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Do you seriously think that having a few guns is going to make a difference when the government come knocking at your door? The idea that the government will so

by leoedin 11y ago

Do you seriously think that having a few guns is going to make a difference when the government come knocking at your door? The idea that the government will somehow turn suddenly into the enemy and millions of Americans will seize their arms and rise up against it, toppling it and replacing it with some new, better government is a complete fantasy. A fantasy which costs 30,000 lives a year.

hga 11y ago
At bare minimum it'll make a difference when they come to my neighbor's door and I and other neighbors shoot them from the flank. The rest of what you said is part strawmen, part a testament to passivity in the face of evil and a severe lack of imagination, part a lumping of suicides with homicides, which statistics from other nations with severely anti-gun regimes suggests would only result in substitutions if guns were magically removed from American hands. And let me add this thought from a man who saw many of his fellows die in labor camps: And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! That's from Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his GULAG Archipelago. Again, number matter. Make mass murder too expensive, and it can't even be conceived of. Sort of like how you can't conceive of it "happening here." Which neither can I, seeing how well we are armed, not to mention quite capable of offensive counter attacks. Note well how the mostly clueless nutcase Chris Dorner, in a state where I'll note most people are not allowed to bear arms, caused the police to completely lose their shit. Imagine that multiplied 10 million times over (the so called "3%").
kls 11y ago
History paints a far darker narrative than the one you tell. You are falling victim to Cognitive in which you are shortcutting that data because, the data is so nebulous you are only looking at your experience as the whole set instead of a subset. As well you are falling victim to Confirmation Bias as your personal experience (of a stable peaceful government) deviates from the norm, but you are assuming it is the norm. Outside of the first world the world is still a very violent place and it has really only been peaceful in the first world for the last 60 or so years. As recently the late 30's Spain was locked in a bitter civil war in which is government was oppressing and killing it's citizens. You and I where not born then and did not experience it, but on the scales of time that was 5 minutes ago. So the answer to your question is yes the data spell out that you should be distrustful of government, where we are at right now is an anomaly and historical data says governments are a temporal thing, it's just that they, in general, span multiple lifespans and you and I got really lucks, but our life span could bridge the fall of that government. Now things may have changed this time and we may have evolved but those are long odds looking around the world and the current political and financial climate. Again going back to the historical data if it does not rise and fall, then this will be the anomaly and mark a new epoch in civilization. And that very well could be, but no bookie in Vegas would take those odds based on the numbers. You don't like guns and that's cool, but don't try and justify it by mocking another persons perspective on the subject by calling it a fantasy, especially when the data supports that persons position. There are a lot of valid reasons to tighten regulations on guns, but assuming that the government does not need an offset is not one of them.

by leoedin 11y ago

hga 11y ago

At bare minimum it'll make a difference when they come to my neighbor's door and I and other neighbors shoot them from the flank. The rest of what you said is part strawmen, part a testament to passivity in the face of evil and a severe lack of imagination, part a lumping of suicides with homicides, which statistics from other nations with severely anti-gun regimes suggests would only result in substitutions if guns were magically removed from American hands. And let me add this thought from a man who saw many of his fellows die in labor camps: And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! That's from Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his GULAG Archipelago. Again, number matter. Make mass murder too expensive, and it can't even be conceived of. Sort of like how you can't conceive of it "happening here." Which neither can I, seeing how well we are armed, not to mention quite capable of offensive counter attacks. Note well how the mostly clueless nutcase Chris Dorner, in a state where I'll note most people are not allowed to bear arms, caused the police to completely lose their shit. Imagine that multiplied 10 million times over (the so called "3%").

kls 11y ago

History paints a far darker narrative than the one you tell. You are falling victim to Cognitive in which you are shortcutting that data because, the data is so nebulous you are only looking at your experience as the whole set instead of a subset. As well you are falling victim to Confirmation Bias as your personal experience (of a stable peaceful government) deviates from the norm, but you are assuming it is the norm. Outside of the first world the world is still a very violent place and it has really only been peaceful in the first world for the last 60 or so years. As recently the late 30's Spain was locked in a bitter civil war in which is government was oppressing and killing it's citizens. You and I where not born then and did not experience it, but on the scales of time that was 5 minutes ago. So the answer to your question is yes the data spell out that you should be distrustful of government, where we are at right now is an anomaly and historical data says governments are a temporal thing, it's just that they, in general, span multiple lifespans and you and I got really lucks, but our life span could bridge the fall of that government. Now things may have changed this time and we may have evolved but those are long odds looking around the world and the current political and financial climate. Again going back to the historical data if it does not rise and fall, then this will be the anomaly and mark a new epoch in civilization. And that very well could be, but no bookie in Vegas would take those odds based on the numbers. You don't like guns and that's cool, but don't try and justify it by mocking another persons perspective on the subject by calling it a fantasy, especially when the data supports that persons position. There are a lot of valid reasons to tighten regulations on guns, but assuming that the government does not need an offset is not one of them.