14 ms·

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 amen

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
  [deleted]
- 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
      With the number of Ford F-150s in the US (or Toyota Tacomas in the Mid-East), it scales reasonably well when either used for targeted assassination of High Value Targets, or as the opening barrage of a combined-arms attack. Considering total costs of employment (vehicle modifications, including explosives), it's cheaper than air support and more accurate than traditional tube artillery.
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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
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
[deleted]
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.

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
[deleted]
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
    With the number of Ford F-150s in the US (or Toyota Tacomas in the Mid-East), it scales reasonably well when either used for targeted assassination of High Value Targets, or as the opening barrage of a combined-arms attack. Considering total costs of employment (vehicle modifications, including explosives), it's cheaper than air support and more accurate than traditional tube artillery.

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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

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

[deleted]

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.