI starting from zero is either going to (most likely) produce nothing or just blow themselves up.
Once you've made the stuff, putting it into a useful form is an art of its own, but a bit less fraught.
Yeah, but nitroglycerin? That stuff tends to result in an ignobel fate on a good day.
Add to diatomaceous earth, and you get significantly less iggy.
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When drones first started becoming the new thing I wondered how the law was going to bend itself and evolve in the direction of regulating them over things like this. There was a funny case in Ohio awhile back of someone who used a drone to fly in a bag of weed and a cell phone to an inmate at a prison. After cases like that you saw aggressive legislation regulating where drones are permitted for use.
They're near impossible to actually outlaw (harder than guns, certainly) since a drone is basically just 4 electric motors, a frame (which can be 3d printed, or made from gluing popsicle sticks together, etc.), a battery, and a control board (a cheap Arduino or other microcontroller etc.).
https://www.instructables.com/The-Ultimate-Guide-to-Building-a-Quadcopter-From-S/
Simple doesn’t always mean easy. The sun is just a bunch of interstellar hydrogen packed very tightly, gathered into one place; doesn’t mean you can just go out and make a sun. A car is also just four wheels on a metal frame. Most people don’t know the first thing about motors, don’t even know how to pronounce “Arduino,” have never used a 3D printer, suck at gluing popsicle sticks and wouldn’t know how to work a control board. Law enforcement isn’t going to have that difficult of a time. I’d be much more concerned about someone coming along and publishing guides on how to jailbreak mass produced, advanced consumer drones; and seeing people exploit the hell out of their uses to abuse the law.
Building a drone is both simple AND easy and legally safe, compared to building a gun. And there's no need to jailbreak mass produced consumer drones because there's no jail to break in most cases.
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Sure, in the same way that most people aren't going to use electrochemical machining to rifle their own barrels, but the option is still there and makes truly outlawing them impossible.
I'm just saying that building a drone from off the shelf parts is quite a bit easier than making your own gun, even with the massive advances that the DIY gun community has made in recent years.
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The problem for those isn't 2A but FAA regulations.
I imagine if you never ever fly them you probably can stockpile them as destructive devices?
The grenade drop drones, as an example, might not even be destructive devices on their own. "Why yes officer, it's for dropping biodegradable gender reveal streamers". IIRC Ukraine was, for a while, importing and only lightly modifying non-military drones.
For all our firearms, explosives are AFAIK rather hard to come by, but not impossible.
There's probably not much of a civilian market for shape-charge warheads, though (and you're not going to kill a tank by dropping a hand grenade on it) (I realise tanks have been killed by drone-dropped hand grenades dropped through an open hatch, but you can't rely on all crews being similarly
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I wouldn’t know as far as manufacturing standard munitions for firearms, how difficult that would be. But I loved the 4th of July when I was a kid. My father had an extremely advanced knowledge of science for someone who was an autodidact, and he used to make some highly illegal explosives that make some very destructive boom booms. He would take my sibling and I out in the middle of nowhere and set them off and put on a real spectacle; and later taught me how. That was mostly how I took a liking to and later learned a good amount of chemistry on my own. Plus I’m a geek; so that’s what I do anyway.
He walked me through a read of the Anarchist Cookbook once and taught me why it’s not a good reference to use at all. “If you do this… followed by this… what happens is that… and creates a mixture of this… at which point, you will die.” Luckily even back then we were extremely discreet. That kind of homebrew activity was the norm. Byproduct of a different time. Today we’d have gotten marked as domestic terrorists.
I hit high school right around the time that online networks (not even the internet yet, just garbage like AOL) were growing like mad, and the sharper adults had figured out that most kids now basically had unfettered access to anything that could be encoded as a text or image file. My chemistry teacher begged to help any of us who might actually try an Anarchist Cookbook explosives recipe, also based on the proposition that too many of its recipes were suicidal if followed as-written. I don't think anyone took her up on it, though; the wildest homebrew reaction I ever ended up seeing was a friend's thermite in college.
From what I've read, even modern powder isn't too hard ... though some of the precursors are supposedly in the "legal, but bulk purchase will bring men with badges to your door for a friendly chat" category. The tricky chemicals to manufacture without killing yourself are primers.
I was reading about this in the course of post-apocalyptic-fiction background research, though, looking at the context of a setting where people would eventually have to redevelop manufacturing capacity for everything. In the modern US, reloaders can buy a box of 1000 primers online for under $100. Chris Rock's bullet control routine was hilarious, but essentially impossible. Even if we focus on the difficulty of making your own primers, there's no way to effectively ban something that's been sold in billion-unit-per-year quantities and can be shelf-stable indefinitely.
This makes me slightly envious, I would have certainly taken him or her up on it. The fanciest thing I ever got do synthesize in school was nitrocellulose. I can still feel the disappointment like it was yesterday when a teacher who had promised to synthesize any ether compound we wanted reneged on that when I picked an ester of nitric acid and glycerin.
Nor did I ever try that on my own, my balls to brains ratio is apparently low enough that I still have all my fingers. I did thermite on my own though, it is reasonably safe when done outside with some eye protection and plenty of sand so you don't start a big fire.
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Cathode_G had DIY guncotton pretty much solved, DIY gunpowder as difficult but doable, and (corrosive) primer as viable (cw: guy is also an exhibitionist furry, so link is safe but be warned if you follow him). The traditional mercury fulminate solution is both messy, chemically nasty, and extremely dangerous without the right tools and experience, and pretty much any traditional primer is going to be dangerous by definition.
There's been some interesting efforts in electrically-ignited primers that look safer and even harder to block, though they're weird enough that it's been difficult to adapt modern tools to them.
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Regarding online networks, I was roughly in the same space as you age-wise (you sound like someone possibly in my bracket) and remember AOL very well. There was a site that was very popular among us and I can’t recall the fucking name, because it was awesome. Something like rotteneggs.com; but something “egg” related for sure. What it was, was basically an open forum of posts for registered users to post all sorts of malicious recipes for things. And I’m not talking just making stink bombs, or using krazy glue and toothpicks and breaking them off inside school doors so they’re inaccessible and have to be replaced; I mean full on bomb manuals by teenagers and young adults, who were just experimenting with shit. Some of them were probably really bad people too, but that was the milieu and environment of the time for people like us. And granted they were written in this sort of amateurish tutorial style format, and some users didn’t have great grammar, but there were a lot of pearls of wisdom on that site to be mined, and I loved reading it.
In my self-study and also from my father, I learned a lot about black powder and compounds with energetic properties, etc. He actually taught me a lot from books like this, specifically. I didn’t have the technical know how at the time to independently understand much of it, but as he taught me more it became very comprehensible. It’s ironic you mention thermite too, my best friend and I also made thermite around this time. We used it to destroy an old hard drive (a very bad idea to do as a young kid and highly dangerous). Modern powders as you say actually aren’t too hard to come by, and it’s been known for a long time that large quantities of certain OTC items will immediately get you flagged. That was known even when I was a kid. Today you’re practically Osama if you go shopping at a Costco with such intentions. I’m sure regulations have tightened even further, but I’m not going back to that anymore. I’ve had my fun and more than my fill of that stuff. One of the last time’s I visited my younger cousin and her young kids, we were talking about stories of things we did in the past and they all wanted to go do the same things we did and asked if we could teach them how. I said “absolutely, not.” Unfortunately today’s a different day and age. Funny I was actually thinking of that exact Chris Rock clip while reading the rest of your post.
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