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How does the military respond to disparate Americans shooting at LEOs knocking on their own doors?
Again a question of scale. How precisely do you expect the U.S. to successfully occupy itself?
Good. Then we can agree that gun deaths would decrease under a heavy gun control regime (although likely a massive spike given the aforementioned issue with enforcement) but there's as always the question of whether that simply results in further encroachments by the government once it has taken this step.
Simply put, I don't want to live under the rule of a government that doesn't trust its' citizens enough to allow them firearms.
If you shoot at the cops, they know your address. After the first week all patrols will be accompanied by Predator drone air support. You'll have two Hellfire missiles crashing through your roof in minutes after opening fire. If they can't get officers to shoot at Americans in person, they can sure as hell get some loyal private to sit at the drone terminal in Alexandria.
So "shoot while they're knocking at someone else's door" is the equilibrium strategy, then? At least "one of us got shot before we killed the shooter" can be spun as a heroic story; "one of us got shot before some kid at a desk bombed innocent people" (not to mention the crime scene where evidence of the bullet trajectory used to be) is the sort of thing that makes you look for a better job than "sucker who draws fire on the civilian-bombers' behalf".
And that's assuming no other collateral damage, which is ... a stretch. The 1985 MOVE bombing was horrifying enough to show up in the news last year, even though all the "this is unconstitutional", "pay millions of dollars to the victims", etc. decisions were made decades ago. This does not scale up.
You are pattern-matching to some random commune in Philadelphia. You should be pattern-matching to Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor, because that is what questioning American sovereignty (the kind that elites care about) amounts to. It’s pretty undignified to die on a million-dollar battleship in port from a dive bomber hitting the magazine. Did America look at that and decide, “whoops, our bad. We’ll stay on our side of the Pacific and mind our own business from now on”? No, they hunted down and killed every single Japanese soldier who wouldn’t surrender. How many collateral casualties were acceptable in that conflict? Do you think there will be sympathy for the terroristic gunmen on American media? Fox canned Tucker despite much better ratings than anyone else on their network because nobody would advertise on his show. Can you imagine if there was an actual shooting civil conflict and a host sided with the “bad guys”?
It's not a perfect match. It's people wanted for illegal weapons possession who got bombed for it, but it was also a group that had been threatening the lives of their neighbors. Many of your future missile victims will be much more sympathetic.
You've found much worse matches, though.
The first key bit with Pearl Harbor was "in port". When Americans died undignified deaths in others' ports, we weren't quite so gung-ho about keeping the pressure on forever. See Vietnam (which had celebrities siding with the Viet Cong, even, not just with civilian collateral damage), Iraq, Afghanistan.
The second key bit was "Japanese". Not just in a racist or myopic "wait, my neighbors' lives matter!" way, but because a coordinated empire trashing our defenses while conquering the Pacific looked like an existential threat. Impromptu snipers would be a threat to the secret police knocking on their neighbors' doors, but nobody's going to imagine that that kid safely behind the drone controls had no other choice.
The last key bit was "mind our own business". Japan had started conquering its neighbors before even economic sanctions started. What is your average hunter doing, that we need to ransack his home if he claims to have lost a gun that you think he's hiding? In this scenario the initial surprise attackers aren't the victims of your missile strikes, they're the perpetrators of them.
Imagine for a moment that we decided to invade Mexico, not because they had knocked out battleships or skyscrapers in a surprise attack, but because they have four times the gun homicide rate that we do and obviously we want to do the most good first, by sending in the military to disarm them all and kill off any resistance. Do you imagine this plan getting wide public support? There may be some "anti-colonialists" who are less resistant to invading Wyoming than Mexico, but I suspect that that group will balk at invading Chicago.
For snipers picking off cops that aren't coming for them specifically? No. For victims of misunderstandings ensuing from jumpy cops and drone operators trying to collect guns in such an environment? Absolutely. The largest mass shooting of civilians in US history was committed while trying to round up the victims' guns, and we call it the "Wounded Knee Massacre", not the "Lakota totally had it coming". How many more Breonna Taylor incidents (shot in the crossfire while her boyfriend was shooting at police, yet still the subject of protests for years!) would you expect to see while rounding up the guns owned by ten million African-Americans? How much more extreme would the reaction be if the "crossfire" was a missile and she didn't even have a chance not to die? What about the next time there are kids in the Hellfired house? How about when it turns out that one of her successors had a restraining order against a violent stalker and obviously had a good reason to keep a gun? What about when nobody in the house even had a gun, but it turns out that the cops and military panicked when someone across the street shot one of them from behind? What about when nobody at all had a gun, but some kid set off a firework at the wrong time, or was waving around a toy like Tamir Rice? You're not getting rid of a hundred million guns, even if somehow everybody was on board with that, without triggering a hundred thousand such incidents by accident. And it's going to get worse when terroristic gunmen start triggering such incidents on purpose. There's a quote about the Viet Cong that goes something like: "To demoralize the enemy you send a child carrying a flower and wearing a bomb. To really demoralize the enemy you then send five more children with flowers and no bomb."
"We're going to get rid of guns and shootings by removing part of the Bill of Rights then bringing heavily armed cops from door to door and killing people" is not the obviously easy PR victory you think it is. Have you missed the last few years? At this point "replace as many cops as we can with unarmed social workers because cops can't be trusted with guns" is a serious movement. "Swatting" is a thing you do when you're a horrible person who wants to risk someone's life, not something we want to make mass policy. "Deck the cops out for SWAT and send them door to door" isn't on the table among the left any more, much less the right.
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And when friendly fire or kid bits end up on national news?
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You know this is comical. Its like when Biden says something like, "what are you going to do about nukes." You can't fricken drone strike a single family house (let alone a single person's apartment) without causing mass collateral damage. Plus, the fact is you can't just siege Joe in 1F until he shits himself to death when there are 10000 Joes, nor can you snipe him when he leaves 1F without eviscerating all the other civil rights that exist. You'd be treating suspected gun owners worse than indicted criminals skipping bond.
All, in the end, probably for little benefit. Ask thyself, would the average gun control advocate accept this compromise (assuming it was ironclad): You get 10 years of doing your thing. But, if in year 10 the homicide rate of America is greater than any of Germany, England, or France all gun control laws enacted since 1900 are repealed permanently. Would they accept? Of course not. Nor for 20 or 25 years. Probably not even 50. This would all be rational, even though most of them would be dead, or nearly so at T=50. Because they would lose that bet. I mean, unless they engaged in a massive genocide program and somehow managed to gerrymander that to not be included in homicide.
Of course you can. Single family detached is easy. An apartment, maybe you're using a robot of some sort instead of a drone, but more likely police in riot gear. There aren't going to be 10,000 Joes; once you make an example over the first one, the rest will snap into line. Remember all the protests on Joe Biden's inauguration day? Of course not, because the government made its point on January 6.
(And the gun control advocates would totally take the deal. Then they'd welch. What are you going to do about it?)
Well obviously, but space aliens or something. The point is they don't even truly believe it will work.
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when someone says "you can't do x," they don't typically mean it's impossible for it to be done, but that doing it would cross some sort of line which would turn off people and cause more damage than what is gained through the use of huge violence
it's theoretically possible for the state to nuke a city if a gang takes over a city block, but so what?
to get around this issue, you simply assert something is possible and assert a prediction confidently, but confident predictions aren't arguments and they're not convincing anyway
bombing a city block because of MOVE didn't result in the disappearance of gang violence, it resulted in the philly PD stopping enforcement
There's no line. People will accept anything as long as the authorities doing it, with the connivance of the press, confidently declare themselves the good guys.
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