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The right to bear arms is also, explicitly, a protection against tyranny BY the government. Thomas Jefferson: ""When governments fear the people, there is libe

The right to bear arms is also, explicitly, a protection against tyranny BY the government. Thomas Jefferson: ""When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

Yver 13y ago
No offense to Thomas Jefferson but a government that is afraid of its own people is a pretty peculiar definition of "liberty."
- jswinghammer 13y ago
  It's one based on examining the history of governments.
- dsego 13y ago
  Governments have to be kept in check. They're granted great power and people who have power tend to abuse it. My understanding is that the founding fathers were realists and recognised this very early on.
  - Retric 13y ago
    Having guns does little to hold government in chech. A well educated, well informed, and politically active populace on the other hand is a strait jacket. Which is why free assembly and free speech are so important.
    - DamnYuppie 13y ago
      I agree a well educated and informed society is the best deterrent to keeping governments serving the best interest of the people. Yet recent events have shown that we are not that well informed by our media and government on purpose. Guns are not a deterrent in as much as a means to allow the people to defend themselves against an abusive government when and if needed.
      - pekk 13y ago
        When you say 'the people,' which people do you mean? Because it doesn't serve everyone's interests to threaten civil war in the US - only certain people's interests. These people don't represent all people, listen to what they say closely, but are rather prioritizing their own interests so far above others that they maintain a right to threaten and kill people they disagree with.
        jeremyjh 13y ago
        >These people don't represent all people, listen to what they say closely, but are rather prioritizing their own interests so far above others that they maintain a right to threaten and kill people they disagree with. Are you talking about our government?
    - angersock 13y ago
      To play the other side... Look at what happens to every group of well-educated, well-informed, politically active people when they go up against an authority. Look at the Prague Spring (speaking of holding the government in Czech), at Occupy Oakland, and what's happened in Turkey most recently. Free speech and free assembly merely mean that you can call the jackbooted thugs names as they crack open the heads of you and your friends. Further, consider that the trends in education, mass media, and overall American culture have very nearly destroyed the ability to field a group of people meeting any of the three criteria for your 'strait jacket'. We've done such a bangup job of driving social networks and short action-reward loops in our advertising and communication that we have a populace with such a low attention span that it's hard to stay angry long enough to cause trouble. On the other hand, the 2nd amendment speaks for itself. At the risk of being particularly cynical, I imagine that it is far, far easier to find a hundred thugs who can be talked into taking potshots at the Man than it is to find one who can carefully and consistently explain why the government is doing wrong, what the exact nature of the wrong is, and how to fix it. We cherish the 2nd precisely because, at the end of the day, you get a lot further with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone. If you don't believe me, ask the men in Washington.
      - reader5000 13y ago
        What? It's easier to find inbred retards who want to shoot at "the Man" than actually maintaining an educated populace, so therefore we "cherish" the 2a? That is quite a novel interpretation of the 2a.
        gohrt 13y ago
        No, parent was saying that it easier for an educated subset of the populace to shoot at the Man than to educate her "inbred, retard" (to use your phrase) peers. Exhibit A: the American Revolution.
        angersock 13y ago
        Erm, again, not quite. I am suggesting that while the 1st and 4th amendments are very important, they alone are insufficient against jackbooted thugs; moreover, they appeal and are useful only to the relative intellectual elite of a country--if them. The 2nd amendment, by contrast, expands the availability of force to the common man, and in so doing allows even the dullest and slowest hooligan to contribute to the process of political reform. Indeed, should the Man come calling, I would rather have a dozen armed rednecks and coon-asses standing with me than a few score of the best-spoken orators of our time. It's unfortunate that things seem to be suggesting that this sort of calculus is becoming reasonable again.
    - VLM 13y ago
      "A well educated, well informed, and politically active populace" Observation shows a media oligopoly merged with .gov, makes a effective exploit against that set of conditions. A right, never used, may as well not exist.
    - mindcrime 13y ago
      Even better: A well educated, well informed, and politically active populace, with guns. These things aren't mutually exclusive, ya know...
mtgx 13y ago
