9 ms·

In France we have a contract: if people are unhappy they rise against. If there's no risk of revolting, the fox is fearless in the chicken hen.

Tharkun 7y ago
I've heard something similar said about the US, as a sort of justification for their right to bear arms...the government should apparently fear its people, and its people should be armed and able to overthrow said government. I wish you the best of luck with that, in an age of mass surveillance, armed-to-the-teeth governments and unparallelled propaganda machines.
alex_duf 7y ago
As a french person I don't see that going very well or being very effective. Now our police force (CRS) are just military and dress like robocop for any confrontation. People get hurt, the news outlets take the government side and the problems stays the same.
- bamboozled 7y ago
  This is why many Americans won’t give their guns away. Imagine (not saying it would be a good outcome), but what Hong Kong would be like right now if all citizens hard arms? Well maybe the whole thing wouldn’t have even started. But wow, it would be a very different scene. Instead it’s more a case of if the military wants to walk in and shutdown the place, it’s going to be a lot easier. Not entirely a gun rights advocate at all, but I can see some people’s motives.
  - nosianu 7y ago
    Can't tell if the comment is satire. I guess it's best to assume it is and move on, since any discussion based on the assumption that it's not satire has already taken place many times, following predictable paths. Except that I can't keep myself from pointing out the orders of magnitude of difference in effectiveness between a cohesive, trained and organised force and a bunch of individuals, even if they were equally armed, so I don't even get the point of this idea if it's made as a joke.
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    - lovemenot 7y ago
      >> ... the orders of magnitude of difference in effectiveness between a cohesive, trained and organised force and a bunch of individuals True for a head-on conflict, but the story in the article has the organised forces' equipment in a vulnerable place - 65Kft above a city. Asymmetric activity in such a theatre would favour the armed civilian, for now at least. Ground-based coordinated tracking with 1W laser on rudimentary automatic control could ground such devices. The gas-bag being a large, vulnerable target. The relative ease of downing a tracking device, capturing, reverse-engineering then publicly reporting its capabilities should help keep them in check. For now.
      - nosianu 7y ago
        You keep making really ridiculous assertions, my dear keyboard warrior. You and all the American gun nuts. Mind you, I served in the army (not the US one), battle tanks, so I'm hardly a pacifist. But you guys are just loudmouths who play too many video games and see too many Hollywood hero movies. No you won't win - and you will not even fight, apart from some very few not so bright people. Because you value your life way too much, liker 99.9% of everybody else faced with overwhelming odds. The forces the US army is up against are not unorganized, they have pretty good training and equipment - and support from foreign governments. They are not desperate lone fighters.
        lovemenot 7y ago
        Haha. You apparently don't know my identity. Not that it's special or anything. But it's not American. Anyway, I realise now that you were not really responding to what I said. And clearly not to me personally, as a non-American. You just needed a place to get up on your high horse.
  - maxheadroom 7y ago
    >This is why many Americans won’t give their guns away.. ...but the way the U.S. laws are written, it's quite illegal to take up arms against or try to depose/overthrow the United States Government - no matter how totalitarian and authoritarian it might get. In fact, nothing in the Bill of Rights or the Consitution or the U.S. Code guarantees such right[s]. This is not to mention the reality that the arms controls would make it seem like the citizens are bringing paper swords to gunfights nor how catastrophic those casualties might be.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      There are (rare) cases in which armed resistance does not result in convictions, and/or in which prosecution of government agents is at least initiated, and civil redress made. The Ruby Ridge incident comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge As does the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Malheur_National_Wildlife_Refuge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Malheur_Nati...
      - close04 7y ago
        The only way a protest with guns is different from a normal protest is if you're willing to use those guns. And using them usually doesn't end well for protesters more than anyone.
        dredmorbius 7y ago
        See the Black Panthers in the 1960s. Mind, I don't generally disagree with your premise, and I'm not a guns advocate. There do exist (as is typically the case) counterexamples to the general rule.
        close04 7y ago
        The past 50-60 years strengthened the positions of governments vs. their people. These days such a movement would find it a lot harder (or impossible) to go that far.
  - adamsea 7y ago
    They would be better served by helping to elect politicians who will preserv their civil liberties.
    - qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
      Voter turnout is dismal. 20% for locals, 50% presidential.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    > But wow, it would be a very different scene. Yeah, it would be a civil war with orders of magnitude more dead. I don't understand the American fascination with guns. When have they ever been useful against the government?
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      1776, 1789, 1848, 1917, and several smaller ones along the way. The one in 1861 was ultimately not effective.
      - deleted 7y ago
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      - coldtea 7y ago
        So, like a century ago, when the state was 1/10 what it is now?
  - senorjazz 7y ago
