8 ms·

I wonder what each bullet will cost once production starts? I sometimes think about the origins of the second amendment and if it's intent was to empower citiz

I wonder what each bullet will cost once production starts? I sometimes think about the origins of the second amendment and if it's intent was to empower citizens against a potentially oppressive government then it has failed. US military technology might as well be black magic. What can a "well regulated militia" do against smart bullets, M1 Abrams, Apache helicopters, etc? Thank goodness we are kept fat and happy.

noblethrasher 12y ago
We should probably be more worried about the non-lethal weapons that can be used to effect control and compliance — like the mobility denial and active denial systems. At least firehoses, dogs, and guns have a chance of illiciting sympathy from onlookers (e.g. the international community). Protesters on a big slip-n-slide will probably just end up on /r/funny.
- oftenwrong 12y ago
  Especially because "non-lethal" is a misnomer. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Victoria_Snelgrove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Victoria_Snelgrove and all of the people killed by tasers.
jMyles 12y ago
fourth?
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
I always assumed that was an argument for havin militias that have Apache helicopters and high explosives.
thecoffman 12y ago
I believe you mean "second." Additionally, vastly superior technology doesn't necessarily outweigh other factors. It certainly makes a huge difference but history is littered with counterexamples.
- ErikRogneby 12y ago
  Yes I did, thank you. The second amendment is the fourth article of the Bill of Rights.
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
This is why well into the 20th century we didn't have standing armies. We should do away with the one we have now.
- bicx 12y ago
  And draft a lucky few hundred thousand when the "need" arises. :)
wwwwwwwwww 12y ago
> Thank goodness we are kept fat and happy. This concept is actually called "bread and circus", and was originally applied by mid-roman emperors to better control the populace and keep political satisfaction up. I'm kinda disappointed that the wikipedia article doesn't go into detail about this because it played a huge part in maintaining control of the empire. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
- rational-future 12y ago
  Junk food and reality shows/professional sports nowadays.
pessimizer 12y ago
>Thank goodness we are kept fat and happy. If by "we" you mean you and me, and people like us. Plenty of people are skipping meals to save money.
wyager 12y ago
Militias don't have to fight directly against tanks and fighter jets. That's why they're effective. You can't maintain a police state by blowing up houses. If you do that, you end up cutting off your only revenue source (taxing employed people), because your tax base either can't or won't work (because they're dead, the roads are impassable, etc.). In fact, this situation would actually be quite beneficial to an insurgency, because if an attacker can't pay or feed their foot soldiers, they will lose their army. In the end, you need foot soldiers to maintain a police state. It's not economically feasible to give everyone state of the art sniper rifles like this, and spending 10x more money on soldiers doesn't make them 10x more effective. It is exponentially harder to maintain a police state than to destroy one, which is why even poorly trained, poorly equipped insurgencies can effectively fight against well trained, well equipped governments. If the US government has problems with this in Vietnam and Iraq, imagine how much worse it would be if they tried the same thing on their own well-armed revenue source.
- mikeyouse 12y ago
  > It's not economically feasible to give everyone state of the art sniper rifles like this. The US has ~2M active duty / reserve military members.[1] The SR25 is a common choice for 'sniper' rifles in the military and costs about $5K new and kitted out. If this state of the art rifle costs 5x the typical rifle, it would cost $25B to outfit half of our current military with these weapons. The US spends over $650B per year on our military[2], so that $25B would only represent 4% of our annual budget. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_military_and_paramilitary_personnel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...
  - tim333 12y ago
    Also I don't think anyone's proposing giving everyone these. A couple of hundred could make quite a difference.
- dobbsbob 12y ago
  To maintain a police state you need mass surveillance and informants. Secret police make you disappear long before your armed rebellion starts and your neighbors will be too scared to get involved or are the informants who turned you in. Flooding the streets with police isn't needed, along with informants they can always work with gangs like Assad does to act as street enforcement. The state's only cost is looking the other way while trafficking goes on and paying a network of snitches in every community.
walterbell 12y ago
The greater the asymmetry of technology, the greater the PR problem. PR problems are infectious, but they require a sympathetic protagonist. A pre-emptive solution is to fake unsympathetic protagonists that can be crushed ruthlessly to dissuade contagion. Parse wisely. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/antz/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/antz/
rayiner 12y ago
The basis of American freedom isn't some libertarians with rifles. Its the fact that the U.S. military consists of poorly-paid kids who care more about family and community than they do about abstract ideas. That and the fact that the military and its arsenal is physicislly distributed over numerous states. More powerful military technology makes us more free, not less. It just means it takes fewer people to break ranks from an oppressive government and effectively oppose it. The biggest threat is well paid mercenaries. It always has been.
- josephjrobison 12y ago
  Interesting thought pattern which I agree with to some extent. Have you come across any articles related to this? Would love to read.
- zobzu 12y ago
  That also relates to the why the police is generally enforcing whatever a government wants, while the military always sides with the people when things go really wrong.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - njharman 12y ago
    Counter examples. Civil war, Japanese internment, numerous actions against native Americans although you may not consider them protected by bill of rights.