So is the 4th amendment, and look how much that one is abused. In the end the Constitution really is "just a piece of paper", if not the government, not the judges, not the media, and ultimately not even the people respect it, live by it, and try to protect it as soon as it's endangered by people trying to accumulate too much power. Where are all the street protests?! I also fail to understand people who so viciously defend the 2nd amendment "because of potential tyranny", but don't try to defend the 1st and 4th amendments with the same aggressiveness, when in fact those amendments are the first line of defense against that encroaching tyranny, and if they fail, it's the first clue the country is slipping into tyranny. Would you rather wait until the very last moment, until people can't take it anymore but to rise up against the government with violence and starting a massacre, all just to remove the government? Or would you try to fix things while you still can do it peacefully, by protecting the 1st and 4th amendments, so it doesn't have to come to "using the 2nd amendment right to defend against the government with guns"? Or maybe it all comes down to who has more money to raise the awareness about it. NRA is a powerful lobby. ACLU and EFF less so.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Where are all the street protests?! The people who went to the streets protesting in 2011 got arrested. You're looking at the maturation of a tyrannical, authoritarian neoliberal regime.
  - criley 13y ago
    I like you said "got arrested" instead of "got thrown into jail indefinitely". Are any Occupiers in prison without having committed crimes worthy of the sentence? Or are you just being extremely hyperbolic?
  - talmand 13y ago
    There were groups who have protested who had no serious arrests to report. There were some groups that had a heavy amount of arrests. If one were to look at all the groups protesting recently with an objective eye I'm sure examples can be found that show why one group had such results.
lemming 13y ago
When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. It's pretty clear from the last couple of days that the balance in the US is pretty firmly tipped towards tyranny by that definition. Certainly I doubt anyone in the government is at all worried about the people being able to do anything about this scandal. There have been several comments on here and elsewhere from people who are thinking twice about publicly supporting Snowden, or are at least aware that that support is probably logged somewhere and might have repercussions in the future. This would have been ridiculous paranoia not that long ago.
- pekk 13y ago
  That's not a definition of tyranny, it's a hypothesis about tyranny. But it's foolish. Pointing a shotgun at random government workers like the census taker or sending ricin to the President are not doing anything to improve our politics.
- ryanhuff 13y ago
  I think some politicians (supporters of this policy) are very worried about this, in that it could turn their base against them, and be vote out of office. We will have to wait and see how public sentiment turns.
anonymfus 13y ago
"But when people fear each another they start to want tyranny." — anonymfus.
weego 13y ago
Which is useful only while tyranny is physical.
- bmelton 13y ago
  Look up the Battle of Athens. In a nutshell, some veterans returned home from fighting the war to find out that their local government had become oppressive - levying insane fees on speeding tickets, committing false arrests, taking bribes, etc. On top of all that, the local Sheriff had rigged the ballot box to ensure that they stayed in power, denied some the right to vote, and overthrew poll-watchers through force. The returned veterans recognized all of the above as tyranny, had put forth honest people for the election, and insisted that the election was done fairly be surrounding the Sheriff's office where the ballots where and mounting an armed resistance to ensure that tyranny wasn't done.
randomsearch 13y ago
Interesting. But, how does owning a gun provide protection against the US military?
- mdesq 13y ago
  I think the folks in the Middle East have pretty much demonstrated how this works.
  - randomsearch 13y ago
    Gun ownership amongst individuals did not lead to the Arab Spring.
    - freehunter 13y ago
      But it did lead to an insanely long battle that continued well after the official war was over in not one but two countries. The governments had given up fighting, but the civilians with guns kept US forces under constant attack for ten years.
      - astrodust 13y ago
        Guns are an important tool, but it's Improvised Explosive Devices that are causing the majority of the casualties, over 63% of them in Iraq and 66% in Afghanistan. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_explosive_device http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_explosive_device) A lot of the guns in circulation in Iraq were liberated from the army and police, or acquired through corrupt channels, originally provided by the coalition forces themselves. You credit a well armed populace as being the key here, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. They could've started with zero guns and simply acquired them as necessary. Remember, a hostile government might shoot an unarmed individual in a conflict, but they will always shoot an armed one.
        bmelton 13y ago
