Don't forget they disarmed the people. If some people ever start to care they wont have the boomstick power. They maybe be upside down but authoritarian regimes work the same, secure the monopoly on force by removing arms is a key step for any authoritarian gov.
> Also, anyone think that a US civilian militia has more than a snowball's chance in hell against any committed government-deployed force?
I do think that in case of armed resistance, US government will step back instead of nuking Oklahoma City.
Also, search "chechen wars". Large well-equipped Russian army with tanks, artillery and air force lost to people armed with AK's, determination and grassroots support from locals.
For more recent example see what happened in Afghanistan. The best the most powerful army on the planet could do is sitting inside their bases with multiple security perimeters.
I am skeptical of the utility of private arms in resisting a home-grown tyrannical government. I'm extremely skeptical that they're better to have around, than not to have around, from a preserving-liberty perspective, in a developed state, especially.
I'd welcome any evidence that they're of much use for that. I see too many mixed outcomes (private arms aiding in the installation of tyrannical government, notably, of which I'm aware of way more examples than the reverse) and cases that are too different to compare—every single example I'm aware of involves extensive foreign intervention and/or resistance to a foreign occupier, which is very different.
I think the odds of an armed US militia resisting tyranny being popular enough not to end up being opposed by even more armed militia who are pro tyranny, in a situation in which the military is not also mostly on the anti-tyranny side, is effectively zero. I think the reverse is far more likely (private arms supporting tyranny). I'd welcome evidence that would change this view, but as far as I can tell the scales strongly lean toward my take.
History only give us multiple examples of what happens if the people where disarmed in the years before the gov went fully tyrannical. Not the evidence you wanted but good enough for me.
>I think the reverse is far more likely (private arms supporting tyranny)
They would need to overpower gov AND the privately armed non-supporters. Compared to only the gov if the people would not be armed. (unless you assume the tyranny group is actually unarmed because they follow the law but this seems weird highly tyrannical and criminal groups all over the world always find a way to arm themself even in places where private people dont have guns.)
> They would need to overpower gov AND the privately armed non-supporters. Compared to only the gov if the people would not be armed. (unless you assume the tyranny group is actually unarmed because they follow the law but this seems weird highly tyrannical and criminal groups all over the world always find a way to arm themself even in places where private people dont have guns.)
The role they play is usually as part of a deniable dirty-work militia, or in cases in which the military sits out the conflict (usually a very bad sign for whoever's in power, tyrannical or not). In some cases in which the government is very ineffective and has a shit army, they can help—but again, I'm aware of that working in cases like the Cuban revolution, which wasn't exactly a blow struck for liberty, and it requires that the government has poor support and is very weak to begin with.
So the worst thing that could happen is that people who will be ordered to do the dirty work already have guns rather than whoever controls them has to arm them first.
Seems to be a minor detail not something that has any effect on larger outcome of conflicts.
Yes, I would agree that private arms rarely, bordering on never, have much effect either way, unless a government is already extremely weak, and then the arms often aid in establishing (perhaps another, rather than a new one) tyranny, not ending it.
I was curious where this was coming from so I checked your comment history. It seems your scared of a particular party (republicans) forcing their way into power via the use of guns. Is this true?
> You say they are different, but you don’t say why.
Sorry, didn't occur to me to note the differences. The incentives, motivations, goals, costs, and resources for a foreign government fighting on your soil are all very from your own government fighting a civil war or dealing with a domestic, guerrilla resistance, are the main things.
I remain unconvinced that private arms are likely to be any kind of useful factor in resisting tyranny in a developed country, and also unconvinced that they're more likely to be used to that end than in service of the precisely the opposite purpose, even if they were useful for tyranny-resistance to begin with.
> It’s another way of saying they aren’t the same in various ways.
Yes, I guess I just... figured it was extremely obvious that a foreign occupation resisted by locals and a civil war or domestic insurgency are very different, largely on those categories. I feel like I'm being asked to defend the statement that bicycles and airplanes are, though both modes of transportation, quite different in a bunch of important ways.
It’s obvious they are different. It’s not obvious what differences would render guns useless, which appears to be your position.
I’m not asking you to arbitrarily explain how they are different. I’m asking you to explain how and why the differences you are thinking of make guns useless for civilians to own.
Ah, I've got you. Sorry, I probably read poorly or something.
Aggregating the differences, part of it is that the stakes are so much lower in a foreign occupation and that withdrawal to save any of several sorts of costs involved is an option that won't result in the toppling of the occupying state's government or loss of any of the occupying state's core territory or sovereignty, and the other part (also mentioned in my post) is that it's very common for a successful insurgency or rebellion [edit: against foreign occupiers, I mean, in this case] to have foreign aid, which often exceeds the benefit of private arms to such a degree that it's not clear a few folks having AKs mattered at all, so even in such cases–which are already quite different from a domestic conflict—it's usually not clear-cut that private arms made much difference.
