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I always find this sentiment a little silly - if the US President went in to full dictator mode and had the support of the military, do you really think a milit

by Fezzik 7y ago

I always find this sentiment a little silly - if the US President went in to full dictator mode and had the support of the military, do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces? And if s/he did not have the support of the Armed Forces, it would not be a very effective dictatorship and you would not even need guns for a rebellion. I truly do not get it.

bhupy 7y ago
The US (with its support of the military) has been at war in the Middle East for nearly 2 decades now with insurgents. The argument is not that a rebellious citizenry will necessarily win a war, it's that it will draw out a bloody civil war so long and so expensive as to be a form of mutually assured destruction, the risk of which acts as a check in and of itself.
- josephdviviano 7y ago
  The fact is that the dictator would still win. The rebellious citizenry would live a life of absolute misery, just as those in the middle east do. The 2nd amendment made a lot of sense when weaponry consisted of horses and rifles, not computer-guided missiles. If there was ever a true US dictator, the 2nd amendment would mostly be used by the oppressed to rob, attack, and oppress one another.
  - oblongx 7y ago
    or like you know, protect themselves from others...
  - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
    There's an interesting sci-fi dystopia in there, maybe. Everything up to light machine guns are available with no restrictions to anyone who wants to buy them. The government constantly talks up the sanctity of the right to bear arms, and the importance of being prepared at all times to defend innocents against <insert scapegoat group here>. The dystopian military enforcers wear bulletproof powered armor, and private ownership of any weapon that can pierce that armor is a "grievous threat to public order," punishable by summary execution.
    - yonaguska 7y ago
      That's not far off from reality. It's illegal to sell armor piercing ammo, but not illegal to buy it or possess it. And certain municipalities(my own local one) are looking at regulating the sale and possession of body armor. Which to me is more egregious, as body armor is inherently not a weapon. Nor is it a force multiplier against law enforcement, as fully automatic weapons could be construed as. And it has practical uses in the sporting world. I know more than a few people that choose to wear body armor at public ranges as extra insurance against the potential stupidity of those around them.
    - deleted 7y ago
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    - CapricornNoble 7y ago
      >>>The dystopian military enforcers wear bulletproof powered armor, and private ownership of any weapon that can pierce that armor is a "grievous threat to public order," punishable by summary execution. Which sounds like a deterrent.....until the insurgents use autonomous vehicle technology to pilot dump trucks full of fertilizer explosives into the enforcers. https://hugokaaman.com/2017/02/14/the-history-and-adaptability-of-the-islamic-state-car-bomb/ https://hugokaaman.com/2017/02/14/the-history-and-adaptabili... https://hugokaaman.com/2019/03/13/islamic-state-the-cross-provincial-use-of-svbieds/ https://hugokaaman.com/2019/03/13/islamic-state-the-cross-pr... https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/March-April-2017/ART-009/ https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/Eng...
      - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
        Well, it's dystopian sci-fi. Of course there's got to be some way to hit back against the oppressors. On the other hand, if your battle plan involves using up an entire truck for each enemy soldier (or squad?) neutralized, I feel like you're gonna have a hard time scaling that up to open warfare.
        CapricornNoble 7y ago
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    During the cold war, both Russia and the US developed a post-strike strike capability (basically a response if your enemy nukes you first which in turn destroys your enemy). The US called this a 'second strike' capability, and Russia called this the 'deadman's hand'. Most commenters since have simply referred to it as "mutually assured destruction" or MAD. Here's the thing - from an ethical standpoint, it never makes sense to actually fire it. If you're dead, well, you're dead - there's no sense in murdering millions of citizens of an enemy nation. At the same time, by its very presence, you've made it very seemingly difficult for your enemy to ever engage in a nuclear first strike because they'd be signing their own death warrant. Could the US military defeat a bunch of armed citizens? Well, purely by the numbers, probably. It'd be really bad for morale though, and a lot of innocent people would die, and realistically, there's not really much of a country left at that point anymore. Without a check, the Government can do whatever it wants because it always has a cheat card, but with the check, the government has to at least pretend to respect the citizens. > ...it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      >Here's the thing - from an ethical standpoint, it never makes sense to actually fire it. If you're dead, well, you're dead - there's no sense in murdering millions of citizens of an enemy nation. Everybody does not die in a nuclear war. You want your survivors to have a better chance. Leaving whoever nuked you mostly untouched is highly counterproductive to that.
      - vorpalhex 7y ago
        I am sure the enemy nation doesn't care about the stick and stone huts your heavily cancer prone survivors will be building after they rediscover the bow and arrow. When you launch total nuclear war you are well past the "Let's invade and take their land" bit.
    - jancsika 7y ago
      I still don't understand the argument. Compare * armed citizenry gathering illegally and getting slaughtered by a superior military force * weaponless non-violent citizenry gathering illegally and getting slaughtered by a military force (which would have been superior to the citizens if they had been armed) You've already conceded that the armed citizenry is no match for the military. At best your point about morale is equally true in both cases. At worst arming the crowd gives a boost to military morale because armed opponents gives them a way to rationalize their slaughtering. Finally: if the slaughter of innocent citizens still matters to a critical mass of other citizens, it's vastly more powerful for them to hear that the citizens had been unarmed. And if there is no longer a critical mass of other citizens to organize against the military, then you're screwed either way. I just can't figure out what the benefit to arms would be in this case, especially given that there obvious downsides to arming a population.
  - tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
    I just don't see any historical evidence that superior weaponry always wins, whereas there are plenty of examples to the contrary. So I don't know why it's a "fact" that the dictator would still win.
    - enraged_camel 7y ago
      Except the US military doesn't just have superior weaponry. It also has superior training, superior discipline, superior logistics, superior intelligence, superior force projection capability, superior everything. Unlike the Taliban or the Viet Cong, the US citizenry, even armed, would be like chaff. edit: so many downvotes. I guess I hit a sore spot. I'm sorry the truth hurts, guys and gals. :)
      - tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
        I'm not disagreeing with you over the difference in skill/training/etc. The Viet Cong and Taliban are obviously superior than the average American citizen. But I doubt that their respective victories were because of their military prowess. They turned the battlefield into an un-winnable game by requiring the military to effectively destroy the country in order to win. By the time the superior military wins, there's very little value left. War isn't just a game of who has the bigger guns and better soldiers. If we descend to such a state where an American president is (a) willing to completely annihilate the population, (b) can either bypass congress or get their approval to do so, and (c) can mobilize our military to perform the annihilation, then perhaps your point is correct. I wouldn't exactly hold my breath on that.
        dragonwriter 7y ago
        > The Viet Cong and Taliban are obviously superior than the average American citizen. But I doubt that their respective victories were because of their military prowess. The VC were utterly crushed, leading the NVA to get more directly involved in the South rather than using them as a catspaw. To the extent that the combined operation had success (which it clearly did) it was because of the NVA—a regular army—and the backing they had even further up the Communist food chain.
  - codeddesign 7y ago
    Essentially you are saying to sit back and watch because there is nothing you can do about it. The point of the 2nd amendment is that you have the right hold a militia and bear arms against an oppressive government. Whether you will win or not is not the argument, but rather that you have the right to protect and defend yourself as the oppressed. While it’s easy to sit on a couch relaxed and watching the news all while saying “we should get rid of guns”, it’s a lot different story to be in the midst of a contention or oppression.
    - crispyambulance 7y ago
      The 2nd amendment is effectively a lifestyle hobby. We are very, very far away from a civil war or anything resembling what is going to happen in Hong Kong. But if things do ever start to skid in the wrong direction, we'll end up doing the same thing that others have done. Put up a fight with or without "militias", and then after it's crushed, when the economy collapses, money is worthless, and crazed libertarian warlords rule the land... mass migration. The irony will not be lost on latin America.
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  - daenz 7y ago
    >The 2nd amendment made a lot of sense when weaponry consisted of horses and rifles, not computer-guided missiles. Let me make sure I understand your basic premise: the ability to defend yourself against a tyrannical dictatorship made sense until the government developed better technology, now it's pointless so just give up your guns? Aside from being completely contrary to the American spirit of defending yourself from tyranny, it's based on the bogus premise that the advanced military technology can be used effectively against its own people. Where is the military going to fire those "computer guided missiles?" Into every rural home and every urban apartment window of everyone they suspect has guns, with thousands of civilian collateral casualties? Are tanks and fighter jets going to roll in and level entire economic hubs like cities? Are they going to destroy their own infrastructure? Are you envisioning "the rebellion" would set up a nice neat base in some remote location for the military to aim its tech at? Do you think the real men and women of the military would follow orders to destroy its own hometowns and families? How long before regional coups? How big do you think the US military is, relative to the armed civilian population? You are also aware that soldiers and police wear recognizable uniforms, while "the rebellion" doesn't? I don't think you've thought this through.
    - slg 7y ago
      Isn't this basically what the fascist in Germany, the communists in China and the Soviet Union, and countless other examples did? It is weird that people think that Americans are somehow a morally superior people to all the other countries that had already fallen down that path. I mean we are already locking up toddlers in cages and I haven't heard a single report of any push back from the people who are controlling those detention camps. World history has taught us that people are perfectly willing to betray or even kill their neighbor as long as you give them a believable enough reason. If anything, I think the overabundance of guns makes things more likely to go to shit quicker rather than less.