    > but what Hong Kong would be like right now if all citizens hard arms? The chinese are slowly removing democratic institutions away from the people. The people are rising up to protect them without guns. Democratic norms are slowly being eroded from the US as well. Extreme gerrymandering, electoral college / popular vote, overt foreign interference, requested foreign interference, voting irregularities, voter purges, voting machine irregularities, a complicit senate, out of control corporate funding / ownership / bribery of politicians. What are the people with guns doing? Nothing. In some cases cheering it on with claims of "if your side tries anything we are armed and ready". Does having an armed population really protect the people from the government? Does it protect a democracy? does it protect the constituion? Or is more likely they become a paramilitary wing of a corrupt government? Just look around the world and see what happens in other countries with a heavily armed population? Then tend to form groups to have power, slowly becoming war lords, which the politicians then use a power source to keep the population in check. Maybe an armed population made sense a few hundred years ago (maybe not though), but am going to have to see some working out to show it is still relevant today before being believed as an unquestionable truth. Some examples would be good. And before everyone shouts SWITZERLAND SWITZERLAND. If you are comparing the US population to Switzerland, I think you have more homework todo as all that shows you, there is a lot more to it than just having guns.
    - Trav5 7y ago
      > does it protect the constituion? Or is more likely they become a paramilitary wing of a corrupt government? Good point, but you are lumping all gun owners into one mindset. I could definitely see that happening, but it would not be all gun owners, just a percentage. And of the many gun owners I know, the percentage that would support any government and impose anything on others would be really low.
      - ethbro 7y ago
        Guns are necessary but not sufficient. Guns + independent, civil society groups are what make a healthy democracy. The idea is to back civil society with an implicit, but never used, question of force. If things break down into shooting, that's civil war. And who knows what happens next, but it's not likely to be good for anyone or the country.
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    If America went to shit enough that people needed to take up arms to protect themselves against the government, around half of the people with guns would be on the side of the government. It would not be a battle of the people vs the state, it would be half of the people against the other half, but with only one side getting military backing (unless the miltary itself also split).
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      I think there's reasonable reason to believe that if things got to that point that the military would be likely to have split allegiance.
      - noir_lord 7y ago
        Split yes, down the middle or remotely evenly who knows. A confounding factor is that both the US and UK militaries have been fighting extended insurrection 'policing' actions for much of the last two decades, so you have an army that is used to been an occupying force. All that said a smart military commander would never use local troops in their own backyard anyway.
        inflatableDodo 7y ago
        >All that said a smart military commander would never use local troops in their own backyard anyway. Is why the local regiments were confined to barracks, the last time the UK felt the need to put tanks on the streets of Glasgow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_George_Square https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_George_Square
        noir_lord 7y ago
        Funnily enough that was what I was thinking about when I wrote my post.
        inflatableDodo 7y ago
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >This is why many Americans won’t give their guns away. It's not like those guns do anything. Americans seldom protest their governments laws, and are conditioned to be living and having passed upon them way worse laws than French (without guns) have...
    - brigandish 7y ago
      > It's not like those guns do anything. Isn't the point is that they don't need to actively do anything because they're a deterrent?
      - bilbo0s 7y ago
        I think he's saying that the guns haven't deterred much when viewed through the lens of a French/American comparison. In a lot of ways, the French are unquestionably better off. The whole line of argument is moot though anyway, because with these new technologies I don't think the French will remain better off in those ways for too much longer. Neither guns, nor protests will be effective as deterrents in the face of ubiquitous surveillance. Both will be fairly impotent against these technologies in fact.
  - EliRivers 7y ago
    But wow, it would be a very different scene. Possibly use of firearms by the general population against police and government in HK could have led to the simple invasion of HK by the PRC army, with shootings and executions like those that happened at the time of Tiananmen, but on a larger scale. Right now, possibly the lack of firearms is a brake on falling into this doomsday scenario. When you know the other fellow doesn't have a firearm, you don't need to shoot first.
- CapacitorSet 7y ago
  It's a matter of cost and disincentives. Want to pass a law that cuts on workers' rights in a country that typically doesn't protest? Sure, go ahead. Want to do that in France? You'll think twice about it after the clashes of 1st May and of the gilets jaunes.
taurath 7y ago
Here the revolters are completely wedged and pitted against each other.
jules 7y ago
The last protest didn't go very well for the protesters.
CamperBob2 7y ago
The trouble is, you guys seem to 'revolt' over nothing on a regular basis, paralyzing your own economy in the process. You need to learn to pick your battles.
davesmith1983 7y ago
How many weeks of protest are in Paris now? It hasn't appeared to change anything.
- coldtea 7y ago
  Be assured that it has changed a lot of things...
  - CamperBob2 7y ago
    OK, I've been duly "assured." Now what?
    - coldtea 7y ago
      "Although President Macron had been insisting that the fuel tax increases would go through as planned, on 4 December 2018 the government announced that the tax rises would be put on hold, with Prime Minister Édouard Philippe saying that "no tax deserves to endanger the unity of the nation"." (...) "On 10 December, Macron condemned the violence but acknowledged the protesters' anger as "deep, and in many ways legitimate". He subsequently promised a minimum wage increase of €100 per month from 2019, cancelled a planned tax increase for low-income pensioners, and made overtime payments as well as end-of-year bonuses tax free." So much for nothing having changed. Not to mention tons of France-wide and regional implications, the political impact on several levels, and the pause and hesitation it would bring to politicians considering to unilaterally pass unpopular laws in the future.
rienbdj 7y ago
The US arguably has a much stronger version of this with the right to bear arms.
rasz 7y ago
So how did that work out for you lately? 8 months of fires and tear gas with no appreciable effect on the democratic process.
oceanghost 7y ago
We have a saying in the US, which I don't think anyone follows anymore: "There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Please use in that order."
type0 7y ago
And what would it end like, bringing back the guillotines?!