        Doesn't that just illustrate that their odds would have been better had they started with arms instead of acquiring them as they went though? This is somewhat similar to another argument I've had - there were some armed Jews in Germany who were able to leverage that firepower to hold off the SS and, eventually, escape. It certainly didn't stop the Nazis from committing the Holocaust, and communication / coordination are key to mounting a successful offense that the Jews didn't necessarily have time to mount, but while there were lots of Jews that died (some of them which might have even been armed), there were some that escaped (some of which were not armed); regardless, guns were demonstrably beneficial to those who fended off the SS. As pertaining to the US Military, they have proven over and over that guerrilla warfare is not their strong suit, and especially so on foreign soil. Vietnam, Middle East, etc., have all shown that to be true. Also, as was mentioned earlier, many, if not most of the existing armed forces would have a very hard time mounting all out martial law against its citizenry. That isn't meant to imply that the situation couldn't be framed as such that it appeared to be necessary, but that also doesn't hold for long.
jpdoctor 13y ago
> Thomas Jefferson: ""When governments fear the people, there is liberty. Looks like false attribution according to wikiquote. (Why do people feel the need to use proof by authority anyway? Either a thing is right, or it is insightful, but attributing it to dead 18th century rebels does not bolster the case.) ________________________________ When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. Falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson; first attributed to Jefferson in Gyeorgos C. Hatonn, It's All in the Game: Butterflies, Mind Control--The Razor's Edge‎ (1994), p. 214. A 1912 issue of The American Anti-socialist attributes the re-ordered form, "Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty", to John Basil Barnhill. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_...
- justin66 13y ago
  > Why do people feel the need to use proof by authority anyway? Either a thing is right, or it is insightful, but attributing it to dead 18th rebels does not bolster the case. There's at least one completely made up Orwell quote that gets kicked around quite a bit by conservatives. ("rough men") That one is weird: you'd think those people would be happy to NOT quote Orwell if they knew anything about his politics. I assume it's less about argument from authority and more about just a lack of eloquence or confidence on the part of the person relying on quotations to make their point.
  - jpdoctor 13y ago
    > I assume it's less about argument from authority and more about just a lack of eloquence or confidence on the part of the person relying on quotations to make their point. That's probably right. Hell, it's part of the reason that Hallmark greeting cards will always have a viable business model.
    - justin66 13y ago
      I really don't mind it when it's just meant to amuse people or send a nice message. When people try to engage in a battle of ideas and they rely so directly on borrowed wisdom, it can make for a boring time.
chrischen 13y ago
Back then having to bear arms against your government was a much more likely scenario than it is now. Of course it would lead to something like the civil war. The democratic system is supposed to prevent that anyways. However in modern times we've moved quite a bit away from the possibility of armed rebellions. It's something that happens in less developed countries like Iraq.
umumum 13y ago
Fake Thomas Jefferson quote alert: http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/when-government-fears-people-there-libertyquotation http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/when-government-fea...
temp453463343 13y ago
The world Jefferson lived in is infinitely different from ours. There is absolutely no chance that the government of the US will turn tyrannical. none. zero. if you think there is you're nuts. There is all sorts of talk in this comment section about how people would fight the US military and stuff like that. There people are in la-la land. I'm not going to elaborate on this but: I think it's closely tied with the American obsession with the apocalypse (see zombie/post-apocalyptic movies) People have very very different expectations from the government now than they did even 50 years ago. No first world country (even ones that don't cherish liberty as much as us) in the past 50 years has turned to tyranny. There are studies about how past a certain GDP tyranny becomes unsustainable - and we're well past that point. I do what to clarify that I'm not against the second amendment at all. But the argument that it's to fight the government is absolutely absurd.
jlarocco 13y ago
That's not really true any more. When Thomas Jefferson was alive it was feasible for the people to protect themselves from tyranny by fighting the government because the technology available to "normal" people was the same as available to the military. Today it would be impossible. Even the police are 10000x better equipped than any group of civilian can be. And then there's the military... Besides that, I'm skeptical there will ever be an issue where enough people are angry enough to start a revolt against the government. Right now people are outraged because the government is massively violating our rights, but nobody's talking about an armed revolution.
lostlogin 13y ago
You also end up with people fearing the people unfortunately. Not sure how that was missing from the original equation.