      - nostrademons 7y ago
        Surprised you're downvoted. The U.S. already has one civil war in its history, conducted when the 2nd amendment was in force and even more people owned guns than do today. It played out exactly like what the grandparent said was ridiculous: the respective militaries fired into every rural and urban home, set whole plantations on fire, destroyed their own infrastructure, killed their brothers and extended families, fought over their hometowns, and caused thousands of civilian casualties. There were in fact regional coups - really, the whole thing was one big regional coup, with some fractal splitting in the borderlands - but that didn't stop the bloodshed. And eventually, the guy who nobody in the rebellious states voted for won. War is not rational. People will destroy all sorts of stuff if something close to their identity is under threat.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > The 2nd amendment made a lot of sense when weaponry consisted of horses and rifles Around the time of the founding, there was privately-owned field artillery (and rifles were still in limited deployment). The second amendment made sense when calling up the militia/posse comitatus was an essential feature of how the government at all levels dealt with internal and external security threats, such that it was not planning to meet such needs with fully professional forces is most cases. Note that this was true, in both internal and external cases, for much of the life of the Republic though less so over time; for external security the idea was essentially written off after Vietnam with the adoption of the all-volunteer force. For internal security it's just about as dead, though there's not an equivalent milestone.
    - jboggan 7y ago
      We still have privately owned field artillery, among other things: https://youtu.be/qtFczo5ZCwY?t=934 https://youtu.be/qtFczo5ZCwY?t=934
  - merpnderp 7y ago
    You're talking about maybe a million combat soldiers, before the massive attrition due to fighting against the Constitution, against 10's of millions of insurgents, all with a surplus of light weapons. It's not like those computer-guided missiles will have a target, as like most insurgencies there won't be many set piece battles.
    - Mirioron 7y ago
      And even if you have a target against the insurgents, the target is likely going to be next to some service member's home.
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  - reroute1 7y ago
    This is assuming that the military and all constituents would follow martial law, which I think is not at all a certainty.
  - magduf 7y ago
    The 2nd amendment made sense when the enemy was a group of people across the ocean (the British), and other groups of people from across the ocean that they hired as mercenaries (the Hessians). Keeping the common people armed to be used as foot-soldiers in case of foreign invasion is not a bad idea if invasion is a serious concern; Switzerland still does this to this day. For protecting against your own government, it really doesn't make that much sense. Your own government has to have support of your own military, which gets its members from the population: the military is made of your own neighbors. If your military is committed to the government and doesn't mind shooting their own family and neighbors, then you have a problem that arming people with small arms isn't going to solve: the rebels just aren't going to be that numerous. More likely, the military isn't going to support this action at all, and will mutiny and either implode as different factions within the military fight each other, or the military will stage a coup and take over the government (this has happened before many times, in other nations). In short, if the military supports the dictator, the armed opposition really has no chance of winning. If the opposition has a chance of winning, they don't need weapons because the military isn't going to support the dictator.
    - Nuzzerino 7y ago
      Imagine if the armed forces were equipped with smart weapons that could be disabled remotely for this very reason, and imagine if the government hired mercenaries to fight rebels instead of using its own armed forces?
    - kleton 7y ago
      The Hessians fighting against Washington's army were not mercenaries, they were feudal levies from the House of Hanover's continental holdings.
  - spaginal 7y ago
    Every war goes to the streets in the end. No amount of tanks or missiles stops this eventuality. At some point you are going door to door with guns. You can't just bomb people from far away with a few missiles and wipe your hands clean of it and call it a day. The only effective bombing campaign that subdued a citizenry outright in military history were nukes, and if we ever crossed that line as a nation where the government nuked it's own citizens to quell rebellion, we are never coming back from that as a nation. It would leave a scar on humanity. Whatever would be left of the United States after that event would curse the people that did it. So to your point, the 2A is not antiquated, if the US government had any interest in having an intact territory, at some point it would need to get face to face with the people, and the presence of firearms in the citizenry acts as a check against this possibility, and an escape option for the citizens of it ever got there.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      >The only effective bombing campaign that subdued a citizenry outright in military history were nukes The firebombs and the nukes didn't subdue the citizenry. They were still willing to follow their cause to the death. You can't win against that unless you're going to kill each and every last one of them. The nukes showed their leader that his people would be destroyed with little cost to the enemy and convinced him to call it off.
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    No way would the dictator win. The US military relies on a huge amount of logistics. Fighting happening on US soil would severely undermine that. You can't exactly bomb your own cities with B-52s, because that's where the bombs are made. The US military would draw maybe a few million people - the rest of the populace would still be over 300 million people with a gun for every single person. Furthermore, it's virtually impossible for the military not to split under a dictator that fights their own people.
  - nyolfen 7y ago
    someone should let the taliban know
  - bdowling 7y ago
    Who is the occupying army in this scenario? Is it the US Army, made up of citizen volunteers, being asked to oppress their fellow citizens? Or is it an invading army or an army of mercenaries, in which case what side is the US Army on?
  - brightball 7y ago
    But in the US there are as many guns in circulation as people. If you’re assuming even 20% of citizens hold those firearms you’re looking at an armed opposition that numbers over 60 million people. It doesn’t matter how advanced your technology is, there’s a certain point where numbers win. You’re also assuming that military personnel themselves wouldn’t defect and side with their fellow citizens in such a situation, which would also make a lot of the same technology available to the hypothetical resistance. When you look at those numbers, it becomes clearer why pushes to disarm the population when there isn’t a problem present such a huge threat to the country.
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  - solidsnack9000 7y ago
    War is not actually a contest to see who is strongest. If it was, then the strongest nations would always fight to the finish and the weaker nations would always be defeated and utterly subjugated. Clausewitz was not the first person to notice that this didn't always happen, nor the first to conclude that war must be viewed as an extension of politics. As such, dictatorship and imposition of rule through force has to be considered in light of other political options. Oppressive government does not generally start with an all out war to subdue the populace, using strategic weapons like missiles and bombers. Insurrections are managed with lighter arms not because totally destroying the enemy is not a military option but rather because it is not consonant with the relevant political goals. The right to bear arms isn't about what you do for all out war -- that's when you move from citizen soldiers to building armies -- it's about trimming the distribution at the lower end and improving the odds of the citizenry being able to make it up the food chain in a reasonable amount of time. (Knowing what guns are actually called is a surprising advantage there.) Even Hitler started small, and disarmed the citizenry early.
- aasasd 7y ago
  To clarify, are those insurgents buying rifles at shops, or are they supplied with military-grade missiles by friendly countries?
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- simonh 7y ago
  And then all you get is a whole bunch of mutually hostile regional militias sitting on piles of rubble shooting at each other. This is not a recipe for a stable state of any kind, and certainly not a democratic one. Guns and democracy simply don't mix. Democracy is about giving an equal voice to every citizen, while firearms are a force multiplier. They make the strong stronger and the weak comparatively weaker.
  - bhupy 7y ago
    > This is not a recipe for a stable state of any kind It is not meant to be used in a stable state. It’s a Hobbesian point of last resort, to be used when democracy has failed and autocracy/tyranny is in effect. It’s a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency, so to speak.
    - simonh 7y ago
      Has it ever actually worked?
      - javagram 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution
        dragonwriter 7y ago
        The American Revolution wasn't a citizen uprising, it was a local-government uprising it did rely on citizen militias against professional soldiers, but those citizen militias were the regular security forces of the local governments, which also the central government relied on for local security in routine cases, not counterbalances to them. That's the model the second amendment attempted to preserve, but even with the RKBA alive that model was progressively abandoned and it's last significant remnants were retired decades ago. And even with that, the American Revolution relied on backing from one of the top two European powers at the time to succeed.
- enraged_camel 7y ago
  >>The argument is not that a rebellious citizenry will necessarily win a war, it's that it will draw out a bloody civil war so long and so expensive as to be a form of mutually assured destruction, the risk of which acts as a check in and of itself. This assumption did not work out for the Confederacy in the Civil War. What makes you think it would work today?
  - linuxftw 7y ago
    The Confederate generals surrendered to keep the country from endless guerilla warfare. This is why the Confederates weren't executed for treason, etc, because everyone wanted to end the fighting at that point.
    - enraged_camel 7y ago
      The Confederate generals surrendered because they realized that, with Lee himself surrendering, they had zero chance of prevailing, and any continuation of hostilities would result in the North invading the Confederate states and shooting/hanging not just the generals themselves, but all the civilian leaders who supported them. It wasn't to "keep the country from endless guerilla warfare", but rather an act of simple self-preservation. While there was a fair amount of war wariness among the public, continued resistance by the Confederacy was not something the North would have tolerated, especially since they clearly had the upper hand at that point.
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      Sherman burning everything had a lot to do with making guerrilla warfare undesirable in the south (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman%27s_March_to_the_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman%27s_March_to_the_Sea). It isn't something that we would dare try in the Middle East, at least with the hearts and minds doctrine. (destroying your enemy is easy, doing so without destroying everyone else is another matter)