    - rayiner 12y ago
      In the context of "oppressive government" I'm thinking of the classic 1984 type situation, with a small faction suppressing the will of the majority. I.e. subversion of majoritarian will through military power. Civil war was a civil war, with the country split into two sides. Regional bonds took precedence over national ones but the military of each faction sided with the people of their region. Japanese internment and native Americans involved minorities. The soldiers didn't come from those communities, and native americans were barely considered people much less Americans. It doesn't take much to get the majority to take action against a minority, but that's not an existential threat to democracy.
noonespecial 12y ago
The 2nd isn't really to protect you from the combined might of an oppressive nation-state. If it gets that far, its really already too late. The 2nd is to protect you from Bob down at the police station in Podunksville deciding that he might like to have a go at running the town his way and helping himself to your stuff. Its the safety valve on the local-est kind of corruption.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  The 2nd was initially more to assure the states the means to protect themselves against encroachment by the central government (and thereby dissuade such encroachment), a concern that was within vivid living memory for the framers, and was of particular concern to skeptics of the centralization that the Constitution represented compared to the Articles of Confederation. Like all of the Bill of Rights, it was about constraining the Federal government, not the Podunksville Police.
ranran876 12y ago
While I'm not for or against the second amendment, do you honestly think it's a realistic scenario that the government gets oppressive to the point where people will pick up arms? Do you really honestly believe that? Do you think other developed nations like the UK, France, or Japan are at a higher risk of turning to tyranny b.c they do not have guns widely available?
- droopyEyelids 12y ago
  Every nation you listed including our own has at some point fought against it's own government. The assumption isn't whether a government can get oppressive to the point where people fight. It's "Is our government so good that citizens will never have cause to oppose it, for the rest of human history?"
  - ranran876 12y ago
    Just because something has happened before, doesn't mean it's bound to happen again. All those countries have also had slavery and monarchies, but we don't worry about that happening again b/c humanity moves forward and certain things simply become impossible - this includes things like the return of nazism, communism, evil tyrants, emperors, juntas and whatever other anachronism you can think of "nearly all the autocracies in the world with a higher [than $6000 ] per capita income are petro-states" http://thediplomat.com/2012/10/is-chinas-communist-party-doomed/ http://thediplomat.com/2012/10/is-chinas-communist-party-doo...
  - vacri 12y ago
    What was the UK's popular uprising against its own government?
    - grkvlt 12y ago
      The English civil war(s) from 1642 to 1651 which resulted in the regicide of Charles I and then Cromwell's Protectorate. Until everyone decided that maybe Kings were kindof OK, as long as parliament could tell them to fuck off if they got too demanding, plus Cromwell (and son) had generally pissed everyone off by then...
jeffdavis 12y ago
"I sometimes think about the origins of the second amendment and if it's intent was to empower citizens against a potentially oppressive government then it has failed." The government doesn't actively need to attack people with their own agents. They just need to make it known that someone won't be protected, and let the criminal element do the rest. In some places, weapons for self-defense can be a defense against that kind of government.
geon 12y ago
It is not so much about the weapons, but that you won't even have the chance to use them. How would you organize your coup? The government listens to all your calls, reads your email/im, knows where you travel and what you buy. You would be branded a terrorist and detained before you could say "unconstitutional". Like guns would even make a difference...
FroshKiller 12y ago
Fire is a cheap and freely available force multiplier.
sosborn 12y ago
>What can a "well regulated militia" do against smart bullets, M1 Abrams, Apache helicopters, etc? First of all, have you seen how much of a fight low tech militias have put up against the U.S. lately? Secondly, don't forget that the people trained to use that technology are U.S. citizens too and will fight for their family before they fight for their county (most of them anyway).
- Shivetya 12y ago
  There is one thing to note about the "difficulty" the modern US military has faced versus low tech militias. The US military has been required to exercise due caution so as not to cause significant collateral damage. The trade off is lives saved today versus those lost tomorrow. If WW2 had been fought the same way it may have taken years longer. You do not end support for an enemy until you beat the population that supports them. There is no infinite number in resistance, ww2 proved that.
- vacri 12y ago
  There's no government that would turn the US military against the US population. It just wouldn't happen. What is happening though is the militarisation of the police, and making it more and more 'normal' for the population to accept it. The idea of a national army being turned against it's own people is hopelessly outdated in the modern, western world. There are more efficient and more subtle ways to control the population.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    Read up about the bonus riots, not an episode the US military is particularly proud of I would bet.
- walshemj 12y ago
  They don't in most cases come out and fight - they use the most effective tactics for their lower quality troops and poorer equipment.
  - sophacles 12y ago
tsotha 12y ago
No revolution succeeds when the military is united against the rebels. Any scenario which has the US government successfully overthrown includes some significant part of the military either deserting or switching sides.
ctdonath 12y ago
Every year in the USA, some 18,000,000 (yes, eighteen million) snipers engage in live fire live target training. They operate independently with their own weapons, camo, comms, transport, and other gear (much if it high quality) - and do so as lone operators with minimal government involvement. "Operation Deer Season" is a resounding success.