Tharkun 7y ago

I've heard something similar said about the US, as a sort of justification for their right to bear arms...the government should apparently fear its people, and its people should be armed and able to overthrow said government. I wish you the best of luck with that, in an age of mass surveillance, armed-to-the-teeth governments and unparallelled propaganda machines.

alex_duf 7y ago

As a french person I don't see that going very well or being very effective. Now our police force (CRS) are just military and dress like robocop for any confrontation. People get hurt, the news outlets take the government side and the problems stays the same.

bamboozled 7y ago
This is why many Americans won’t give their guns away. Imagine (not saying it would be a good outcome), but what Hong Kong would be like right now if all citizens hard arms? Well maybe the whole thing wouldn’t have even started. But wow, it would be a very different scene. Instead it’s more a case of if the military wants to walk in and shutdown the place, it’s going to be a lot easier. Not entirely a gun rights advocate at all, but I can see some people’s motives.
- nosianu 7y ago
  Can't tell if the comment is satire. I guess it's best to assume it is and move on, since any discussion based on the assumption that it's not satire has already taken place many times, following predictable paths. Except that I can't keep myself from pointing out the orders of magnitude of difference in effectiveness between a cohesive, trained and organised force and a bunch of individuals, even if they were equally armed, so I don't even get the point of this idea if it's made as a joke.
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  - lovemenot 7y ago
    >> ... the orders of magnitude of difference in effectiveness between a cohesive, trained and organised force and a bunch of individuals True for a head-on conflict, but the story in the article has the organised forces' equipment in a vulnerable place - 65Kft above a city. Asymmetric activity in such a theatre would favour the armed civilian, for now at least. Ground-based coordinated tracking with 1W laser on rudimentary automatic control could ground such devices. The gas-bag being a large, vulnerable target. The relative ease of downing a tracking device, capturing, reverse-engineering then publicly reporting its capabilities should help keep them in check. For now.
    - nosianu 7y ago
      You keep making really ridiculous assertions, my dear keyboard warrior. You and all the American gun nuts. Mind you, I served in the army (not the US one), battle tanks, so I'm hardly a pacifist. But you guys are just loudmouths who play too many video games and see too many Hollywood hero movies. No you won't win - and you will not even fight, apart from some very few not so bright people. Because you value your life way too much, liker 99.9% of everybody else faced with overwhelming odds. The forces the US army is up against are not unorganized, they have pretty good training and equipment - and support from foreign governments. They are not desperate lone fighters.
      - lovemenot 7y ago
        Haha. You apparently don't know my identity. Not that it's special or anything. But it's not American. Anyway, I realise now that you were not really responding to what I said. And clearly not to me personally, as a non-American. You just needed a place to get up on your high horse.
- maxheadroom 7y ago
  >This is why many Americans won’t give their guns away.. ...but the way the U.S. laws are written, it's quite illegal to take up arms against or try to depose/overthrow the United States Government - no matter how totalitarian and authoritarian it might get. In fact, nothing in the Bill of Rights or the Consitution or the U.S. Code guarantees such right[s]. This is not to mention the reality that the arms controls would make it seem like the citizens are bringing paper swords to gunfights nor how catastrophic those casualties might be.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    There are (rare) cases in which armed resistance does not result in convictions, and/or in which prosecution of government agents is at least initiated, and civil redress made. The Ruby Ridge incident comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge As does the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Malheur_National_Wildlife_Refuge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Malheur_Nati...
    - close04 7y ago
      The only way a protest with guns is different from a normal protest is if you're willing to use those guns. And using them usually doesn't end well for protesters more than anyone.
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        See the Black Panthers in the 1960s. Mind, I don't generally disagree with your premise, and I'm not a guns advocate. There do exist (as is typically the case) counterexamples to the general rule.
        close04 7y ago
        The past 50-60 years strengthened the positions of governments vs. their people. These days such a movement would find it a lot harder (or impossible) to go that far.
- adamsea 7y ago
  They would be better served by helping to elect politicians who will preserv their civil liberties.
  - qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
    Voter turnout is dismal. 20% for locals, 50% presidential.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  > But wow, it would be a very different scene. Yeah, it would be a civil war with orders of magnitude more dead. I don't understand the American fascination with guns. When have they ever been useful against the government?
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    1776, 1789, 1848, 1917, and several smaller ones along the way. The one in 1861 was ultimately not effective.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - coldtea 7y ago