- adamsea 7y ago
  Tell that to Syria.
- coryfklein 7y ago
  Not sure how well the comparison works. Decades of shifting conflicts in several regions opposite the globe and against different "enemies" backed by opposing foreign nations, vs quelling localized rebellions at home where the areas are already saturated with police forces.
- x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago
  So we are just going to sit here and act like the US Civil War didn't happen?
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  The insurgencies would be easy to deal with if we didn't care much about collateral damage. Similar to how a well armed confederacy faired against the Union army under Grant and Sherman's "total war."
dannyw 7y ago
Dictating over a country of armed resistance is not very valuable. I also think you underestimate the power of sheer numbers and guerilla warfare. The ones fighting would be the friends and family of the armed forces.
MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
You need ground troops to conquer and occupy any country, especially cities. Tanks or jets won’t help you. If civilians are armed with assault rifles, good luck.
markstos 7y ago
The US Armed Forces is made up of people, many of which would not support a self-appointed dictator attacking their own people.
- hnuser54 7y ago
  The rise of killer death robots like Boston Dynamics definitely changes this dynamic. A handful of people in charge of the robots could order them to murder whomever with little oversight or room for ethical qualms on the part of the "soldiers".
  - samsolomon 7y ago
    This is actually something I've thought a good bit about. As robots become more militaristic, an armed populace becomes less of a threat to their government. There's a good sci-fi story in there somewhere.
    - chongli 7y ago
      I disagree. I think robots will actually decentralize power. The key to all of this is software which, as we’ve seen, is effectively impossible to lock up. So I think what you’ll see is the proliferation of cheap, effective drones armed with explosives that are extremely difficult to defend against. We’re seeing this play out in the Middle East, most recently with a drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil production.
      - hnuser54 7y ago
        I definitely support civilian ownership of self-defense robots. But for them to be affordable (or maybe even possible), there needs to be substantial production of non-defense humanoid robots like robot maids to build up the supply chain. Even then humanoid robots have a lot more moving parts so they'll never be as cheap as today's civilian drones.
  - chongli 7y ago
    It’s not a question of whether the robots could attack and kill people, it’s a question of whether they could defend the dictator’s interests. In a protracted guerrilla war against survivalist Americans with machine guns and large stashes of preserved food, not to mention access to tons of technology? I doubt it. It’s not very difficult to attach a hand grenade (or even a pipe bomb) to a quadcopter drone and use it to attack a military checkpoint or a politician’s entourage. It’s simply much harder to defend than it is to attack nowadays, and centralized power is offset by scattered, decentralized resistance. Finally, you might be able to convince a unit based in one state to attack another, but you’re unlikely to have the loyalty of all generals in a civil war.
baseballdork 7y ago
Depends on the circumstances, probably. 100 million armed people is nothing to ignore. I would also assume that the enforcement would be via the police, not the military.
- pjc50 7y ago
  It would probably start with ICE. The gradual expansion of their powers to hold any person in prison until they can prove they're not an immigrant. The continued expansion of use of those against Latino communities. Voter sweeps: go to polling stations and arrest everyone who looks like they might be a Democrat. That kind of thing.
LinuxBender 7y ago
Yes and No. Would many small militias "win". Of course not. Would they cause nearly endless pain and chaos for decades? Most certainly. Some of them would also be members of the standing military and embedded in every level of government. Even the most malevolent narcissistic sociopath dictators don't want such a high maintenance and unstable situation.
onepointsixC 7y ago
I supposed that's why the Taliban has been gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces.
kaolti 7y ago
You seem to be saying because it wouldn't work - why would we allow it? It's your right to defend yourself. Whether it works or not has nothing to do with it.
kgwxd 7y ago
I would hope, since our military hasn't been conditioned from birth to believe they're serving a living god, that there would be heavy resistance from within the military itself if such a thing were attempted.
tfha 7y ago
Yes, it would matter. If you don't want to raze your own cities an armed and hostile restiance even in the thousands of people is a massive thorn in your side. If the resistance reaches millions of people you basically don't have control at all. The country is just in a state of heavy war that point
csomar 7y ago
> if the US President went in to full dictator mode and had the support of the military, do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces? You don't really need militias. If a majority of the people oppose the dictator and the military man are from these families then your coup is going to fail. That's why dictatorships with strong oppositions try to lure a portion of their population against another portion or hire an army from another country. In a nutshell, the current US army is not going to attack their fellow citizens anytime soon for the eyes of a dictator.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > You don't really need militias. If a majority of the people oppose the dictator and the military man are from these families then your coup is going to fail. That's the real (failed) purpose of the second amendment, to prevent the use of a professional armed force for internal and/or external security, with it's invariable separate subculture, so that the views of the masses of the people and those of the armed forces would not be distinct.
Consultant32452 7y ago
Guns aren't for taking the military on head first. Guns are for assassinating your neighborhood cop and his entire family for supporting the dictator. The dictator requires lots of small time local support, which is much softer targets. Without it, the dictator can't dictate.
flatline 7y ago
People have this vision of a civil war, some all-out armed conflict with winner-take-all. Looking at any country with a history of armed rebels, you see a long-term political standoff that occasionally runs hot. Ruby Ridge and Waco are small scale examples in the US. On a larger scale these types of movements actually can accomplish quite a bit. I'm not condoning it by any means, I think it's completely nuts, but I don't think it's so far fetched. If you get enough people with enough political will they can accomplish a lot, armed or not.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Waco and the public response to the government acting that way is why Bundy Ranch turned out the way it did. There was an overwhelming majority of people who didn't think the governments use of force at Waco was ok (pictures of burned to death kids will do that) and the government changed the way it operates to reflect that which resulted in a more "wait them out" approach. Incremental feedback loops like that are what prevent civil war in the long term.
xienze 7y ago
> if the US President went in to full dictator mode and had the support of the military, do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces? Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. On paper, none of them stood a chance. How’s everything played out, in your opinion?
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
The US military is made up of Citizen Soldiers. Not clear that 'full dictator mode' would get anywhere.
- ivanbakel 7y ago
  The US military is made up of professional soldiers. Citizen soldiers are citizens first, and soldiers only when civic duty calls them up.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    That's pretty much describing the vast bulk of US military. Citizen Soldiers.
    - ivanbakel 7y ago
      In what way are they citizen soldiers? The statistics I can find suggest that active duty personnel majorly out reserve personnel. Active duty personnel cannot be considered citizen soldiers because their service is not compulsory and they are full-time professionals, not merely civilians in service. Reservists might be considered citizen soldiers, if you're a bit loose with the criteria that service must be a compulsory civic duty.
      - javagram 7y ago
        Army Active Duty 472,047 Army National Guard 345,153 Army Reserve 219,054 I believe a significant number of soldiers also only do 4 or 8 years and then return to civilian life, they aren’t a permanent military class like the Roman legions or whatever. As you mention a lot depends on what you consider a “citizen soldier” though.
ravenstine 7y ago
It depends on their arsenal and their strategies. Guerilla tactics have proven to be difficult for even modern militaries. The US would have a high probability of defeating it's citizens in a conflict, but it wouldn't exactly be a walk in the park. They'd still be risking dead soldiers, disrupted supply chains, and money just to finance the thing. If citizens posed a credible threat, it might not be worth the time of a gradually corrupting government that otherwise wanted to cross the line. The point of having armed citizens and militias is not necessarily to win but to provide a credit threat that forces an issue to be a cost-benefit analysis. If memory serves me, the Russians gave up against the Mujihadeen forces(who had help from the US; the Soviet Union was also going broke). The US came back with it's tail between it's legs after fighting Vietnam guerillas and farmers. Military might isn't everything. Practically speaking, I don't think today's Americans are equipped to provide a credit threat against a dictator and may never will.
- yonaguska 7y ago
  > Practically speaking, I don't think today's Americans are equipped to provide a credit threat against a dictator and may never will. I think they do- but we are so far removed from people actually caring about providing a credible threat as of now. Once people lose their access to basic amenities though, everything changes. And the type of people that do see the government as a threat now, already have organized militias, rudimentary training, military connections, and stockpile weapons and food. The right to organize into a militia is a constitutional right, and extremist elements have certainly been taking advantage of that. And logistically speaking, we have very porous borders and inevitably foreign entities that would seek to assist an insurgency. The American Revolutionaries had the support of the French, and the Southern confederacy had the support of the British.
excalibur 7y ago
And of course look what happens when your citizen militias actually SUPPORT the dictator. His opposition is swiftly crushed, it's not even a contest. Democracy falls almost overnight.
pjc50 7y ago
Exactly. The US won wars against its own citizens on a number of occasions; the Indian Wars, the short-lived Mormon conflict, the entire Civil War, and the city of Tulsa.
newvoiceoldphne 7y ago
Bluntly, yes. All those soldiers sleep, eat and live in a larger community. All those civil servants live in neighborhoods. Even if we accept that the entire military would just forget their sworn voe to uphold and defend the Constitution of the US against all enemies, foreign and domestic, an armed civilian populace in revolt would be a nightmare scenario.
ProAm 7y ago
> do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces The US has arguably won only one war in the last 70 years (being at war or at least armed conflict for most of those 70 years) with the largest most powerful military in the world.
