7 ms·

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

by randomsearch 13y ago

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.
        astrodust 13y ago
        It's disrupting supply lines that does the real damage. Fuel trucks in Iraq were an extremely popular target for this reason. You seem to think having piles of guns to start with puts you at an advantage. It doesn't. If anything, having piles of guns is a liability. In Libya they would just raid police stations and military depots and get all the guns they could ever want. I'm sure the same thing is going on in Syria. Even in a place like Japan where firearms are heavily restricted, it would be only hours after some hypothetical civil war broke out before the resistance was armed. Guns are an important tool in fighting, but there's billions of them in circulation around the world. If people want guns, they will get them. The amount of initiative lost in not having guns in the first few hours of a struggle is negligible. This kind of unrest takes years to resolve.
      - Zak 13y ago
        An advantage of an armed population is a large number of people skilled in the use of arms. Most people cannot reliably hit a person-sized target at several hundred meters the first time they pick up a rifle. Make that target a trained soldier who's moving and shooting back and the disadvantage grows much larger.
        astrodust 13y ago
        I doubt the average American that owns a gun could hit a tin can at twenty feet. On the other hand, a random Israeli has probably participated in mandatory military service even if they don't own a gun.
mpyne 13y ago
In a way, it doesn't. There's really no way to arm yourself in a fashion to survive sustained attack from the U.S. military in this day and age. But that's one of the reasons the military are sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution as the primary goal, not simply to obey orders. They even throw in the surreal weasel words "against all enemies, foreign and domestic" as a way of really punching that point home. So it's not really possible to meet the full intent of the 2nd Amendment any longer but at the same time there are other safeguards.
philwelch 13y ago
It's somewhat fortunate that the actual military is, if anything, the least likely threat. Almost all of the veterans I've known would take the people's side. So if it came down to it, I could see large amounts of the military refusing orders or defecting. The main risk is probably paramilitaries like the ATF or your local SWAT team. One of the neat ways the Second Amendment is self-enforcing is that, if you sent those guys house to house to confiscate people's firearms, they'd get shot at. It also ends up being really handy to stand up to the local authorities from time to time: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946) http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946) http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/ http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret...
- bmelton 13y ago
  I was going to say almost exactly that, only instead of the ATF (who have very little in the way of tactical response capabilities), the DHS is the biggest threat on the whole. Firstly, they are not bound by Posse Comitatus, but even moreso than that, they've been gearing up for awhile to have extremely tactical response capacity, including live-fire drills in and over major cities, purchase of armored urban vehicles, and massive ammunition purchases. At last count, DHS has approximately five bullets for every single American in the US borders. Only slightly scarier is that they've been purchasing 'hesitate no more' targets to train on designed to desensitize them to the killing of 'normal people', including pregnant women, children, etc. Also, the ammo they've been buying are illegal to use extra-nationally due to the Geneva convention.
  - davidcuddeback 13y ago
    Can you cite a source for this information?
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - bmelton 13y ago
      Yes (this isn't meant to be sarcastic, but necessary because I had to move this post from where it was to where it is, and HN keeps marking it dead). The DHS is not bound by Posse Comitatus[1]. The DHS has been buying massive amounts of ammo[2][3][4], and most recently, the House has voted to get justification on the quantity of hollow points it is purchasing[5]. It looks like the claim that they're buying large quantities of urban armored vehicles is wrong[4], though they do acknowledge that they possess them, though my Google-fu is on the fritz getting a source for that since all searches for "DHS armored vehicles" returns the wrong conspiracy theory. The DHS was using 'no more hesitation' targets that look like citizens[6][7]. Of note, link 7 implies that the manufacturer took them off the site, but the manufacturer never claimed that they were no longer for sale, or that they were no longer being sold directly to DHS, even when asked that question directly. I have no direct knowledge either way. The ammo they've been buying is hollow-point[2][3], and hollow point ammo is illegal per Geneva convention (is actually wrong, it's illegal based on the Hague convention, the point stands true either way... Hague just predates Geneva)[8] I think that's all of it. Let me know if I missed anything. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act [2] - http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/the-ammo-conspiracy/ http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/the-ammo-cons... [3] - http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2013/04/29/gao-now-investigating-dhs-ammo-purchases http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2013/04... [4] - http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/ssabullets.asp http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/ssabullets.asp [5] - http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/303803-house-votes-to-delay-bulk-ammo-purchase-by-dhs http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/303803-house-vot... [6] - http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/high-tide-and-turn/2013/feb/28/dhs-training-practice-targets-featuring-children-p/ http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/high-tid... [7] - http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/25/law-enforcement-targets-inc-discontinues http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/25/law-enforcement-targets-in... [8] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow-point_bullet#Legality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow-point_bullet#Legality
mindcrime 13y ago
But, how does owning a gun provide protection against the US military? I don't understand why people keep asking this question, and variations of it, or offering up the argument "the 2A is useless for allowing rebellion since you can't defeat the US military". Bands of rebels armed with mostly light weapons have caused superpowers all sorts of issues: See Afghanistan, from the Soviet era through today. And if a full fledged rebellion did break out in the US, here are a few points to consider: 1. It's likely that at least some military units would side with the rebels. So you're already not talking about a case of just "you and your AR-15 versus tanks and F-16's". 2. Nukes are effectively "off the table" since there wouldn't be much point in nuking your own country, as there wouldn't be anything left to rule. 3. A hypothetical rebellion would not be limited to just AR-15's and what-not... factor in IEDs and various kinds of improved weapons. 4. And factor in stolen / captured military weapons. 5. And factor in military weapons provided, illicitly, to the rebels by the manufacturers, distributors, foreign groups, and gosh knows who else. 6. The population of the US is somewhere north of 300 million people, right? And a significant portion of the population own firearms. How many members are in the standing US military? According to Wikipedia, there are 1,429,995 active duty members of the US armed forces. IF a rebellion had sufficient popular support, consider, as they say, that quantity has a quality all it's own. Anyway, the point is to say that it's not as simple as "you and a gun versus the US military" if you look at the big picture. I mean, sure, if it's just you and you take on a tank with an AR-15, they're just going to run you over, game over. But if an actual, massed rebellion, with lots of popular support were to break out, those guns do matter.
- antoko 13y ago
  If you've got the popular support you're eluding to you'd be fine with baseball bats and molotov cocktails. You'd also be fine to steal the guns and other weapons of military/police forces as you have victorious encounters. You wouldn't actually need the guns in the first place.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    Maybe not, but I'd prefer not to handicap myself right out of the gate.
lightknight 13y ago
How does owning a gun provide protection against meteors? It doesn't; the question itself is invalid. If you think the US military will deploy against even one million Americans on American ground, for the sake of shredding the US Constitution, well...you may as well believe orange is violet. The US military has already said, as have the multitudes of its members under its control, that it will not be marching on the US civilian population. They would throw down their arms and join the other side, that of their friends and families, long before they'd betray everything they'd sworn an oath to. Now, you might find one or two people, with a handful of soldiers who, for the thirty seconds it would take before they'd be executed (not even court martial-ed) with such an intent. And they'd be buried in a common grave, stripped of name and rank, for their actions.