noblethrasher 12y ago

We should probably be more worried about the non-lethal weapons that can be used to effect control and compliance — like the mobility denial and active denial systems. At least firehoses, dogs, and guns have a chance of illiciting sympathy from onlookers (e.g. the international community). Protesters on a big slip-n-slide will probably just end up on /r/funny.

oftenwrong 12y ago
Especially because "non-lethal" is a misnomer. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Victoria_Snelgrove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Victoria_Snelgrove and all of the people killed by tasers.

jMyles 12y ago

fourth?

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

I always assumed that was an argument for havin militias that have Apache helicopters and high explosives.

thecoffman 12y ago

I believe you mean "second." Additionally, vastly superior technology doesn't necessarily outweigh other factors. It certainly makes a huge difference but history is littered with counterexamples.

ErikRogneby 12y ago
Yes I did, thank you. The second amendment is the fourth article of the Bill of Rights.

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago

This is why well into the 20th century we didn't have standing armies. We should do away with the one we have now.

bicx 12y ago
And draft a lucky few hundred thousand when the "need" arises. :)

wwwwwwwwww 12y ago

> Thank goodness we are kept fat and happy. This concept is actually called "bread and circus", and was originally applied by mid-roman emperors to better control the populace and keep political satisfaction up. I'm kinda disappointed that the wikipedia article doesn't go into detail about this because it played a huge part in maintaining control of the empire. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

rational-future 12y ago
Junk food and reality shows/professional sports nowadays.

pessimizer 12y ago

>Thank goodness we are kept fat and happy. If by "we" you mean you and me, and people like us. Plenty of people are skipping meals to save money.

wyager 12y ago

Militias don't have to fight directly against tanks and fighter jets. That's why they're effective. You can't maintain a police state by blowing up houses. If you do that, you end up cutting off your only revenue source (taxing employed people), because your tax base either can't or won't work (because they're dead, the roads are impassable, etc.). In fact, this situation would actually be quite beneficial to an insurgency, because if an attacker can't pay or feed their foot soldiers, they will lose their army. In the end, you need foot soldiers to maintain a police state. It's not economically feasible to give everyone state of the art sniper rifles like this, and spending 10x more money on soldiers doesn't make them 10x more effective. It is exponentially harder to maintain a police state than to destroy one, which is why even poorly trained, poorly equipped insurgencies can effectively fight against well trained, well equipped governments. If the US government has problems with this in Vietnam and Iraq, imagine how much worse it would be if they tried the same thing on their own well-armed revenue source.

mikeyouse 12y ago
> It's not economically feasible to give everyone state of the art sniper rifles like this. The US has ~2M active duty / reserve military members.[1] The SR25 is a common choice for 'sniper' rifles in the military and costs about $5K new and kitted out. If this state of the art rifle costs 5x the typical rifle, it would cost $25B to outfit half of our current military with these weapons. The US spends over $650B per year on our military[2], so that $25B would only represent 4% of our annual budget. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_military_and_paramilitary_personnel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...
- tim333 12y ago
  Also I don't think anyone's proposing giving everyone these. A couple of hundred could make quite a difference.
dobbsbob 12y ago
To maintain a police state you need mass surveillance and informants. Secret police make you disappear long before your armed rebellion starts and your neighbors will be too scared to get involved or are the informants who turned you in. Flooding the streets with police isn't needed, along with informants they can always work with gangs like Assad does to act as street enforcement. The state's only cost is looking the other way while trafficking goes on and paying a network of snitches in every community.