lazyguy2 7y ago
> do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces? Yes, absolutely. If it's a true revolt. The reason for this is because if the rebels have support of the population then they can get intelligence and material support from said population. They will be able to walk circles around military bureaucracy. Were as the USA Military is dependent on the USA population for economic support. No economic support means no military sustainability. Sure they have stockpiles of weapons and whatnot, but there is more that is need to run a successful campaign against domestic guerrillas then just stockpiles of weapons. The reality is that in order to overthrow the Federal government all the American people have to do is just choose to stop paying their taxes and refusing to do business with the Federal government. The Federal government would be dead within months. Firearms are redundant. What they are useful for, however, is to prevent politicians from getting bad ideas... like using the military against their own population.
- coryfklein 7y ago
  > if the rebels have support of the population That's a big if. How many Arab Spring revolutions crumbled under this assumption? Besides, look at today's political climate - the majority of gun owners are backing the man who is the most authoritarian. You don't have to be worried about a gun owning populace if they're "voting" for you already.
daenz 7y ago
Good reads and sums up the basic ideas: https://imgur.com/a/WnTzIxR https://imgur.com/a/WnTzIxR
bonerman69 7y ago
What % of the military do you think will fight for the president? You only need enough weapons(dependent on that %) to create enough of a _mess_, to make it never worth pursuing.
ChrisLomont 7y ago
The US military requires a massive functioning economy to feed it goods, fuel, food, etc. If enough of the US were rebelling against the govt, the military would fold. And it's likely hard to get troops to shoot their own countrymen. As direct evidence, over the past few decades the US has been unable to stop a vastly smaller, vastly less armed resistance in various regions of the world. Maybe you underestimate the power of a few armed people against a military. And in any case, if it came to people vs military (which I do not think is anywhere close to happening), armed people do much better than unarmed.
- raisedbyninjas 7y ago
  Firearms are faster a killing; it's why we use them. However a military entering a hostile area doesn't just stroll through casually even if they could know for a fact no guns are in the area. They still have to contend with fertilizer bombs, molotov cocktails, suicide trucks, bows and arrows, those 3 watt laser pointers, plus any other improvised weapon. If lasers weren't being banned from war for cruelty would maybe even be more effective at taking combatants off the battlefield than an AR-15.
  - hnuser54 7y ago
    It's likely that insurgents wouldn't be treated as irregulars or partisans under the Geneva Convention in any case, so the incentives to not just "blind away" with lasers would be more about personal reservations, retaliation, and PR.
rgbrenner 7y ago
We can't defeat the insurgents in Afghanistan... and that's just the size of Texas. The rocky mountains cover more area than AF; our borders are more porous (the Canadian border is the longest in the world); and our citizens have the most firearms in the world - total or per person (far more than AF or IQ). The US military cant stop insurgents from moving across the border with Pakistan, but they would be able to stop them on a border 4x longer? They can't stop drugs from south america (at the mexican border, or through the gulf of mexico), but they would if it were money or weapons? I've posted this here before: The US military has an urban warfare document that states the number of troops required to secure N population. It's based on their experience and the experience of others in past wars in holding urban terrain. If you add up all of the military, police, national guard, fbi, etc... you aren't even close to the number the US military says are required to secure the US. Even if they hired millions of people to do so, they would still leave large swaths of the US unsecured (like the rocky mountains) where insurgents could operate. I don't know why when this is brought up people imagine citizens would stand face to face with the US military. Like they would be so dumb as to stick their face in front of a gun and ask they be shot. The US military says they can't secure the US from an insurgency. If you think otherwise, I would seriously like to hear what you base that on.
- baybal2 7y ago
  That's true. USSR had a similar document that was only declassified after the fall. Even if Union's military was to use multimegaton nukes on rebelling cities, and red army kept 100% loyalty, the military would've still lost due to logistical exhaustion. Armed forces rely on much more reliable supply train to function effectively than any kind of insurgent force. Armor and air force is useless unless fueled, oiled, armed and well maintained.
- coryfklein 7y ago
  > The US military has an urban warfare document that states the number of troops required to secure N population Are you expecting the whole US to join this insurgency/rebellion/civil war? Most of the gun owners today already support Trump - a man who idolizes authoritarianism. Instead of a scenario where the entirety of the U.S. police force quells a rebellion made up of 100% of the gun owning populace, it would be more likely that the dictator gets the gun owning populace on his/her side (not far from today's situation!) as reward for supporting the authoritarianism policies under the guise of democracy.
voldacar 7y ago
The wars in Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan would like to have a word with you. Furthermore, there are about 393 million firearms in the USA, and that's just a minimum as you can suspect that many do not report their firearms. Considering that plus the fact that about 43% of American households own at least one firearm, this means that in the event of a rebellion against a dictator, very quickly 100% of households are armed. Modern weapons such as nukes, fighter jets, tanks, etc, are effective at completely obliterating an opponent, if they were deployed against American citizens, there would be no country left to rule over.
merpnderp 7y ago
Large numbers of people find it ideologically necessary to take on faith that millions armed insurgents couldn't have large effects against the US military, contrary to every bit of evidence.
brobdingnagians 7y ago
I assume quite a bit of the military would _join_ the citizenry, so yes, they probably would have a fairly good chance combined together. After all, the military in the US comes _from_ the citizenry and have family & friends among the "civilians" and don't feel all that detached.
robotburrito 7y ago
A few Vietnamese would like to have a word with you.
parliament32 7y ago
It's much easier to mount a "resistance" with a few unregistered and unregulated guns in every household than not. The US military is very good at wreaking havoc in places where you can just crusie-missle a square kilometer and not have any problems. That becomes difficult domestically: you can't just arbitrarily wipe your own cities off the map cause, you know, those cities are the ones who generate you income/GDP and have your actual population in them. There's no point in being a dictator of a wasteland.
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miles 7y ago
> do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces? Turned out to be very effective in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
sjwright 7y ago
If every gun owner took their ownership as seriously as you, I’d say you had a point. Until then it’s a narrative that doesn’t map to the overwhelming bulk of reality.
JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
Yes. A) Infrastructure. a huge portion of the US military might is not deployed in the US. B) Bombings and collateral damage. The military may not give a fuck about the infrastructure of another country but bombing US cities is damaging their own infrastructure. Litterally cutting of their nose to spite their face. C) Getting soldiers to shoot at other humans is hard. Getting them to shoot at other Americans is even harder. D) We sure wiped the floor with the Koreans and Vietnamese without the first 3 points right? How hard could a country an order of magnitude larger, with much better armed citizenry be?
- MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
  Agree on all points. To be fair though, Vietnam was a political defeat, not a military one. They killed 10 vietnamese for every american soldier.
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ben509 7y ago
> And if s/he did not have the support of the Armed Forces, it would not be a very effective dictatorship and you would not even need guns for a rebellion. Unless they don't have the support because of the rebellion's guns. If anyone wearing a uniform is being shot by their neighbors, military support for the dictatorship is going to dry up quickly.
CapricornNoble 7y ago
>>>do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces Who do think we've been fighting in Afghanistan for the last 18 years? Impoverished farmers with AKs and explosives. >>>I truly do not get it. Insurgents win by undermining the legitimacy of the government, and moving into the vacuums that are created. You don't do that be attempting to fight force-on-force against overwhelming conventional power. You do it by targeting the mayors, governors, police chiefs, district attorneys, tax collectors, etc.....basically all of the key leadership of low-level government, and law enforcement. Without the support or at least tolerance of the population, ANY army will have exploitable vulnerabilities in essentially hostile territory.
jpadkins 7y ago
This has been debated many times. Even the DoD strategic planning has concluded that if a certain % of the population would take up arms, the army would lose an insurgency war (especially if the opposing side has the support of the people). Also have to factor in the massive defections of trained soldiers and officers from the military. The service members I know are not loyal to a person or group, they are loyal to the idea of the republic.
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CharlesColeman 7y ago
> do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces? No, clearly not. Iraq and Afghanistan are proof of that. The argument that the US military could so easily wipe the floor with a domestic insurgent militia that Second Amendment is obsolete hasn't been credible for 20 years. Widespread gun ownership does block several mechanisms of descent into dictatorship.
behringer 7y ago
Just tell that to the taliban.
humble_engineer 7y ago
Yes, absolutely, its called asymmetrical warfare and the Vietnamese defeated the US with it, and the Taliban are about to defeat the US with it. These were also foreign enemies, if you also consider the US soldiers would be fighting their own people, in their own land, yes....they could defeat the US military. Its not about totally destroying the US military, its about creating a situation where the US can't win and dragging it on long enough until its just pointless and heart clenching to continue.
Nuzzerino 7y ago
This is not a "sentiment", it's the very foundation the country's freedom was built on. When you admit that you don't understand it, then ask questions in a leading form that way, you're effectively arguing against the idea and forcing people to respond to it, or reinforcing others who have the fallacious beliefs against the second amendment based on lack of understanding on military and political strategy. It's astonishing how many people these days have suddenly become armchair generals to push back against the very foundation of the freedom of the United States in the form of this tired argument.
dmh2000 7y ago
its a good question : could the dictator get the support of the military? Would the people in the military from the top down be willing to, say, decimate a resisting US city with artillery and bombs?
jdkee 7y ago
Tell that to the Vietcong.

