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If the US army turned on its citizens do you think it wouldn't go through ANY resistance like a hot knife through butter?

• RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
  You mean like it has in Afghanistan?
• christophilus 8y ago
  I live in the southeast. There are pockets here that would be very tough to take. It would be a Vietnam situation. So, yes. The 2nd amendment still has deterrent power.
  • clueless123 8y ago
    It is not a matter of hard or easy, is a matter of simple economics: 2nd amendment = high price to pay, no 2nd amendment = easy peasy.
  • munk-a 8y ago
    This is a terrible form of romance America has adopted recently, and it's costing the country a lot. 2nd amendment proponents have been singing praises of it while the 1st amendment has continued to be curtailed. This decline started under clinton with restrictions on media revenue being lifted but it has gotten so much worse in the past year.
  • pjc50 8y ago
    I've no doubt that guerilla resistance would continue for years, but the imposition of petrol rationing alone would curtail almost all rebel attempts to hold anything of any importance within about two weeks.
    • Jach 8y ago
      If you can successfully blockade an interior group, sure. But that interior group has the ability to strike back and away from their interior that they want to hold. America's infrastructure is totally not hardened. The millions in prisons also make for a potential pool of manpower. All I'm really saying is any actual conflict would play out a lot different than the real civil war we had, or any of our foreign continent excursions where the enemy can't really strike back.
  • fenwick67 8y ago
    It wouldn't be a Vietnam situation, it would be an Iraq situation. Much more aerial surveillance and drone strikes.
  • yongjik 8y ago
    Only if the government is stupid enough to take on them head-to-head. Any half-competent dictator will sell his vision first, saying how America is in danger and it's time for the freedom-loving patriots to take back their country... ...And then he can sit back and enjoy the fireworks from the safety of Washington DC, while his followers are doing the dirty work. Those 2A arguments never really made sense to me: what makes you think your gun-toting neighbor (or even yourself) will be on the right side of freedom?
• MrZongle2 8y ago
  Who do you think makes up the US Army? The US Army, or any other branch of service for that matter, isn't going to turn on its citizens: it would more likely turn on any leaders that order them to do so. And don't discount the fact that among the civilians are a good number of individuals who were former military.
  • abfan1127 8y ago
    the army could certainly be convinced to turn on its own citizens, they just have to label those people as Traitors, Terrorists, Criminals, Gangs, Outsiders, Communists, Muslims, something other than "us".
    • munk-a 8y ago
      And, specifically, they'd turn on those labeled peoples one at a time to single them out, it has happened many times before.
  • pjc50 8y ago
    Kent State happened. Waco happened. There are ongoing protests about the willingness of police to shoot civilians. Given a sufficiently big breakdown of public order, especially along partisan lines, there would be talking heads on the news demanding that the army go in and shoot "looters".
    • gaius 8y ago
      Waco happened Waco was the cops wasn’t it? Who are always happy to shoot random civilians.
    • MrZongle2 8y ago
      "Kent State happened. Waco happened." The Kent State shootings were in 1970. The Branch Davidian compound siege was in 1993. In the former case, the Guardsmen involved claimed to have fired in self-defense and were cleared of both criminal and civil charges. In the latter, the military assets were limited to a few Bradley fighting vehicles on the perimeter and combat engineering vehicles -- which were actually used for breaching and wall-breaking -- under the direction (if not operation) by ATF and FBI, and no military units engaged in fire. In neither case were military units ordered to suppress or attack civilians. And compared to the number of training related deaths that occur in the military during peacetime, the number of fatalities from the incidents you list (although tragic) pale in comparison over the same time period.
• 2RTZZSro 8y ago
  The US army is composed of the citizens of the United States and is held together by a small elite run by the officer corps and high level civilians GS-13 and above. I estimate this to be under 5000 people. Unless a convincing narrative is formulated, US soldiers will refuse to fight their own. One way to accomplish this is to paint "the enemy" as unsophisticated ludditical racists.
  • fifnir 8y ago
    What's the difference in any other national army (besides the budget of course)
• weberc2 8y ago
  US military budget: $590b; 3% GDP Venezuala military budget: $2.6b; 1% GDP Your analogy needs work. EDIT: Corrected US military budget %GDP value.
  • adventured 8y ago
    Your US numbers are very weirdly off. I've never seen someone try to claim US defense spending was 15% of GDP. US military budget: ~$700 billion, 3.4% of GDP. US GDP will be close to $20.50 trillion for 2018. Your 15% figure implies a GDP of about $4 trillion (close to the size of Germany's economy). The US will add roughly $1 trillion to its GDP figure in 2018. That's nearly the size of Mexico's entire economy (15th largest economy), added in just one year.
    • weberc2 8y ago
      You're right, I was hasty and copied the % of the federal budget instead of % GDP. In any case, the US military is much better equipped than the Venezuelan military.
• rootusrootus 8y ago
  In a focused area, sure. In general, not really. Take all law enforcement in America, combine that with the entire US Military, and then just look at able-bodied adults in, say, the 20-60 age group. The civilians vastly outnumber law enforcement, and there are enough guns in America already to arm every last one of them.