It'd help for the analysis if a state with a modern maneuver-focus equipped-and-trained army had faced a realistic domestic threat from rebels bearing private small arms... like, ever. There've been revolutions in such states (Russia, mainly—I'm actually struggling to think of another, since even the ones with maneuver-focus equipment usually hadn't managed the training for it, so fight very differently), but they've not really been the result of civil wars or armed insurrections. Such militaries have lost abroad, but not domestically, and usually against an enemy with one or more foreign state backers—and not by actual, outright defeat on the battlefield, but by convincing the occupier (the political leadership, not the military—they're usually not routes due to loss of morale) to cut their losses and go home. I strongly suspect that the circumstances that would render private arms enough to be any meaningful part of successful resistance against such a state in a civil war or insurrection, would also mean they weren't necessary for that success in the first place—that is, the circumstances would include such overwhelming and enthusiastic support from the populace, and/or enough support from the military, that a bunch of civilian-owned rifles wouldn't much matter for the outcome. There may be some narrow, unlikely set of circumstances in which they're really be the deciding factor, but at that point the cost/risk of keeping them around would have to be incredibly low to justify doing so specifically on the grounds that they're very important for resisting tyranny (there are other justifications for firearms ownership, of course).
You seem to be restating your position a few times in more words - I.e. that examples of resistance to foreign opposition are not relevant, and that guns wouldn’t be relevant in then scenarios you can imagine.
Can you try condensing the actual argument into a short paragraph?
It’s not clear what scenario you are imagining in which the weapons wouldn’t help. How about just outlining the scenario you are thinking about clearly?
Your argument is that during an occupation civilians owning guns already in the occupied country doesn’t matter because another country will come in and arm them?
You keep imagining that all the population will be on your side in this exchange. It'll just be so obvious you should be fighting the government, everyone will join!
That's not the point. The point is that it means a government must resort to violence and it may be unwilling to do so. Whereas if people don't have guns, then the government can be incredibly overpowering without having to step over the threshold of violence, which makes it more likely.
Governments have no problem "stepping over the threshold" and using violence. If you think that the US government wouldn't use violence against its own people for breaking laws, even hastily-written or unfair laws, you're sorely mistaken.
There is no such things as "the government who enforces laws" its people who enforce laws and they wont if they dont agree and dont have a monopoly on violence. Also "hastily-written or unfair laws" wont be enacted if there is a realistic chance you pay with your life for doing so.
The guns are there for when the legal way to solve stuff no longer works and laws are no longer of any meaning. Saying its against the law to use them or that law enforcement will enforce any law no matter what is pure ignorance. Civil wars happens and if there is one you better hope both sides have guns because else its not a war its a takeover.
>Yes, but there is a very low limit to the number of people that can be on the other end of the violence, and with guns, that limit is even much lower.
I don't really understand what you mean here?
You pull your gun out and threaten a government representative, and you will be dead or in handcuffs within 30 minutes.
Maybe your idea of civilian government overthrow could come true if you could somehow gather thousands of people with guns who are against the government simultaneously, but other than that, it's over. And even if you do manage to gather those people, it's over when the national guard arrives.
Escalating violence doesn't work when you're massively outgunned, or do you have your own Apache helicopters, armed drones and tanks? Do you think they will hesitate to attack armed terrorists trying to overthrow the "democratically elected" government?
I'm not American so please explain what I'm missing here.
Think less on quick-draw-shoot-the-cop sort of scenarios, and more along the lines of a "the freedom fighters generally live in these hills, and they like to blow us up with bombs or shoot us from far away when we aren't suspecting" situation.
If there was a tyranny and a rebellion, the cops are going to think twice about going out and about without full force since they might be ambushed.
That's one thing. But there's another. I've done years of fighting sports training with half the local (sort-of, they get called out pretty far, sometimes even flown somewhere) SWAT team. Including the commander. If you think even such a team will go charging into what might be an ambush, you're insane.
It does not work like in the movies. If you're in your house and someone is trying to kill you with a weapon, it will take the cops 15 minutes to your door ... and 30 minutes before they come in, minimum. If a unit has been lost (meaning a cop already got hurt), it will take hour before they come to the door, minimum. Some places (such as the court house) have different rules.
As soon as a unit has been lost, they will FIRST do a cost-benefit analysis of retaliating at all. And, especially in large cities, that analysis will regularly come up with something akin to "just let them deliver the drugs and do ... nothing" or "just let them go". Even when non-lethal (and "non-lethal" as in a knife) weapons are used they may refuse. You see, not getting maimed (even a little bit) is a thoroughly essential part of having any sort of career, and the treatment wounded cops get certainly does not justify self-sacrifice. The kinder logic is that criminals don't stop after one crime. If it's needed to stop them, there will be another chance.