by Fezzik 7y ago

bhupy 7y ago

The US (with its support of the military) has been at war in the Middle East for nearly 2 decades now with insurgents. The argument is not that a rebellious citizenry will necessarily win a war, it's that it will draw out a bloody civil war so long and so expensive as to be a form of mutually assured destruction, the risk of which acts as a check in and of itself.

josephdviviano 7y ago
The fact is that the dictator would still win. The rebellious citizenry would live a life of absolute misery, just as those in the middle east do. The 2nd amendment made a lot of sense when weaponry consisted of horses and rifles, not computer-guided missiles. If there was ever a true US dictator, the 2nd amendment would mostly be used by the oppressed to rob, attack, and oppress one another.
- oblongx 7y ago
  or like you know, protect themselves from others...
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  There's an interesting sci-fi dystopia in there, maybe. Everything up to light machine guns are available with no restrictions to anyone who wants to buy them. The government constantly talks up the sanctity of the right to bear arms, and the importance of being prepared at all times to defend innocents against <insert scapegoat group here>. The dystopian military enforcers wear bulletproof powered armor, and private ownership of any weapon that can pierce that armor is a "grievous threat to public order," punishable by summary execution.
  - yonaguska 7y ago
    That's not far off from reality. It's illegal to sell armor piercing ammo, but not illegal to buy it or possess it. And certain municipalities(my own local one) are looking at regulating the sale and possession of body armor. Which to me is more egregious, as body armor is inherently not a weapon. Nor is it a force multiplier against law enforcement, as fully automatic weapons could be construed as. And it has practical uses in the sporting world. I know more than a few people that choose to wear body armor at public ranges as extra insurance against the potential stupidity of those around them.
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  - CapricornNoble 7y ago
    >>>The dystopian military enforcers wear bulletproof powered armor, and private ownership of any weapon that can pierce that armor is a "grievous threat to public order," punishable by summary execution. Which sounds like a deterrent.....until the insurgents use autonomous vehicle technology to pilot dump trucks full of fertilizer explosives into the enforcers. https://hugokaaman.com/2017/02/14/the-history-and-adaptability-of-the-islamic-state-car-bomb/ https://hugokaaman.com/2017/02/14/the-history-and-adaptabili... https://hugokaaman.com/2019/03/13/islamic-state-the-cross-provincial-use-of-svbieds/ https://hugokaaman.com/2019/03/13/islamic-state-the-cross-pr... https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/March-April-2017/ART-009/ https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/Eng...
    - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
      Well, it's dystopian sci-fi. Of course there's got to be some way to hit back against the oppressors. On the other hand, if your battle plan involves using up an entire truck for each enemy soldier (or squad?) neutralized, I feel like you're gonna have a hard time scaling that up to open warfare.
      - CapricornNoble 7y ago
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  During the cold war, both Russia and the US developed a post-strike strike capability (basically a response if your enemy nukes you first which in turn destroys your enemy). The US called this a 'second strike' capability, and Russia called this the 'deadman's hand'. Most commenters since have simply referred to it as "mutually assured destruction" or MAD. Here's the thing - from an ethical standpoint, it never makes sense to actually fire it. If you're dead, well, you're dead - there's no sense in murdering millions of citizens of an enemy nation. At the same time, by its very presence, you've made it very seemingly difficult for your enemy to ever engage in a nuclear first strike because they'd be signing their own death warrant. Could the US military defeat a bunch of armed citizens? Well, purely by the numbers, probably. It'd be really bad for morale though, and a lot of innocent people would die, and realistically, there's not really much of a country left at that point anymore. Without a check, the Government can do whatever it wants because it always has a cheat card, but with the check, the government has to at least pretend to respect the citizens. > ...it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    >Here's the thing - from an ethical standpoint, it never makes sense to actually fire it. If you're dead, well, you're dead - there's no sense in murdering millions of citizens of an enemy nation. Everybody does not die in a nuclear war. You want your survivors to have a better chance. Leaving whoever nuked you mostly untouched is highly counterproductive to that.
    - vorpalhex 7y ago
      I am sure the enemy nation doesn't care about the stick and stone huts your heavily cancer prone survivors will be building after they rediscover the bow and arrow. When you launch total nuclear war you are well past the "Let's invade and take their land" bit.
  - jancsika 7y ago
    I still don't understand the argument. Compare * armed citizenry gathering illegally and getting slaughtered by a superior military force * weaponless non-violent citizenry gathering illegally and getting slaughtered by a military force (which would have been superior to the citizens if they had been armed) You've already conceded that the armed citizenry is no match for the military. At best your point about morale is equally true in both cases. At worst arming the crowd gives a boost to military morale because armed opponents gives them a way to rationalize their slaughtering. Finally: if the slaughter of innocent citizens still matters to a critical mass of other citizens, it's vastly more powerful for them to hear that the citizens had been unarmed. And if there is no longer a critical mass of other citizens to organize against the military, then you're screwed either way. I just can't figure out what the benefit to arms would be in this case, especially given that there obvious downsides to arming a population.
- tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
  I just don't see any historical evidence that superior weaponry always wins, whereas there are plenty of examples to the contrary. So I don't know why it's a "fact" that the dictator would still win.
  - enraged_camel 7y ago
    Except the US military doesn't just have superior weaponry. It also has superior training, superior discipline, superior logistics, superior intelligence, superior force projection capability, superior everything. Unlike the Taliban or the Viet Cong, the US citizenry, even armed, would be like chaff. edit: so many downvotes. I guess I hit a sore spot. I'm sorry the truth hurts, guys and gals. :)
    - tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
      I'm not disagreeing with you over the difference in skill/training/etc. The Viet Cong and Taliban are obviously superior than the average American citizen. But I doubt that their respective victories were because of their military prowess. They turned the battlefield into an un-winnable game by requiring the military to effectively destroy the country in order to win. By the time the superior military wins, there's very little value left. War isn't just a game of who has the bigger guns and better soldiers. If we descend to such a state where an American president is (a) willing to completely annihilate the population, (b) can either bypass congress or get their approval to do so, and (c) can mobilize our military to perform the annihilation, then perhaps your point is correct. I wouldn't exactly hold my breath on that.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        > The Viet Cong and Taliban are obviously superior than the average American citizen. But I doubt that their respective victories were because of their military prowess. The VC were utterly crushed, leading the NVA to get more directly involved in the South rather than using them as a catspaw. To the extent that the combined operation had success (which it clearly did) it was because of the NVA—a regular army—and the backing they had even further up the Communist food chain.
- codeddesign 7y ago
  Essentially you are saying to sit back and watch because there is nothing you can do about it. The point of the 2nd amendment is that you have the right hold a militia and bear arms against an oppressive government. Whether you will win or not is not the argument, but rather that you have the right to protect and defend yourself as the oppressed. While it’s easy to sit on a couch relaxed and watching the news all while saying “we should get rid of guns”, it’s a lot different story to be in the midst of a contention or oppression.
  - crispyambulance 7y ago
    The 2nd amendment is effectively a lifestyle hobby. We are very, very far away from a civil war or anything resembling what is going to happen in Hong Kong. But if things do ever start to skid in the wrong direction, we'll end up doing the same thing that others have done. Put up a fight with or without "militias", and then after it's crushed, when the economy collapses, money is worthless, and crazed libertarian warlords rule the land... mass migration. The irony will not be lost on latin America.
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- daenz 7y ago
  >The 2nd amendment made a lot of sense when weaponry consisted of horses and rifles, not computer-guided missiles. Let me make sure I understand your basic premise: the ability to defend yourself against a tyrannical dictatorship made sense until the government developed better technology, now it's pointless so just give up your guns? Aside from being completely contrary to the American spirit of defending yourself from tyranny, it's based on the bogus premise that the advanced military technology can be used effectively against its own people. Where is the military going to fire those "computer guided missiles?" Into every rural home and every urban apartment window of everyone they suspect has guns, with thousands of civilian collateral casualties? Are tanks and fighter jets going to roll in and level entire economic hubs like cities? Are they going to destroy their own infrastructure? Are you envisioning "the rebellion" would set up a nice neat base in some remote location for the military to aim its tech at? Do you think the real men and women of the military would follow orders to destroy its own hometowns and families? How long before regional coups? How big do you think the US military is, relative to the armed civilian population? You are also aware that soldiers and police wear recognizable uniforms, while "the rebellion" doesn't? I don't think you've thought this through.
  - slg 7y ago
    Isn't this basically what the fascist in Germany, the communists in China and the Soviet Union, and countless other examples did? It is weird that people think that Americans are somehow a morally superior people to all the other countries that had already fallen down that path. I mean we are already locking up toddlers in cages and I haven't heard a single report of any push back from the people who are controlling those detention camps. World history has taught us that people are perfectly willing to betray or even kill their neighbor as long as you give them a believable enough reason. If anything, I think the overabundance of guns makes things more likely to go to shit quicker rather than less.
