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As an European I'd say any USAnite can almost get a gun with breakfast cereal boxes. But weapons' culture in the US it's obsolete. Militias can't do shit agains
by anthk 9mo ago
As an European I'd say any USAnite can almost get a gun with breakfast cereal boxes. But weapons' culture in the US it's obsolete. Militias can't do shit against tyranical govs because once they send drones it's game over.
- joe_mamba 9mo ago> But weapons' culture in the US it's obsolete. Militias can't do shit against tyranical govs because once they send drones it's game over. Pretty sure those 50 thousand or so civilians killed on the street in the recent Iranian protests/riots would have been a lot less, if all those Iranians had easy access to guns, and not just the government. Drones are not enough, you still need boots on the ground for you to claim control over a territory, and boots on the ground think twice about signing up for service if that includes facing armed mobs with guns on a daily basis. So no, mobs with guns are not obsolete.
- anthk 9mo agoMob with guns would be useless against the Iranian Guards which are pretty much elite commandos.
- joe_mamba 9mo agoWhat's the commando to civilian ratio in Iran?
- mschuster91 9mo agoLet's do some napkin math: Iran has about 94 million people. Iran's IRGC alone has a personnel count of 125.000 [1], of which about 2-5000 are estimated to be the elite of the elite ("Quds Force"). Together with the Basij (anywhere from 100-600k) that alone is a sufficient amount of force. And on top of that come maybe 400-500k of the regular Iranian Armed Forces [2], as well as about 260k active police+100k police reservists. So, if one sees the whole of IRGC plus Basij as the "commandos", they alone form an active elite of about 0.5%, if one sees the entirety of the military+police we're looking at easily 2-3 million units, so up to 2%. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Revolutionary_Guard_Corps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Revolutionary_Guard_Co... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Republic_of_Iran_Armed_Forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Republic_of_Iran_Armed...
- rayiner 9mo agoGoat herders with guns in Afghanistan kicked the U.S. army out of their country.
- pegasus 9mo agoBut could they do the same to goat herders with bigger guns, drones, bombs, etc?
- JKCalhoun 9mo agoPretty sure Iranians with 3D printed guns would not be able to kick their own army out of Iran.
- sidewndr46 9mo agoThis isn't really accurate. The Northern Alliance entered into an agreement with the US to secure the country. An insurgency sprang up and we fought it for 20 years before giving up. Since this is now after the fact, we can safely say the Taliban ran the insurgency the whole time. The Taliban are a military and political group compromised of an ethnic minority in Afghanistan. It's not even that the US lost to "goat herders with guns". We failed to secure a small country against a well organized, armed minority.
- LorenPechtel 9mo agoNo. Pakistan supported an insurgency group for 20 years. No insurgency like that can exist without foreign support in some form, usually from governments but it can be from resource export. And the reality is nobody has ever defeated a foreign sponsored insurgency. Some have ended because the sponsor quit sponsoring them, but that is not the same thing as defeated.
- sidewndr46 9mo agoI don't really think it's news that the Taliban are sponsored by Pakistan. We've known that longer than I've been alive.
- abosley 9mo agoThe Iranian guards, along with most of the armies in the second and third tier powers don't have elite anything. Please see Desert Storm, etc. Most of them ran. The ones that didn't were destroyed.
- rayiner 9mo agoIt’s not obsolete. In a country where your military is farm boys, the important thing is being able to start the war. Eventually chunks of the military will defect. We saw this happen during the Bangladesh independence movement. The revolutionaries got lucky and knocked over a weapons depot early in the conflict. They started fighting and a large number of the Pakistani army that was of Bangladeshi ancestry defected. I am confident the same thing would happen if the government in DC tried to oppress Iowa or Texas. Drones cut both ways. You’re correct that it allows a small number of people loyal to the regime to asymmetrically oppress a large population. But drone technology is in theory accessible to the populace in an industrialized country.
- FatherOfCurses 9mo agoThe 2A crowd has been really quiet this past year. Hell, Trump even said in response to the Pretti shooting that only criminals walk around carrying guns in public. I guess no one cares about government tyranny unless they're asked to respect someone's pronouns.
- rayiner 9mo agoWhy would the 2A people say anything? Conservatives aren’t libertarians. They think government has legitimate functions and draw a distinction between government performing those functions (which isn’t tyranny) and the government exceeding its scope (which is tyranny). Removing foreigners here illegally is a core function of the government. Social engineering is not.
- 9mo ago
- pocksuppet 9mo agoThose drones lost some wars against guerilla militias
- lenerdenator 9mo ago1) That's a mischaracterization of the FFL purchase process if I've ever heard one. 2) The weapons culture of the US is so obsolete that there are government officials parroting lines about it not being legal to carry a concealed weapon during a protest in Minnesota when it is, actually, very much legal. That is to say, it's not obsolete at all. Given the prior public stances of the Trump administration on firearms, this is incredibly telling, and all the more reason why you can't trust people like them.
- riskable 9mo agoWell, at birth every American is issued Baby's First Glock™
- AngryData 9mo agoDrones may be good against foreign adversaries, but you can't bomb your own population and cities into being productive economy. A war between two well funded and supported militaries is far different than an insurgency.