      So, like a century ago, when the state was 1/10 what it is now?
- senorjazz 7y ago
  > but what Hong Kong would be like right now if all citizens hard arms? The chinese are slowly removing democratic institutions away from the people. The people are rising up to protect them without guns. Democratic norms are slowly being eroded from the US as well. Extreme gerrymandering, electoral college / popular vote, overt foreign interference, requested foreign interference, voting irregularities, voter purges, voting machine irregularities, a complicit senate, out of control corporate funding / ownership / bribery of politicians. What are the people with guns doing? Nothing. In some cases cheering it on with claims of "if your side tries anything we are armed and ready". Does having an armed population really protect the people from the government? Does it protect a democracy? does it protect the constituion? Or is more likely they become a paramilitary wing of a corrupt government? Just look around the world and see what happens in other countries with a heavily armed population? Then tend to form groups to have power, slowly becoming war lords, which the politicians then use a power source to keep the population in check. Maybe an armed population made sense a few hundred years ago (maybe not though), but am going to have to see some working out to show it is still relevant today before being believed as an unquestionable truth. Some examples would be good. And before everyone shouts SWITZERLAND SWITZERLAND. If you are comparing the US population to Switzerland, I think you have more homework todo as all that shows you, there is a lot more to it than just having guns.
  - Trav5 7y ago
    > does it protect the constituion? Or is more likely they become a paramilitary wing of a corrupt government? Good point, but you are lumping all gun owners into one mindset. I could definitely see that happening, but it would not be all gun owners, just a percentage. And of the many gun owners I know, the percentage that would support any government and impose anything on others would be really low.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      Guns are necessary but not sufficient. Guns + independent, civil society groups are what make a healthy democracy. The idea is to back civil society with an implicit, but never used, question of force. If things break down into shooting, that's civil war. And who knows what happens next, but it's not likely to be good for anyone or the country.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  If America went to shit enough that people needed to take up arms to protect themselves against the government, around half of the people with guns would be on the side of the government. It would not be a battle of the people vs the state, it would be half of the people against the other half, but with only one side getting military backing (unless the miltary itself also split).
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    I think there's reasonable reason to believe that if things got to that point that the military would be likely to have split allegiance.
    - noir_lord 7y ago
      Split yes, down the middle or remotely evenly who knows. A confounding factor is that both the US and UK militaries have been fighting extended insurrection 'policing' actions for much of the last two decades, so you have an army that is used to been an occupying force. All that said a smart military commander would never use local troops in their own backyard anyway.
      - inflatableDodo 7y ago
        >All that said a smart military commander would never use local troops in their own backyard anyway. Is why the local regiments were confined to barracks, the last time the UK felt the need to put tanks on the streets of Glasgow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_George_Square https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_George_Square
        noir_lord 7y ago
        Funnily enough that was what I was thinking about when I wrote my post.
        inflatableDodo 7y ago
- coldtea 7y ago
  >This is why many Americans won’t give their guns away. It's not like those guns do anything. Americans seldom protest their governments laws, and are conditioned to be living and having passed upon them way worse laws than French (without guns) have...
  - brigandish 7y ago
    > It's not like those guns do anything. Isn't the point is that they don't need to actively do anything because they're a deterrent?
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      I think he's saying that the guns haven't deterred much when viewed through the lens of a French/American comparison. In a lot of ways, the French are unquestionably better off. The whole line of argument is moot though anyway, because with these new technologies I don't think the French will remain better off in those ways for too much longer. Neither guns, nor protests will be effective as deterrents in the face of ubiquitous surveillance. Both will be fairly impotent against these technologies in fact.
- EliRivers 7y ago
  But wow, it would be a very different scene. Possibly use of firearms by the general population against police and government in HK could have led to the simple invasion of HK by the PRC army, with shootings and executions like those that happened at the time of Tiananmen, but on a larger scale. Right now, possibly the lack of firearms is a brake on falling into this doomsday scenario. When you know the other fellow doesn't have a firearm, you don't need to shoot first.
CapacitorSet 7y ago
It's a matter of cost and disincentives. Want to pass a law that cuts on workers' rights in a country that typically doesn't protest? Sure, go ahead. Want to do that in France? You'll think twice about it after the clashes of 1st May and of the gilets jaunes.