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      Surprised you're downvoted. The U.S. already has one civil war in its history, conducted when the 2nd amendment was in force and even more people owned guns than do today. It played out exactly like what the grandparent said was ridiculous: the respective militaries fired into every rural and urban home, set whole plantations on fire, destroyed their own infrastructure, killed their brothers and extended families, fought over their hometowns, and caused thousands of civilian casualties. There were in fact regional coups - really, the whole thing was one big regional coup, with some fractal splitting in the borderlands - but that didn't stop the bloodshed. And eventually, the guy who nobody in the rebellious states voted for won. War is not rational. People will destroy all sorts of stuff if something close to their identity is under threat.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > The 2nd amendment made a lot of sense when weaponry consisted of horses and rifles Around the time of the founding, there was privately-owned field artillery (and rifles were still in limited deployment). The second amendment made sense when calling up the militia/posse comitatus was an essential feature of how the government at all levels dealt with internal and external security threats, such that it was not planning to meet such needs with fully professional forces is most cases. Note that this was true, in both internal and external cases, for much of the life of the Republic though less so over time; for external security the idea was essentially written off after Vietnam with the adoption of the all-volunteer force. For internal security it's just about as dead, though there's not an equivalent milestone.
  - jboggan 7y ago
    We still have privately owned field artillery, among other things: https://youtu.be/qtFczo5ZCwY?t=934 https://youtu.be/qtFczo5ZCwY?t=934
- merpnderp 7y ago
  You're talking about maybe a million combat soldiers, before the massive attrition due to fighting against the Constitution, against 10's of millions of insurgents, all with a surplus of light weapons. It's not like those computer-guided missiles will have a target, as like most insurgencies there won't be many set piece battles.
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    And even if you have a target against the insurgents, the target is likely going to be next to some service member's home.
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- reroute1 7y ago
  This is assuming that the military and all constituents would follow martial law, which I think is not at all a certainty.
- magduf 7y ago
  The 2nd amendment made sense when the enemy was a group of people across the ocean (the British), and other groups of people from across the ocean that they hired as mercenaries (the Hessians). Keeping the common people armed to be used as foot-soldiers in case of foreign invasion is not a bad idea if invasion is a serious concern; Switzerland still does this to this day. For protecting against your own government, it really doesn't make that much sense. Your own government has to have support of your own military, which gets its members from the population: the military is made of your own neighbors. If your military is committed to the government and doesn't mind shooting their own family and neighbors, then you have a problem that arming people with small arms isn't going to solve: the rebels just aren't going to be that numerous. More likely, the military isn't going to support this action at all, and will mutiny and either implode as different factions within the military fight each other, or the military will stage a coup and take over the government (this has happened before many times, in other nations). In short, if the military supports the dictator, the armed opposition really has no chance of winning. If the opposition has a chance of winning, they don't need weapons because the military isn't going to support the dictator.
  - Nuzzerino 7y ago
    Imagine if the armed forces were equipped with smart weapons that could be disabled remotely for this very reason, and imagine if the government hired mercenaries to fight rebels instead of using its own armed forces?
  - kleton 7y ago
    The Hessians fighting against Washington's army were not mercenaries, they were feudal levies from the House of Hanover's continental holdings.
- spaginal 7y ago
  Every war goes to the streets in the end. No amount of tanks or missiles stops this eventuality. At some point you are going door to door with guns. You can't just bomb people from far away with a few missiles and wipe your hands clean of it and call it a day. The only effective bombing campaign that subdued a citizenry outright in military history were nukes, and if we ever crossed that line as a nation where the government nuked it's own citizens to quell rebellion, we are never coming back from that as a nation. It would leave a scar on humanity. Whatever would be left of the United States after that event would curse the people that did it. So to your point, the 2A is not antiquated, if the US government had any interest in having an intact territory, at some point it would need to get face to face with the people, and the presence of firearms in the citizenry acts as a check against this possibility, and an escape option for the citizens of it ever got there.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    >The only effective bombing campaign that subdued a citizenry outright in military history were nukes The firebombs and the nukes didn't subdue the citizenry. They were still willing to follow their cause to the death. You can't win against that unless you're going to kill each and every last one of them. The nukes showed their leader that his people would be destroyed with little cost to the enemy and convinced him to call it off.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  No way would the dictator win. The US military relies on a huge amount of logistics. Fighting happening on US soil would severely undermine that. You can't exactly bomb your own cities with B-52s, because that's where the bombs are made. The US military would draw maybe a few million people - the rest of the populace would still be over 300 million people with a gun for every single person. Furthermore, it's virtually impossible for the military not to split under a dictator that fights their own people.
- nyolfen 7y ago
  someone should let the taliban know
- bdowling 7y ago
  Who is the occupying army in this scenario? Is it the US Army, made up of citizen volunteers, being asked to oppress their fellow citizens? Or is it an invading army or an army of mercenaries, in which case what side is the US Army on?
- brightball 7y ago
  But in the US there are as many guns in circulation as people. If you’re assuming even 20% of citizens hold those firearms you’re looking at an armed opposition that numbers over 60 million people. It doesn’t matter how advanced your technology is, there’s a certain point where numbers win. You’re also assuming that military personnel themselves wouldn’t defect and side with their fellow citizens in such a situation, which would also make a lot of the same technology available to the hypothetical resistance. When you look at those numbers, it becomes clearer why pushes to disarm the population when there isn’t a problem present such a huge threat to the country.
- deleted 7y ago
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- solidsnack9000 7y ago
  War is not actually a contest to see who is strongest. If it was, then the strongest nations would always fight to the finish and the weaker nations would always be defeated and utterly subjugated. Clausewitz was not the first person to notice that this didn't always happen, nor the first to conclude that war must be viewed as an extension of politics. As such, dictatorship and imposition of rule through force has to be considered in light of other political options. Oppressive government does not generally start with an all out war to subdue the populace, using strategic weapons like missiles and bombers. Insurrections are managed with lighter arms not because totally destroying the enemy is not a military option but rather because it is not consonant with the relevant political goals. The right to bear arms isn't about what you do for all out war -- that's when you move from citizen soldiers to building armies -- it's about trimming the distribution at the lower end and improving the odds of the citizenry being able to make it up the food chain in a reasonable amount of time. (Knowing what guns are actually called is a surprising advantage there.) Even Hitler started small, and disarmed the citizenry early.
aasasd 7y ago
To clarify, are those insurgents buying rifles at shops, or are they supplied with military-grade missiles by friendly countries?
- deleted 7y ago
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simonh 7y ago
And then all you get is a whole bunch of mutually hostile regional militias sitting on piles of rubble shooting at each other. This is not a recipe for a stable state of any kind, and certainly not a democratic one. Guns and democracy simply don't mix. Democracy is about giving an equal voice to every citizen, while firearms are a force multiplier. They make the strong stronger and the weak comparatively weaker.
- bhupy 7y ago
  > This is not a recipe for a stable state of any kind It is not meant to be used in a stable state. It’s a Hobbesian point of last resort, to be used when democracy has failed and autocracy/tyranny is in effect. It’s a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency, so to speak.
  - simonh 7y ago
    Has it ever actually worked?
    - javagram 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        The American Revolution wasn't a citizen uprising, it was a local-government uprising it did rely on citizen militias against professional soldiers, but those citizen militias were the regular security forces of the local governments, which also the central government relied on for local security in routine cases, not counterbalances to them. That's the model the second amendment attempted to preserve, but even with the RKBA alive that model was progressively abandoned and it's last significant remnants were retired decades ago. And even with that, the American Revolution relied on backing from one of the top two European powers at the time to succeed.
enraged_camel 7y ago
>>The argument is not that a rebellious citizenry will necessarily win a war, it's that it will draw out a bloody civil war so long and so expensive as to be a form of mutually assured destruction, the risk of which acts as a check in and of itself. This assumption did not work out for the Confederacy in the Civil War. What makes you think it would work today?
- linuxftw 7y ago
  The Confederate generals surrendered to keep the country from endless guerilla warfare. This is why the Confederates weren't executed for treason, etc, because everyone wanted to end the fighting at that point.
  - enraged_camel 7y ago
    The Confederate generals surrendered because they realized that, with Lee himself surrendering, they had zero chance of prevailing, and any continuation of hostilities would result in the North invading the Confederate states and shooting/hanging not just the generals themselves, but all the civilian leaders who supported them. It wasn't to "keep the country from endless guerilla warfare", but rather an act of simple self-preservation. While there was a fair amount of war wariness among the public, continued resistance by the Confederacy was not something the North would have tolerated, especially since they clearly had the upper hand at that point.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Sherman burning everything had a lot to do with making guerrilla warfare undesirable in the south (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman%27s_March_to_the_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman%27s_March_to_the_Sea). It isn't something that we would dare try in the Middle East, at least with the hearts and minds doctrine. (destroying your enemy is easy, doing so without destroying everyone else is another matter)
adamsea 7y ago
Tell that to Syria.
coryfklein 7y ago
Not sure how well the comparison works. Decades of shifting conflicts in several regions opposite the globe and against different "enemies" backed by opposing foreign nations, vs quelling localized rebellions at home where the areas are already saturated with police forces.
x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago
So we are just going to sit here and act like the US Civil War didn't happen?
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
The insurgencies would be easy to deal with if we didn't care much about collateral damage. Similar to how a well armed confederacy faired against the Union army under Grant and Sherman's "total war."

