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This is a strange fantasy that many gun supporters share with you that having a gun makes you a warrior. It is even bigger fantasy that a persistent resistance

This is a strange fantasy that many gun supporters share with you that having a gun makes you a warrior. It is even bigger fantasy that a persistent resistance can exist in an isolated urban setting when under the control of an overwhelming well-organized, well-supplied, highly technological armed force that has no restrictions to be civilized or respect individual rights such as is the situation in Hong Kong. It is very nice that you all have this gun fetish and it keeps you happy, but guns can't substitute for sound institutions, social cohesion, and rule of law.

seibelj 6y ago
This isn’t a fantasy. It’s simply a fact when you have a huge number of people owning guns, implementing a dictatorship is harder. We also have a culture of loving freedom. In HK, you have a formerly free society that was brutally repressed by the authoritarian state. Saying “it will never happen” belies the fact it literally just happened! I have family that lost everything to communism and had to restart in America. If you have never had to live under authoritarian rule, as a huge portion of civilization had to in the past and still currently do, it’s easy to think a reversion to the mean will never happen. But it can and does!
- gostsamo 6y ago
  I'm from a former communist country. We had anti-communist gorilla fighters to the mid fifties. Guess what, the gorillas were hunted down and neutralized one by one. Guess why, they didn't have arm supplies, they didn't have outside power that would provide them with air cover, they didn't have safe bases for recruiting and training new fighters, for healing and planning operations. Without those basics your freedom loving people will be a sitting target. After a sufficient bloodbath, many will be killed, many will be imprisoned, many will be deported to other ends of the country, many will be broken, and the rest would prefer to forget and to return to some semblance of normality.
  - tablespoon 6y ago
    >> This isn’t a fantasy. It’s simply a fact when you have a huge number of people owning guns, implementing a dictatorship is harder. > I'm from a former communist country. We had anti-communist gorilla fighters to the mid fifties. Guess what, the gorillas were hunted down and neutralized one by one. What proportion of the population were those fighters? It's obvious that a small poorly-supplied force can't stand up to a brutal state, on the other hand "a huge number" of armed people might be able to, or at least put up a respectable fight. Furthermore, there's a deterrent effect from having an armed population that has to be taken into account.
    - gostsamo 6y ago
      I'm trying to explain that no matter of your handguns, tanks are an anti-infantry platform created with the explicit goal of killing people with handguns. The difference of putting a thousand and a hundred thousand people in front of a tank is how many times the machine guns will have to be reloaded. You imagine that a totalitarian regime will be hesitant to use excessive force against its own population. A corrupt and decaying regime might be, like the russian military coup 1990. Compare it to China 1989 or if you want to be more recent to the arab spring civil wars and you will realize that handguns matter only if the military decides to not intervene. Tunis - the president fled. Libya - the rebels were cornered until someone sent the heavy guns. Egypt - the military changed the president twice. Syria - it is a mess, but those with the heavy guns will write the history. That's why gun ownership is a fetish that gives people the illusion of having control over much more complex reality. A single person can't stop a militarized regime. A million single persons can't do it either. Only if united in a coordinated and resourceful structures, they can oppose another organized and resourceful structure.
      - tablespoon 6y ago
        > I'm trying to explain that no matter of your handguns, tanks are an anti-infantry platform created with the explicit goal of killing people with handguns. The difference of putting a thousand and a hundred thousand people in front of a tank is how many times the machine guns will have to be reloaded. I don't think anyone would seriously think that someone could mount a resistance with handguns. IIRC, the US figured they're more or less useless militarily prior to WWII. You'd need to use rifles. And IIRC, tanks haven't rendered infantry obsolete. They require infantry cover otherwise they're vulnerable, and there are environments where they just don't work well. Also, the tactics taken up by such a resistance would have to avoid head-on confrontations with tanks unless they have (captured) the right weapons to do so, since to do otherwise would be dumb. > Compare it to China 1989... The Tiananmen protesters were totally unarmed, and Chinese gun laws are extraordinarily restrictive, so I don't know what that's supposed to prove here. I'm not as familiar with the details of civilian gun ownership in the other countries you mentioned, but some cursory research shows that both Libya and Egypt have pretty restrictive civilian gun laws. There are also counterexamples to your thesis (e.g. Afghanistan) where poorly-equipped fighters have been able to effectively resist modern militaries. > A single person can't stop a militarized regime. A million single persons can't do it either. Only if united in a coordinated and resourceful structures, they can oppose another organized and resourceful structure. This is true. But arming those million single persons is a prerequisite for them to coalesce into an organized structure that could oppose a regime. Arming them doesn't mean a resistance will be successful, but disarming them would guarantee that any resistance would be a failure.
goatinaboat 6y ago
overwhelming well-organized, well-supplied, highly technological armed force that has no restrictions to be civilized or respect individual rights The Soviets had no qualms whatsoever, even booby-trapping childrens toys. But they couldn't hold Afghanistan.
- gostsamo 6y ago
  Can you tell me how long is the boarder between Pakistan and Afghanistan? Do you remember that a big part of the soviet defeat in Afghanistan was the US that was able to regularly supply money and guns to the resistance, giving them even land to air missiles? Do you know that the talibans had and still have bases in Pakistan that allowed them to lead the gorilla war that they did? Don't even try to compare Afghanistan with HK, because the two situations have nothing in common.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    Do you know that the talibans had and still have bases in Pakistan that allowed them to lead the gorilla war that they did? Yes I'll concede that fighting a guerrilla war without external support is difficult but it was always thus. Another example would be the Cuban revolution. However civil wars are often fought without any external backing being the decisive factor.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
john4532452 6y ago
Mass protests has always overthrown governments. CCP's time is near

seibelj 6y ago

This isn’t a fantasy. It’s simply a fact when you have a huge number of people owning guns, implementing a dictatorship is harder. We also have a culture of loving freedom. In HK, you have a formerly free society that was brutally repressed by the authoritarian state. Saying “it will never happen” belies the fact it literally just happened! I have family that lost everything to communism and had to restart in America. If you have never had to live under authoritarian rule, as a huge portion of civilization had to in the past and still currently do, it’s easy to think a reversion to the mean will never happen. But it can and does!