Yver 13y ago

No offense to Thomas Jefferson but a government that is afraid of its own people is a pretty peculiar definition of "liberty."

jswinghammer 13y ago
It's one based on examining the history of governments.
dsego 13y ago
Governments have to be kept in check. They're granted great power and people who have power tend to abuse it. My understanding is that the founding fathers were realists and recognised this very early on.
- Retric 13y ago
  Having guns does little to hold government in chech. A well educated, well informed, and politically active populace on the other hand is a strait jacket. Which is why free assembly and free speech are so important.
  - DamnYuppie 13y ago
    I agree a well educated and informed society is the best deterrent to keeping governments serving the best interest of the people. Yet recent events have shown that we are not that well informed by our media and government on purpose. Guns are not a deterrent in as much as a means to allow the people to defend themselves against an abusive government when and if needed.
    - pekk 13y ago
      When you say 'the people,' which people do you mean? Because it doesn't serve everyone's interests to threaten civil war in the US - only certain people's interests. These people don't represent all people, listen to what they say closely, but are rather prioritizing their own interests so far above others that they maintain a right to threaten and kill people they disagree with.
      - jeremyjh 13y ago
        >These people don't represent all people, listen to what they say closely, but are rather prioritizing their own interests so far above others that they maintain a right to threaten and kill people they disagree with. Are you talking about our government?
  - angersock 13y ago
    To play the other side... Look at what happens to every group of well-educated, well-informed, politically active people when they go up against an authority. Look at the Prague Spring (speaking of holding the government in Czech), at Occupy Oakland, and what's happened in Turkey most recently. Free speech and free assembly merely mean that you can call the jackbooted thugs names as they crack open the heads of you and your friends. Further, consider that the trends in education, mass media, and overall American culture have very nearly destroyed the ability to field a group of people meeting any of the three criteria for your 'strait jacket'. We've done such a bangup job of driving social networks and short action-reward loops in our advertising and communication that we have a populace with such a low attention span that it's hard to stay angry long enough to cause trouble. On the other hand, the 2nd amendment speaks for itself. At the risk of being particularly cynical, I imagine that it is far, far easier to find a hundred thugs who can be talked into taking potshots at the Man than it is to find one who can carefully and consistently explain why the government is doing wrong, what the exact nature of the wrong is, and how to fix it. We cherish the 2nd precisely because, at the end of the day, you get a lot further with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone. If you don't believe me, ask the men in Washington.
    - reader5000 13y ago
      What? It's easier to find inbred retards who want to shoot at "the Man" than actually maintaining an educated populace, so therefore we "cherish" the 2a? That is quite a novel interpretation of the 2a.
      - gohrt 13y ago
        No, parent was saying that it easier for an educated subset of the populace to shoot at the Man than to educate her "inbred, retard" (to use your phrase) peers. Exhibit A: the American Revolution.
        angersock 13y ago
        Erm, again, not quite. I am suggesting that while the 1st and 4th amendments are very important, they alone are insufficient against jackbooted thugs; moreover, they appeal and are useful only to the relative intellectual elite of a country--if them. The 2nd amendment, by contrast, expands the availability of force to the common man, and in so doing allows even the dullest and slowest hooligan to contribute to the process of political reform. Indeed, should the Man come calling, I would rather have a dozen armed rednecks and coon-asses standing with me than a few score of the best-spoken orators of our time. It's unfortunate that things seem to be suggesting that this sort of calculus is becoming reasonable again.
  - VLM 13y ago
    "A well educated, well informed, and politically active populace" Observation shows a media oligopoly merged with .gov, makes a effective exploit against that set of conditions. A right, never used, may as well not exist.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    Even better: A well educated, well informed, and politically active populace, with guns. These things aren't mutually exclusive, ya know...