Working this way means that for even a large metro area they can maybe handle 5 to 10 serious situations at any one time. Police weapons, even the big ones, do not defeat even relatively small determined militias. And the police will abandon neighbourhoods long before it comes anywhere near this point.
If they truly the think the situation will escalate without end, they may go in. That, by the way, generally means snipers, not knocking down the door. If they don't think the situation will escalate, or if there's too many people, or ... they will just let it be.
> If you think that the US government wouldn't use violence against its own people for breaking laws, even hastily-written or unfair laws, you're sorely mistaken.
The government order is acted on by a person, at the end of the day. During the lockdowns my City authority closed all public parks including the one across the street from my house. They also retasked all Parks & Recreation employees to sit in the parks and yell at anyone using the parks. Many citizens, myself included, outright ignored the P&R staff and continued to make use of the park under the threat of "calling the police." Even after the lockdown ended and parks re-opened, the staff at our local park continued with their own "closure."
However, at no point did officers respond let alone use state-sanctioned violence against citizens. That a government flunky gives an order does not mean it will be enforced let alone result in violence from authorities.
Ultimately, this is a continuous function rather than a boolean as you're implying. Citizen ownership of arms helps juice that function in our favor.
Right. There might be three people in the world that believe that the stated goal of the mission was to kill a bunch of people and return power to the group whose members we killed while in the process arming them to the teeth with U.S. equipment so they have free reign once again[1].
Yes, when that militia is in every town. In the end, you need boots on the ground.
A government is a parasitic organism. Quashing resistance only makes sense if it's cost-effective. E.g. nuking your own country is insane; at some point, it's just cheaper to compromise.
The US civilian militias that currently exist in a time of domestic peace are filled with angry people from the margins of society. The ones that would form from the veterans of decades of foreign wars in a time of domestic conflict might be a lot different.
Remember that bin Laden fought off the Soviets using an MBA, an inherited construction company, and billions of dollars of foreign funding. Militias don't exist in isolation from the world.
That's always tricky because the most successful examples of a guerilla army winning like that are all a foreign army coming into a local rebelling population. They mostly work by just wearing down the invaders until the cost and time requirements wear heavy enough that the foreign army decides to just go home, that same dynamic doesn't map as well when it's the state fighting for it's own survival to me.
It's actually probably easier since the government would be asking its own people to kill its own people. If the local government were in broadly thought to be tyrannical, a guerilla civil war would have a high chance of success. Ask Cuba.
It's impossible to say with certainty which way it will go. There's factors pushing in both directions. You're right there will be some defection from the military to any US insurgent side but there's also a lot of space to draw divisions in the US and given enough people you can assign soldiers to fight places they're not particularly aligned to support.
My biggest point is that all the often cited success stories of a guerilla army winning against any modern military are all on a home turf vs invading army (and the guerilla forces are often heavily backed by outside forces or backed up by an actual regular army like in Vietnam). There are completely different incentives there, on the extreme end of things losing means you might be killed
Also don't be so sure about Cuba if you're talking about the current situation, it's far from over and they're not exactly a peer comparison to make to a theoretical US insurgency.
> My biggest point is that all the often cited success stories of a guerilla army winning against any modern military are all on a home turf vs invading army (and the guerilla forces are often heavily backed by outside forces or backed up by an actual regular army like in Vietnam).
Do you think the guns in civilian ownership are to be used for foreign wars? They are exactly for homeland invasion.
And who will back the US with arms? In the examples you gave it’s a richer country, or multiple, helping a poorer country. Who’s going to help the richest country in its death throes? What will be the benefit for all that aid should that nation fall? It’s better to pre-stage the weapons as that also serves to deter those that think the US is inadequately armed.
When presented with historical events supporting these claims your response is “cannot say with certainty”…
The interesting and terrifying part is, if I were China or Russia, I would be online trying to convince the US to disarm itself too.
Well the US gov fighting it’s citizens would be a war crime. And then hopefully the entirety of NATO would come down on them. A gov cannot use their own military force against their citizens. Full stop. And speaking as a veteran, my willingness to fight would be based on the side my beliefs were based upon. If the order was given to kill US citizens, it was an illegal order and the chain of command has been broken. All bets are off.
That's not really what NATO is for and it'd depend a lot on what the actual events looked like. If it's frameable as armed violent uprising/terrorism being controlled then it's much less likely to pull explicit foreign intervention and the prototypical '2A to protect against a tyrannical government usage' will almost definitely fit that bill.
Correct, it depends on the size of the uprising. Further this is still an illegal order to kill US citizens. And with that once the order comes down chaos will ensue in the ranks.