dannyw 7y ago

Dictating over a country of armed resistance is not very valuable. I also think you underestimate the power of sheer numbers and guerilla warfare. The ones fighting would be the friends and family of the armed forces.

MrBuddyCasino 7y ago

You need ground troops to conquer and occupy any country, especially cities. Tanks or jets won’t help you. If civilians are armed with assault rifles, good luck.

markstos 7y ago

The US Armed Forces is made up of people, many of which would not support a self-appointed dictator attacking their own people.

hnuser54 7y ago
The rise of killer death robots like Boston Dynamics definitely changes this dynamic. A handful of people in charge of the robots could order them to murder whomever with little oversight or room for ethical qualms on the part of the "soldiers".
- samsolomon 7y ago
  This is actually something I've thought a good bit about. As robots become more militaristic, an armed populace becomes less of a threat to their government. There's a good sci-fi story in there somewhere.
  - chongli 7y ago
    I disagree. I think robots will actually decentralize power. The key to all of this is software which, as we’ve seen, is effectively impossible to lock up. So I think what you’ll see is the proliferation of cheap, effective drones armed with explosives that are extremely difficult to defend against. We’re seeing this play out in the Middle East, most recently with a drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil production.
    - hnuser54 7y ago
      I definitely support civilian ownership of self-defense robots. But for them to be affordable (or maybe even possible), there needs to be substantial production of non-defense humanoid robots like robot maids to build up the supply chain. Even then humanoid robots have a lot more moving parts so they'll never be as cheap as today's civilian drones.
- chongli 7y ago
  It’s not a question of whether the robots could attack and kill people, it’s a question of whether they could defend the dictator’s interests. In a protracted guerrilla war against survivalist Americans with machine guns and large stashes of preserved food, not to mention access to tons of technology? I doubt it. It’s not very difficult to attach a hand grenade (or even a pipe bomb) to a quadcopter drone and use it to attack a military checkpoint or a politician’s entourage. It’s simply much harder to defend than it is to attack nowadays, and centralized power is offset by scattered, decentralized resistance. Finally, you might be able to convince a unit based in one state to attack another, but you’re unlikely to have the loyalty of all generals in a civil war.

baseballdork 7y ago

Depends on the circumstances, probably. 100 million armed people is nothing to ignore. I would also assume that the enforcement would be via the police, not the military.

pjc50 7y ago
It would probably start with ICE. The gradual expansion of their powers to hold any person in prison until they can prove they're not an immigrant. The continued expansion of use of those against Latino communities. Voter sweeps: go to polling stations and arrest everyone who looks like they might be a Democrat. That kind of thing.

LinuxBender 7y ago

Yes and No. Would many small militias "win". Of course not. Would they cause nearly endless pain and chaos for decades? Most certainly. Some of them would also be members of the standing military and embedded in every level of government. Even the most malevolent narcissistic sociopath dictators don't want such a high maintenance and unstable situation.

onepointsixC 7y ago

I supposed that's why the Taliban has been gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces.

kaolti 7y ago

You seem to be saying because it wouldn't work - why would we allow it? It's your right to defend yourself. Whether it works or not has nothing to do with it.

kgwxd 7y ago

I would hope, since our military hasn't been conditioned from birth to believe they're serving a living god, that there would be heavy resistance from within the military itself if such a thing were attempted.

tfha 7y ago

Yes, it would matter. If you don't want to raze your own cities an armed and hostile restiance even in the thousands of people is a massive thorn in your side. If the resistance reaches millions of people you basically don't have control at all. The country is just in a state of heavy war that point

csomar 7y ago

> if the US President went in to full dictator mode and had the support of the military, do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces? You don't really need militias. If a majority of the people oppose the dictator and the military man are from these families then your coup is going to fail. That's why dictatorships with strong oppositions try to lure a portion of their population against another portion or hire an army from another country. In a nutshell, the current US army is not going to attack their fellow citizens anytime soon for the eyes of a dictator.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> You don't really need militias. If a majority of the people oppose the dictator and the military man are from these families then your coup is going to fail. That's the real (failed) purpose of the second amendment, to prevent the use of a professional armed force for internal and/or external security, with it's invariable separate subculture, so that the views of the masses of the people and those of the armed forces would not be distinct.

Consultant32452 7y ago

Guns aren't for taking the military on head first. Guns are for assassinating your neighborhood cop and his entire family for supporting the dictator. The dictator requires lots of small time local support, which is much softer targets. Without it, the dictator can't dictate.

flatline 7y ago

People have this vision of a civil war, some all-out armed conflict with winner-take-all. Looking at any country with a history of armed rebels, you see a long-term political standoff that occasionally runs hot. Ruby Ridge and Waco are small scale examples in the US. On a larger scale these types of movements actually can accomplish quite a bit. I'm not condoning it by any means, I think it's completely nuts, but I don't think it's so far fetched. If you get enough people with enough political will they can accomplish a lot, armed or not.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Waco and the public response to the government acting that way is why Bundy Ranch turned out the way it did. There was an overwhelming majority of people who didn't think the governments use of force at Waco was ok (pictures of burned to death kids will do that) and the government changed the way it operates to reflect that which resulted in a more "wait them out" approach. Incremental feedback loops like that are what prevent civil war in the long term.

xienze 7y ago

> if the US President went in to full dictator mode and had the support of the military, do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces? Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. On paper, none of them stood a chance. How’s everything played out, in your opinion?

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

The US military is made up of Citizen Soldiers. Not clear that 'full dictator mode' would get anywhere.

ivanbakel 7y ago
The US military is made up of professional soldiers. Citizen soldiers are citizens first, and soldiers only when civic duty calls them up.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  That's pretty much describing the vast bulk of US military. Citizen Soldiers.
  - ivanbakel 7y ago
    In what way are they citizen soldiers? The statistics I can find suggest that active duty personnel majorly out reserve personnel. Active duty personnel cannot be considered citizen soldiers because their service is not compulsory and they are full-time professionals, not merely civilians in service. Reservists might be considered citizen soldiers, if you're a bit loose with the criteria that service must be a compulsory civic duty.
    - javagram 7y ago
      Army Active Duty 472,047 Army National Guard 345,153 Army Reserve 219,054 I believe a significant number of soldiers also only do 4 or 8 years and then return to civilian life, they aren’t a permanent military class like the Roman legions or whatever. As you mention a lot depends on what you consider a “citizen soldier” though.

ravenstine 7y ago

It depends on their arsenal and their strategies. Guerilla tactics have proven to be difficult for even modern militaries. The US would have a high probability of defeating it's citizens in a conflict, but it wouldn't exactly be a walk in the park. They'd still be risking dead soldiers, disrupted supply chains, and money just to finance the thing. If citizens posed a credible threat, it might not be worth the time of a gradually corrupting government that otherwise wanted to cross the line. The point of having armed citizens and militias is not necessarily to win but to provide a credit threat that forces an issue to be a cost-benefit analysis. If memory serves me, the Russians gave up against the Mujihadeen forces(who had help from the US; the Soviet Union was also going broke). The US came back with it's tail between it's legs after fighting Vietnam guerillas and farmers. Military might isn't everything. Practically speaking, I don't think today's Americans are equipped to provide a credit threat against a dictator and may never will.

yonaguska 7y ago
> Practically speaking, I don't think today's Americans are equipped to provide a credit threat against a dictator and may never will. I think they do- but we are so far removed from people actually caring about providing a credible threat as of now. Once people lose their access to basic amenities though, everything changes. And the type of people that do see the government as a threat now, already have organized militias, rudimentary training, military connections, and stockpile weapons and food. The right to organize into a militia is a constitutional right, and extremist elements have certainly been taking advantage of that. And logistically speaking, we have very porous borders and inevitably foreign entities that would seek to assist an insurgency. The American Revolutionaries had the support of the French, and the Southern confederacy had the support of the British.

excalibur 7y ago

And of course look what happens when your citizen militias actually SUPPORT the dictator. His opposition is swiftly crushed, it's not even a contest. Democracy falls almost overnight.

pjc50 7y ago

Exactly. The US won wars against its own citizens on a number of occasions; the Indian Wars, the short-lived Mormon conflict, the entire Civil War, and the city of Tulsa.

newvoiceoldphne 7y ago

Bluntly, yes. All those soldiers sleep, eat and live in a larger community. All those civil servants live in neighborhoods. Even if we accept that the entire military would just forget their sworn voe to uphold and defend the Constitution of the US against all enemies, foreign and domestic, an armed civilian populace in revolt would be a nightmare scenario.