mtgx 13y ago

So is the 4th amendment, and look how much that one is abused. In the end the Constitution really is "just a piece of paper", if not the government, not the judges, not the media, and ultimately not even the people respect it, live by it, and try to protect it as soon as it's endangered by people trying to accumulate too much power. Where are all the street protests?! I also fail to understand people who so viciously defend the 2nd amendment "because of potential tyranny", but don't try to defend the 1st and 4th amendments with the same aggressiveness, when in fact those amendments are the first line of defense against that encroaching tyranny, and if they fail, it's the first clue the country is slipping into tyranny. Would you rather wait until the very last moment, until people can't take it anymore but to rise up against the government with violence and starting a massacre, all just to remove the government? Or would you try to fix things while you still can do it peacefully, by protecting the 1st and 4th amendments, so it doesn't have to come to "using the 2nd amendment right to defend against the government with guns"? Or maybe it all comes down to who has more money to raise the awareness about it. NRA is a powerful lobby. ACLU and EFF less so.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Where are all the street protests?! The people who went to the streets protesting in 2011 got arrested. You're looking at the maturation of a tyrannical, authoritarian neoliberal regime.
- criley 13y ago
  I like you said "got arrested" instead of "got thrown into jail indefinitely". Are any Occupiers in prison without having committed crimes worthy of the sentence? Or are you just being extremely hyperbolic?
- talmand 13y ago
  There were groups who have protested who had no serious arrests to report. There were some groups that had a heavy amount of arrests. If one were to look at all the groups protesting recently with an objective eye I'm sure examples can be found that show why one group had such results.

lemming 13y ago

When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. It's pretty clear from the last couple of days that the balance in the US is pretty firmly tipped towards tyranny by that definition. Certainly I doubt anyone in the government is at all worried about the people being able to do anything about this scandal. There have been several comments on here and elsewhere from people who are thinking twice about publicly supporting Snowden, or are at least aware that that support is probably logged somewhere and might have repercussions in the future. This would have been ridiculous paranoia not that long ago.

pekk 13y ago
That's not a definition of tyranny, it's a hypothesis about tyranny. But it's foolish. Pointing a shotgun at random government workers like the census taker or sending ricin to the President are not doing anything to improve our politics.
ryanhuff 13y ago
I think some politicians (supporters of this policy) are very worried about this, in that it could turn their base against them, and be vote out of office. We will have to wait and see how public sentiment turns.

anonymfus 13y ago

"But when people fear each another they start to want tyranny." — anonymfus.

weego 13y ago

Which is useful only while tyranny is physical.

bmelton 13y ago
Look up the Battle of Athens. In a nutshell, some veterans returned home from fighting the war to find out that their local government had become oppressive - levying insane fees on speeding tickets, committing false arrests, taking bribes, etc. On top of all that, the local Sheriff had rigged the ballot box to ensure that they stayed in power, denied some the right to vote, and overthrew poll-watchers through force. The returned veterans recognized all of the above as tyranny, had put forth honest people for the election, and insisted that the election was done fairly be surrounding the Sheriff's office where the ballots where and mounting an armed resistance to ensure that tyranny wasn't done.

randomsearch 13y ago

Interesting. But, how does owning a gun provide protection against the US military?

mdesq 13y ago
I think the folks in the Middle East have pretty much demonstrated how this works.
- randomsearch 13y ago
  Gun ownership amongst individuals did not lead to the Arab Spring.
  - freehunter 13y ago
    But it did lead to an insanely long battle that continued well after the official war was over in not one but two countries. The governments had given up fighting, but the civilians with guns kept US forces under constant attack for ten years.
    - astrodust 13y ago
      Guns are an important tool, but it's Improvised Explosive Devices that are causing the majority of the casualties, over 63% of them in Iraq and 66% in Afghanistan. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_explosive_device http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_explosive_device) A lot of the guns in circulation in Iraq were liberated from the army and police, or acquired through corrupt channels, originally provided by the coalition forces themselves. You credit a well armed populace as being the key here, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. They could've started with zero guns and simply acquired them as necessary. Remember, a hostile government might shoot an unarmed individual in a conflict, but they will always shoot an armed one.
      - bmelton 13y ago
        Doesn't that just illustrate that their odds would have been better had they started with arms instead of acquiring them as they went though? This is somewhat similar to another argument I've had - there were some armed Jews in Germany who were able to leverage that firepower to hold off the SS and, eventually, escape. It certainly didn't stop the Nazis from committing the Holocaust, and communication / coordination are key to mounting a successful offense that the Jews didn't necessarily have time to mount, but while there were lots of Jews that died (some of them which might have even been armed), there were some that escaped (some of which were not armed); regardless, guns were demonstrably beneficial to those who fended off the SS. As pertaining to the US Military, they have proven over and over that guerrilla warfare is not their strong suit, and especially so on foreign soil. Vietnam, Middle East, etc., have all shown that to be true. Also, as was mentioned earlier, many, if not most of the existing armed forces would have a very hard time mounting all out martial law against its citizenry. That isn't meant to imply that the situation couldn't be framed as such that it appeared to be necessary, but that also doesn't hold for long.

