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"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.
And yet, this was where the conversation started:
Your argument was based on a fight between the military and civilians. My point is that there is probably going to be military on both sides, and also that militaries have civilian families and supporters, and these can also be attacked by other civilians. It is very likely that such a fight will actually be military/civilian vs military/civilian, at which point your original argument is entirely invalidated.
It is not clear to me what "dominate" means here. Guns as a sociopolitical coordination mechanism are extremely important completely aside from their use as weapons. As weapons, Guns are extremely useful for guerrilla warfare in a variety of ways that you do not seem to be aware of. Guns are useful for assassination, sabotage, siege/interdiction of supplies, area denial, self- and community-defense, and on and on and on. There is a reason all modern armies issue rifles, despite having access to much heavier and more sophisticated weaponry. I think the ubiquity of firearms ownership in America will be a decisive factor in the outcome of such a conflict.
Yes. And much of it can (and in some circumstances, should) be inflicted with personal firearms.
Armed insurgents have repeatedly denied police control of significant parts of cities, and the US Military did not get involved, because the local population and thus the local government supported the insurgents. We've already seen this happen, we've already seen how it happens. Why do you believe it can't happen again?
The fuck we don't.
It seems abundantly evident to me that Blue Tribe is more than willing to inflict both orderly and disorderly misery on their opponents in times of relative peace and plenty, including lawless physical violence and actual murder. I see no reason to believe that their willingness to support such misery-infliction would decrease as we slide into open warfare. Nor do I see a reason to believe that Reds are unwilling to support such misery-infliction in return. The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.. We've already tested the question of whether your tribe will support mass mob violence, arson as a political tactic, shooting dissenters, government agents and rival politicians, and established that none of these are deal-breakers. I generously argue that my tribe is not necessarily your moral superiors in every one of these respects, and invite you to consider how symmetrical actions from the other side might play out.
And yet, killing children (and women, and men) is a notable and effective tactic throughout the whole of human history. You think this time will be different, when your tribe's own leaders talk about how they think their opponents' children being murdered would be a positive political development?
Bans are laws. Insurrection is also illegal. It turns out that when your society can't agree what the law is or how to enforce it, law and its enforcement break down.
Repeated shootings. Numerous attacks on police and government agents, many of them quite violent. Rampant intimidation and threats against government agents, backed by local and even federal authorities, rampant intimidation and threats against normal civilians on the rumor that they might be involved somehow. I certainly would not agree that the anti-ICE protests followed the playbook of non-violent resistance, nor that these departures were ineffective or counterproductive. Your tribe backed most of it, and disclaimed all responsibility for the rest.
From my perspective, we have already run this experiment many, many times, and the result has consistently been the opposite of your claim. Large portions of Blue Tribe are absolutely willing to endorse political murder of civilians, including children.
No, the winning strategy is either controlling the definition of "excessive violence" such that your speech is violence and my violence is speech, or at minimum denying the enemy's ability to coordinate common knowledge of such a definition to coordinate collective action around and then winning through superior coordination of meanness. Your framing assumes some solid foundation of impartial law and sturdy social norms that can recognize and punish "excessive violence"; the legendary phrase "mostly peaceful" should put that idea down for good. I do not believe such a foundation currently exists, and certainly do not believe that such a foundation will exist in the future. The violence will be deserved, or it won't have really happened, or it will require historical context, or it will be a false flag by the hated outgroup, or it will be Just Some Crazy People who don't represent anyone, and the real problem is the people blaming your (or my!) tribe as though we're responsible in some way for the sort of violence we enthusiastically celebrate and constantly claim is absolutely necessary. And of course, the inverse Russell Conjugations for violence committed by the outgroup. If you want a demonstration, look at the October 7th attacks in Israel, and the response from Americans and Westerners generally. Your argument would predict that Hamas ought to be polling south of Satan; only, it's not, is it?
The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. "getting in too much trouble" is a variable, and a very flexible one. A huge portion of the search involves that variable specifically. Many practical ways to manipulate it have been demonstrated, and many more can be derived even if they have not yet been implemented at scale. Guns are part of this equation in a way you really ought to recognize.
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