ProAm 7y ago

> do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces The US has arguably won only one war in the last 70 years (being at war or at least armed conflict for most of those 70 years) with the largest most powerful military in the world.

lazyguy2 7y ago

> do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces? Yes, absolutely. If it's a true revolt. The reason for this is because if the rebels have support of the population then they can get intelligence and material support from said population. They will be able to walk circles around military bureaucracy. Were as the USA Military is dependent on the USA population for economic support. No economic support means no military sustainability. Sure they have stockpiles of weapons and whatnot, but there is more that is need to run a successful campaign against domestic guerrillas then just stockpiles of weapons. The reality is that in order to overthrow the Federal government all the American people have to do is just choose to stop paying their taxes and refusing to do business with the Federal government. The Federal government would be dead within months. Firearms are redundant. What they are useful for, however, is to prevent politicians from getting bad ideas... like using the military against their own population.

coryfklein 7y ago
> if the rebels have support of the population That's a big if. How many Arab Spring revolutions crumbled under this assumption? Besides, look at today's political climate - the majority of gun owners are backing the man who is the most authoritarian. You don't have to be worried about a gun owning populace if they're "voting" for you already.

daenz 7y ago

Good reads and sums up the basic ideas: https://imgur.com/a/WnTzIxR https://imgur.com/a/WnTzIxR

bonerman69 7y ago

What % of the military do you think will fight for the president? You only need enough weapons(dependent on that %) to create enough of a _mess_, to make it never worth pursuing.

ChrisLomont 7y ago

The US military requires a massive functioning economy to feed it goods, fuel, food, etc. If enough of the US were rebelling against the govt, the military would fold. And it's likely hard to get troops to shoot their own countrymen. As direct evidence, over the past few decades the US has been unable to stop a vastly smaller, vastly less armed resistance in various regions of the world. Maybe you underestimate the power of a few armed people against a military. And in any case, if it came to people vs military (which I do not think is anywhere close to happening), armed people do much better than unarmed.

raisedbyninjas 7y ago
Firearms are faster a killing; it's why we use them. However a military entering a hostile area doesn't just stroll through casually even if they could know for a fact no guns are in the area. They still have to contend with fertilizer bombs, molotov cocktails, suicide trucks, bows and arrows, those 3 watt laser pointers, plus any other improvised weapon. If lasers weren't being banned from war for cruelty would maybe even be more effective at taking combatants off the battlefield than an AR-15.
- hnuser54 7y ago
  It's likely that insurgents wouldn't be treated as irregulars or partisans under the Geneva Convention in any case, so the incentives to not just "blind away" with lasers would be more about personal reservations, retaliation, and PR.

rgbrenner 7y ago

We can't defeat the insurgents in Afghanistan... and that's just the size of Texas. The rocky mountains cover more area than AF; our borders are more porous (the Canadian border is the longest in the world); and our citizens have the most firearms in the world - total or per person (far more than AF or IQ). The US military cant stop insurgents from moving across the border with Pakistan, but they would be able to stop them on a border 4x longer? They can't stop drugs from south america (at the mexican border, or through the gulf of mexico), but they would if it were money or weapons? I've posted this here before: The US military has an urban warfare document that states the number of troops required to secure N population. It's based on their experience and the experience of others in past wars in holding urban terrain. If you add up all of the military, police, national guard, fbi, etc... you aren't even close to the number the US military says are required to secure the US. Even if they hired millions of people to do so, they would still leave large swaths of the US unsecured (like the rocky mountains) where insurgents could operate. I don't know why when this is brought up people imagine citizens would stand face to face with the US military. Like they would be so dumb as to stick their face in front of a gun and ask they be shot. The US military says they can't secure the US from an insurgency. If you think otherwise, I would seriously like to hear what you base that on.

baybal2 7y ago
That's true. USSR had a similar document that was only declassified after the fall. Even if Union's military was to use multimegaton nukes on rebelling cities, and red army kept 100% loyalty, the military would've still lost due to logistical exhaustion. Armed forces rely on much more reliable supply train to function effectively than any kind of insurgent force. Armor and air force is useless unless fueled, oiled, armed and well maintained.
coryfklein 7y ago
> The US military has an urban warfare document that states the number of troops required to secure N population Are you expecting the whole US to join this insurgency/rebellion/civil war? Most of the gun owners today already support Trump - a man who idolizes authoritarianism. Instead of a scenario where the entirety of the U.S. police force quells a rebellion made up of 100% of the gun owning populace, it would be more likely that the dictator gets the gun owning populace on his/her side (not far from today's situation!) as reward for supporting the authoritarianism policies under the guise of democracy.

voldacar 7y ago

The wars in Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan would like to have a word with you. Furthermore, there are about 393 million firearms in the USA, and that's just a minimum as you can suspect that many do not report their firearms. Considering that plus the fact that about 43% of American households own at least one firearm, this means that in the event of a rebellion against a dictator, very quickly 100% of households are armed. Modern weapons such as nukes, fighter jets, tanks, etc, are effective at completely obliterating an opponent, if they were deployed against American citizens, there would be no country left to rule over.

merpnderp 7y ago

Large numbers of people find it ideologically necessary to take on faith that millions armed insurgents couldn't have large effects against the US military, contrary to every bit of evidence.

brobdingnagians 7y ago

I assume quite a bit of the military would _join_ the citizenry, so yes, they probably would have a fairly good chance combined together. After all, the military in the US comes _from_ the citizenry and have family & friends among the "civilians" and don't feel all that detached.

robotburrito 7y ago

A few Vietnamese would like to have a word with you.

parliament32 7y ago

It's much easier to mount a "resistance" with a few unregistered and unregulated guns in every household than not. The US military is very good at wreaking havoc in places where you can just crusie-missle a square kilometer and not have any problems. That becomes difficult domestically: you can't just arbitrarily wipe your own cities off the map cause, you know, those cities are the ones who generate you income/GDP and have your actual population in them. There's no point in being a dictator of a wasteland.

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miles 7y ago

> do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces? Turned out to be very effective in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

sjwright 7y ago

If every gun owner took their ownership as seriously as you, I’d say you had a point. Until then it’s a narrative that doesn’t map to the overwhelming bulk of reality.

JackRabbitSlim 7y ago

Yes. A) Infrastructure. a huge portion of the US military might is not deployed in the US. B) Bombings and collateral damage. The military may not give a fuck about the infrastructure of another country but bombing US cities is damaging their own infrastructure. Litterally cutting of their nose to spite their face. C) Getting soldiers to shoot at other humans is hard. Getting them to shoot at other Americans is even harder. D) We sure wiped the floor with the Koreans and Vietnamese without the first 3 points right? How hard could a country an order of magnitude larger, with much better armed citizenry be?

MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
Agree on all points. To be fair though, Vietnam was a political defeat, not a military one. They killed 10 vietnamese for every american soldier.

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ben509 7y ago

> And if s/he did not have the support of the Armed Forces, it would not be a very effective dictatorship and you would not even need guns for a rebellion. Unless they don't have the support because of the rebellion's guns. If anyone wearing a uniform is being shot by their neighbors, military support for the dictatorship is going to dry up quickly.

CapricornNoble 7y ago

>>>do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces Who do think we've been fighting in Afghanistan for the last 18 years? Impoverished farmers with AKs and explosives. >>>I truly do not get it. Insurgents win by undermining the legitimacy of the government, and moving into the vacuums that are created. You don't do that be attempting to fight force-on-force against overwhelming conventional power. You do it by targeting the mayors, governors, police chiefs, district attorneys, tax collectors, etc.....basically all of the key leadership of low-level government, and law enforcement. Without the support or at least tolerance of the population, ANY army will have exploitable vulnerabilities in essentially hostile territory.

jpadkins 7y ago

This has been debated many times. Even the DoD strategic planning has concluded that if a certain % of the population would take up arms, the army would lose an insurgency war (especially if the opposing side has the support of the people). Also have to factor in the massive defections of trained soldiers and officers from the military. The service members I know are not loyal to a person or group, they are loyal to the idea of the republic.

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CharlesColeman 7y ago

> do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces? No, clearly not. Iraq and Afghanistan are proof of that. The argument that the US military could so easily wipe the floor with a domestic insurgent militia that Second Amendment is obsolete hasn't been credible for 20 years. Widespread gun ownership does block several mechanisms of descent into dictatorship.

behringer 7y ago

Just tell that to the taliban.

humble_engineer 7y ago

Yes, absolutely, its called asymmetrical warfare and the Vietnamese defeated the US with it, and the Taliban are about to defeat the US with it. These were also foreign enemies, if you also consider the US soldiers would be fighting their own people, in their own land, yes....they could defeat the US military. Its not about totally destroying the US military, its about creating a situation where the US can't win and dragging it on long enough until its just pointless and heart clenching to continue.

Nuzzerino 7y ago

This is not a "sentiment", it's the very foundation the country's freedom was built on. When you admit that you don't understand it, then ask questions in a leading form that way, you're effectively arguing against the idea and forcing people to respond to it, or reinforcing others who have the fallacious beliefs against the second amendment based on lack of understanding on military and political strategy. It's astonishing how many people these days have suddenly become armchair generals to push back against the very foundation of the freedom of the United States in the form of this tired argument.

dmh2000 7y ago

its a good question : could the dictator get the support of the military? Would the people in the military from the top down be willing to, say, decimate a resisting US city with artillery and bombs?

jdkee 7y ago

Tell that to the Vietcong.