jpdoctor 13y ago

> Thomas Jefferson: ""When governments fear the people, there is liberty. Looks like false attribution according to wikiquote. (Why do people feel the need to use proof by authority anyway? Either a thing is right, or it is insightful, but attributing it to dead 18th century rebels does not bolster the case.) ________________________________ When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. Falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson; first attributed to Jefferson in Gyeorgos C. Hatonn, It's All in the Game: Butterflies, Mind Control--The Razor's Edge‎ (1994), p. 214. A 1912 issue of The American Anti-socialist attributes the re-ordered form, "Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty", to John Basil Barnhill. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_...

justin66 13y ago
> Why do people feel the need to use proof by authority anyway? Either a thing is right, or it is insightful, but attributing it to dead 18th rebels does not bolster the case. There's at least one completely made up Orwell quote that gets kicked around quite a bit by conservatives. ("rough men") That one is weird: you'd think those people would be happy to NOT quote Orwell if they knew anything about his politics. I assume it's less about argument from authority and more about just a lack of eloquence or confidence on the part of the person relying on quotations to make their point.
- jpdoctor 13y ago
  > I assume it's less about argument from authority and more about just a lack of eloquence or confidence on the part of the person relying on quotations to make their point. That's probably right. Hell, it's part of the reason that Hallmark greeting cards will always have a viable business model.
  - justin66 13y ago
    I really don't mind it when it's just meant to amuse people or send a nice message. When people try to engage in a battle of ideas and they rely so directly on borrowed wisdom, it can make for a boring time.

chrischen 13y ago

Back then having to bear arms against your government was a much more likely scenario than it is now. Of course it would lead to something like the civil war. The democratic system is supposed to prevent that anyways. However in modern times we've moved quite a bit away from the possibility of armed rebellions. It's something that happens in less developed countries like Iraq.

umumum 13y ago

Fake Thomas Jefferson quote alert: http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/when-government-fears-people-there-libertyquotation http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/when-government-fea...

temp453463343 13y ago

The world Jefferson lived in is infinitely different from ours. There is absolutely no chance that the government of the US will turn tyrannical. none. zero. if you think there is you're nuts. There is all sorts of talk in this comment section about how people would fight the US military and stuff like that. There people are in la-la land. I'm not going to elaborate on this but: I think it's closely tied with the American obsession with the apocalypse (see zombie/post-apocalyptic movies) People have very very different expectations from the government now than they did even 50 years ago. No first world country (even ones that don't cherish liberty as much as us) in the past 50 years has turned to tyranny. There are studies about how past a certain GDP tyranny becomes unsustainable - and we're well past that point. I do what to clarify that I'm not against the second amendment at all. But the argument that it's to fight the government is absolutely absurd.

jlarocco 13y ago

That's not really true any more. When Thomas Jefferson was alive it was feasible for the people to protect themselves from tyranny by fighting the government because the technology available to "normal" people was the same as available to the military. Today it would be impossible. Even the police are 10000x better equipped than any group of civilian can be. And then there's the military... Besides that, I'm skeptical there will ever be an issue where enough people are angry enough to start a revolt against the government. Right now people are outraged because the government is massively violating our rights, but nobody's talking about an armed revolution.

lostlogin 13y ago

You also end up with people fearing the people unfortunately. Not sure how that was missing from the original equation.