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.
      - astrodust 13y ago
        It's disrupting supply lines that does the real damage. Fuel trucks in Iraq were an extremely popular target for this reason. You seem to think having piles of guns to start with puts you at an advantage. It doesn't. If anything, having piles of guns is a liability. In Libya they would just raid police stations and military depots and get all the guns they could ever want. I'm sure the same thing is going on in Syria. Even in a place like Japan where firearms are heavily restricted, it would be only hours after some hypothetical civil war broke out before the resistance was armed. Guns are an important tool in fighting, but there's billions of them in circulation around the world. If people want guns, they will get them. The amount of initiative lost in not having guns in the first few hours of a struggle is negligible. This kind of unrest takes years to resolve.
    - Zak 13y ago
      An advantage of an armed population is a large number of people skilled in the use of arms. Most people cannot reliably hit a person-sized target at several hundred meters the first time they pick up a rifle. Make that target a trained soldier who's moving and shooting back and the disadvantage grows much larger.
      - astrodust 13y ago
        I doubt the average American that owns a gun could hit a tin can at twenty feet. On the other hand, a random Israeli has probably participated in mandatory military service even if they don't own a gun.

mpyne 13y ago

In a way, it doesn't. There's really no way to arm yourself in a fashion to survive sustained attack from the U.S. military in this day and age. But that's one of the reasons the military are sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution as the primary goal, not simply to obey orders. They even throw in the surreal weasel words "against all enemies, foreign and domestic" as a way of really punching that point home. So it's not really possible to meet the full intent of the 2nd Amendment any longer but at the same time there are other safeguards.

philwelch 13y ago

It's somewhat fortunate that the actual military is, if anything, the least likely threat. Almost all of the veterans I've known would take the people's side. So if it came down to it, I could see large amounts of the military refusing orders or defecting. The main risk is probably paramilitaries like the ATF or your local SWAT team. One of the neat ways the Second Amendment is self-enforcing is that, if you sent those guys house to house to confiscate people's firearms, they'd get shot at. It also ends up being really handy to stand up to the local authorities from time to time: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946) http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946) http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/ http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret...