taurath 7y ago

Here the revolters are completely wedged and pitted against each other.

jules 7y ago

The last protest didn't go very well for the protesters.

CamperBob2 7y ago

The trouble is, you guys seem to 'revolt' over nothing on a regular basis, paralyzing your own economy in the process. You need to learn to pick your battles.

davesmith1983 7y ago

How many weeks of protest are in Paris now? It hasn't appeared to change anything.

coldtea 7y ago
Be assured that it has changed a lot of things...
- CamperBob2 7y ago
  OK, I've been duly "assured." Now what?
  - coldtea 7y ago
    "Although President Macron had been insisting that the fuel tax increases would go through as planned, on 4 December 2018 the government announced that the tax rises would be put on hold, with Prime Minister Édouard Philippe saying that "no tax deserves to endanger the unity of the nation"." (...) "On 10 December, Macron condemned the violence but acknowledged the protesters' anger as "deep, and in many ways legitimate". He subsequently promised a minimum wage increase of €100 per month from 2019, cancelled a planned tax increase for low-income pensioners, and made overtime payments as well as end-of-year bonuses tax free." So much for nothing having changed. Not to mention tons of France-wide and regional implications, the political impact on several levels, and the pause and hesitation it would bring to politicians considering to unilaterally pass unpopular laws in the future.

rienbdj 7y ago

The US arguably has a much stronger version of this with the right to bear arms.

rasz 7y ago

So how did that work out for you lately? 8 months of fires and tear gas with no appreciable effect on the democratic process.

oceanghost 7y ago

We have a saying in the US, which I don't think anyone follows anymore: "There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Please use in that order."

type0 7y ago

And what would it end like, bringing back the guillotines?!