You’re missing an essential detail, how Australians view the government, Australians don’t believe that the the government is sufficiently competent to be tyrannical, except in small local cases against the powerless
edit: we don't believe those in government with the inclination towards tyranny are sufficiently competent. There are individuals, in government in Australia, in the same house even if they're are not quite at the centre of power, who are good admirable competent people. And there are those whose fantasies bend towards tyranny. They are not the same people. And then there is the great morass along for the ride and the cushy pension.
I want to vote on policy I care about and understand, not a person I've never met who I can't necessarily trust that's meant to represent me.
The system has failed. I was horrified to see how far we'd fallen. When COVID hit, I thought they'd at least have some basic model on the shelf to extrapolate a response from.
Nope. All that kind of forward thinking seems to have gone along with the brain drain of the CSIRO and everything that followed. All the smart people have already left.
We're now governed by passive-reactive puppets.
At least you can understand tyranny. Possibly intentional incompetence not so much. Welcome to the misinformation age. Who knew it would start so soon after the information age.
> I want to vote on policy I care about and understand, not a person I've never met who I can't necessarily trust that's meant to represent me.
Representative democracy is designed as a compromise between giving power to the people and giving (what's perceived as) too much power to the people.
In the case of a true direct democracy, many fear the ignorance and apathy of the average voter, and wonder if the majority rule would lead to tribalism and repression of minorities. That said, the few actual examples of direct democracy don't really seem to have borne these fears out.
In a way it comes down to how much (or little) confidence you have in your fellow citizen; "the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter," and all that. I veer towards misanthropy, so from that perspective direct democracy doesn't do a lot for me... seems like there's no perfect system.
>In the case of a true direct democracy, many fear the ignorance and apathy of the average voter, and wonder if the majority rule would lead to tribalism and repression of minorities.
I'm more concerned about power vacuums created by value extraction. We were swindled without realising it, in fact some of us enjoyed it - but only because we don't know what we lost. There can be very weird dynamics at play. Unfortunately the descendants of those are eventually left holding the bag and find out what they lost.
I would amend things such that if the Peasants were happy and everyone else was busy then Confucius is happy (because he's not being disturbed). I actually hope for more happy than that, but I'll take what I can get.
The main part of the problem with achieving the perfect system is that it has to also resolve all of the already imperfect systems in play. And you need to work out 'who' gets to define perfection.
I don't believe this, but I empathise with your fury.
There has just been a small Covid outbreak in my town. The organisation of the response (all local - not federal) has been phenomenal, straight up inspiring.
But we are also the inheritors of a long legacy of stupid and brutal, and it can be hard to look around and believe that now is better than it was. How could this possibly be better? The gutting of CSIRO is a tragedy, but it's short term gain for tragedies all the way down.
I think Australia today is different better society than the country a century ago, we are iterating of a base of absolute monarchy and entrenched power, and it seems as we have got comfortable, and many of us are comfortable, many of us have stopped pushing.
There's a book on historical protest movements in Australia by Jeff Sparrow. It was an eye opener for me to see that actually things were even worse a century ago, the way fear of communist infiltration was used to control society, was even more clumsy, and more successful than the garbage we encounter today. The story of the Hilton Hotel bombing in the 70s is so clumsy it would be hilarious if lives weren't ruined. ASIO planted a fake bomb (which they intended to find and they use to justify further funding), which actually blew up, and then the Indian representative (was it the ambassador or the Prime Minister?) declared it was a terrorist attack against him, so ASIO had to find a hippy to arrest, so they did and they got away with it.
If I were a tyrannical gov and my country thought I was incompetent I would run with it for as long as I could, implementing things like surveillance laws, removing guns, all the while the citizens think I’m incompetent. Until they look around one day and realize Ive build a cage around them.
Sure, but it'll be a shit cage that I'm more likely to get get tetanus from it than anything else. If they buy drone soldier robots from China maybe they could pull it off - provide someone figures out the remote, lots of buttons, but you just couldn't find enough people in Australia interested in being your stormtroopers. Murdoch on the other hand could do it, if we ever stop paying him his tribute, who knows, maybe he will rise from crypt and enslave us all, but as long as we keep showing him with gifts he seems content with merely ruining the joint.
SIGH. This isn't true and I wish Americans would stop saying it. You can own guns down here, even keep them in your house. Sure, you're limited to bolt actions/side by sides, etc; but there is a healthy shooting community down here. For instance, I've got a mate who owns 7 rifles, the largest of which is a .338 Lapua.
What Australia did was break the 'gun culture' down here and ban semi-autos, pump actions, etc. And let's be honest, I'd take that over the 18 million ARs in circulation in the USA every day of the week. Not having semi-autos is preferable to daily shootings in the community.