bmelton 13y ago
I was going to say almost exactly that, only instead of the ATF (who have very little in the way of tactical response capabilities), the DHS is the biggest threat on the whole. Firstly, they are not bound by Posse Comitatus, but even moreso than that, they've been gearing up for awhile to have extremely tactical response capacity, including live-fire drills in and over major cities, purchase of armored urban vehicles, and massive ammunition purchases. At last count, DHS has approximately five bullets for every single American in the US borders. Only slightly scarier is that they've been purchasing 'hesitate no more' targets to train on designed to desensitize them to the killing of 'normal people', including pregnant women, children, etc. Also, the ammo they've been buying are illegal to use extra-nationally due to the Geneva convention.
- davidcuddeback 13y ago
  Can you cite a source for this information?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - bmelton 13y ago
    Yes (this isn't meant to be sarcastic, but necessary because I had to move this post from where it was to where it is, and HN keeps marking it dead). The DHS is not bound by Posse Comitatus[1]. The DHS has been buying massive amounts of ammo[2][3][4], and most recently, the House has voted to get justification on the quantity of hollow points it is purchasing[5]. It looks like the claim that they're buying large quantities of urban armored vehicles is wrong[4], though they do acknowledge that they possess them, though my Google-fu is on the fritz getting a source for that since all searches for "DHS armored vehicles" returns the wrong conspiracy theory. The DHS was using 'no more hesitation' targets that look like citizens[6][7]. Of note, link 7 implies that the manufacturer took them off the site, but the manufacturer never claimed that they were no longer for sale, or that they were no longer being sold directly to DHS, even when asked that question directly. I have no direct knowledge either way. The ammo they've been buying is hollow-point[2][3], and hollow point ammo is illegal per Geneva convention (is actually wrong, it's illegal based on the Hague convention, the point stands true either way... Hague just predates Geneva)[8] I think that's all of it. Let me know if I missed anything. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act [2] - http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/the-ammo-conspiracy/ http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/the-ammo-cons... [3] - http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2013/04/29/gao-now-investigating-dhs-ammo-purchases http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2013/04... [4] - http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/ssabullets.asp http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/ssabullets.asp [5] - http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/303803-house-votes-to-delay-bulk-ammo-purchase-by-dhs http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/303803-house-vot... [6] - http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/high-tide-and-turn/2013/feb/28/dhs-training-practice-targets-featuring-children-p/ http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/high-tid... [7] - http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/25/law-enforcement-targets-inc-discontinues http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/25/law-enforcement-targets-in... [8] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow-point_bullet#Legality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow-point_bullet#Legality

mindcrime 13y ago

But, how does owning a gun provide protection against the US military? I don't understand why people keep asking this question, and variations of it, or offering up the argument "the 2A is useless for allowing rebellion since you can't defeat the US military". Bands of rebels armed with mostly light weapons have caused superpowers all sorts of issues: See Afghanistan, from the Soviet era through today. And if a full fledged rebellion did break out in the US, here are a few points to consider: 1. It's likely that at least some military units would side with the rebels. So you're already not talking about a case of just "you and your AR-15 versus tanks and F-16's". 2. Nukes are effectively "off the table" since there wouldn't be much point in nuking your own country, as there wouldn't be anything left to rule. 3. A hypothetical rebellion would not be limited to just AR-15's and what-not... factor in IEDs and various kinds of improved weapons. 4. And factor in stolen / captured military weapons. 5. And factor in military weapons provided, illicitly, to the rebels by the manufacturers, distributors, foreign groups, and gosh knows who else. 6. The population of the US is somewhere north of 300 million people, right? And a significant portion of the population own firearms. How many members are in the standing US military? According to Wikipedia, there are 1,429,995 active duty members of the US armed forces. IF a rebellion had sufficient popular support, consider, as they say, that quantity has a quality all it's own. Anyway, the point is to say that it's not as simple as "you and a gun versus the US military" if you look at the big picture. I mean, sure, if it's just you and you take on a tank with an AR-15, they're just going to run you over, game over. But if an actual, massed rebellion, with lots of popular support were to break out, those guns do matter.

antoko 13y ago
If you've got the popular support you're eluding to you'd be fine with baseball bats and molotov cocktails. You'd also be fine to steal the guns and other weapons of military/police forces as you have victorious encounters. You wouldn't actually need the guns in the first place.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  Maybe not, but I'd prefer not to handicap myself right out of the gate.

lightknight 13y ago

How does owning a gun provide protection against meteors? It doesn't; the question itself is invalid. If you think the US military will deploy against even one million Americans on American ground, for the sake of shredding the US Constitution, well...you may as well believe orange is violet. The US military has already said, as have the multitudes of its members under its control, that it will not be marching on the US civilian population. They would throw down their arms and join the other side, that of their friends and families, long before they'd betray everything they'd sworn an oath to. Now, you might find one or two people, with a handful of soldiers who, for the thirty seconds it would take before they'd be executed (not even court martial-ed) with such an intent. And they'd be buried in a common grave, stripped of name and rank, for their actions.