gostsamo 6y ago
I'm from a former communist country. We had anti-communist gorilla fighters to the mid fifties. Guess what, the gorillas were hunted down and neutralized one by one. Guess why, they didn't have arm supplies, they didn't have outside power that would provide them with air cover, they didn't have safe bases for recruiting and training new fighters, for healing and planning operations. Without those basics your freedom loving people will be a sitting target. After a sufficient bloodbath, many will be killed, many will be imprisoned, many will be deported to other ends of the country, many will be broken, and the rest would prefer to forget and to return to some semblance of normality.
- tablespoon 6y ago
  >> This isn’t a fantasy. It’s simply a fact when you have a huge number of people owning guns, implementing a dictatorship is harder. > I'm from a former communist country. We had anti-communist gorilla fighters to the mid fifties. Guess what, the gorillas were hunted down and neutralized one by one. What proportion of the population were those fighters? It's obvious that a small poorly-supplied force can't stand up to a brutal state, on the other hand "a huge number" of armed people might be able to, or at least put up a respectable fight. Furthermore, there's a deterrent effect from having an armed population that has to be taken into account.
  - gostsamo 6y ago
    I'm trying to explain that no matter of your handguns, tanks are an anti-infantry platform created with the explicit goal of killing people with handguns. The difference of putting a thousand and a hundred thousand people in front of a tank is how many times the machine guns will have to be reloaded. You imagine that a totalitarian regime will be hesitant to use excessive force against its own population. A corrupt and decaying regime might be, like the russian military coup 1990. Compare it to China 1989 or if you want to be more recent to the arab spring civil wars and you will realize that handguns matter only if the military decides to not intervene. Tunis - the president fled. Libya - the rebels were cornered until someone sent the heavy guns. Egypt - the military changed the president twice. Syria - it is a mess, but those with the heavy guns will write the history. That's why gun ownership is a fetish that gives people the illusion of having control over much more complex reality. A single person can't stop a militarized regime. A million single persons can't do it either. Only if united in a coordinated and resourceful structures, they can oppose another organized and resourceful structure.
    - tablespoon 6y ago
      > I'm trying to explain that no matter of your handguns, tanks are an anti-infantry platform created with the explicit goal of killing people with handguns. The difference of putting a thousand and a hundred thousand people in front of a tank is how many times the machine guns will have to be reloaded. I don't think anyone would seriously think that someone could mount a resistance with handguns. IIRC, the US figured they're more or less useless militarily prior to WWII. You'd need to use rifles. And IIRC, tanks haven't rendered infantry obsolete. They require infantry cover otherwise they're vulnerable, and there are environments where they just don't work well. Also, the tactics taken up by such a resistance would have to avoid head-on confrontations with tanks unless they have (captured) the right weapons to do so, since to do otherwise would be dumb. > Compare it to China 1989... The Tiananmen protesters were totally unarmed, and Chinese gun laws are extraordinarily restrictive, so I don't know what that's supposed to prove here. I'm not as familiar with the details of civilian gun ownership in the other countries you mentioned, but some cursory research shows that both Libya and Egypt have pretty restrictive civilian gun laws. There are also counterexamples to your thesis (e.g. Afghanistan) where poorly-equipped fighters have been able to effectively resist modern militaries. > A single person can't stop a militarized regime. A million single persons can't do it either. Only if united in a coordinated and resourceful structures, they can oppose another organized and resourceful structure. This is true. But arming those million single persons is a prerequisite for them to coalesce into an organized structure that could oppose a regime. Arming them doesn't mean a resistance will be successful, but disarming them would guarantee that any resistance would be a failure.

goatinaboat 6y ago

overwhelming well-organized, well-supplied, highly technological armed force that has no restrictions to be civilized or respect individual rights The Soviets had no qualms whatsoever, even booby-trapping childrens toys. But they couldn't hold Afghanistan.

gostsamo 6y ago
Can you tell me how long is the boarder between Pakistan and Afghanistan? Do you remember that a big part of the soviet defeat in Afghanistan was the US that was able to regularly supply money and guns to the resistance, giving them even land to air missiles? Do you know that the talibans had and still have bases in Pakistan that allowed them to lead the gorilla war that they did? Don't even try to compare Afghanistan with HK, because the two situations have nothing in common.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  Do you know that the talibans had and still have bases in Pakistan that allowed them to lead the gorilla war that they did? Yes I'll concede that fighting a guerrilla war without external support is difficult but it was always thus. Another example would be the Cuban revolution. However civil wars are often fought without any external backing being the decisive factor.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

john4532452 6y ago

Mass protests has always overthrown governments. CCP's time is near