walterbell 12y ago

The greater the asymmetry of technology, the greater the PR problem. PR problems are infectious, but they require a sympathetic protagonist. A pre-emptive solution is to fake unsympathetic protagonists that can be crushed ruthlessly to dissuade contagion. Parse wisely. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/antz/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/antz/

rayiner 12y ago

The basis of American freedom isn't some libertarians with rifles. Its the fact that the U.S. military consists of poorly-paid kids who care more about family and community than they do about abstract ideas. That and the fact that the military and its arsenal is physicislly distributed over numerous states. More powerful military technology makes us more free, not less. It just means it takes fewer people to break ranks from an oppressive government and effectively oppose it. The biggest threat is well paid mercenaries. It always has been.

josephjrobison 12y ago
Interesting thought pattern which I agree with to some extent. Have you come across any articles related to this? Would love to read.
zobzu 12y ago
That also relates to the why the police is generally enforcing whatever a government wants, while the military always sides with the people when things go really wrong.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- njharman 12y ago
  Counter examples. Civil war, Japanese internment, numerous actions against native Americans although you may not consider them protected by bill of rights.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    In the context of "oppressive government" I'm thinking of the classic 1984 type situation, with a small faction suppressing the will of the majority. I.e. subversion of majoritarian will through military power. Civil war was a civil war, with the country split into two sides. Regional bonds took precedence over national ones but the military of each faction sided with the people of their region. Japanese internment and native Americans involved minorities. The soldiers didn't come from those communities, and native americans were barely considered people much less Americans. It doesn't take much to get the majority to take action against a minority, but that's not an existential threat to democracy.

noonespecial 12y ago

The 2nd isn't really to protect you from the combined might of an oppressive nation-state. If it gets that far, its really already too late. The 2nd is to protect you from Bob down at the police station in Podunksville deciding that he might like to have a go at running the town his way and helping himself to your stuff. Its the safety valve on the local-est kind of corruption.

dragonwriter 12y ago
The 2nd was initially more to assure the states the means to protect themselves against encroachment by the central government (and thereby dissuade such encroachment), a concern that was within vivid living memory for the framers, and was of particular concern to skeptics of the centralization that the Constitution represented compared to the Articles of Confederation. Like all of the Bill of Rights, it was about constraining the Federal government, not the Podunksville Police.

ranran876 12y ago

While I'm not for or against the second amendment, do you honestly think it's a realistic scenario that the government gets oppressive to the point where people will pick up arms? Do you really honestly believe that? Do you think other developed nations like the UK, France, or Japan are at a higher risk of turning to tyranny b.c they do not have guns widely available?

droopyEyelids 12y ago
Every nation you listed including our own has at some point fought against it's own government. The assumption isn't whether a government can get oppressive to the point where people fight. It's "Is our government so good that citizens will never have cause to oppose it, for the rest of human history?"
- ranran876 12y ago
  Just because something has happened before, doesn't mean it's bound to happen again. All those countries have also had slavery and monarchies, but we don't worry about that happening again b/c humanity moves forward and certain things simply become impossible - this includes things like the return of nazism, communism, evil tyrants, emperors, juntas and whatever other anachronism you can think of "nearly all the autocracies in the world with a higher [than $6000 ] per capita income are petro-states" http://thediplomat.com/2012/10/is-chinas-communist-party-doomed/ http://thediplomat.com/2012/10/is-chinas-communist-party-doo...
- vacri 12y ago
  What was the UK's popular uprising against its own government?
  - grkvlt 12y ago
    The English civil war(s) from 1642 to 1651 which resulted in the regicide of Charles I and then Cromwell's Protectorate. Until everyone decided that maybe Kings were kindof OK, as long as parliament could tell them to fuck off if they got too demanding, plus Cromwell (and son) had generally pissed everyone off by then...

jeffdavis 12y ago

"I sometimes think about the origins of the second amendment and if it's intent was to empower citizens against a potentially oppressive government then it has failed." The government doesn't actively need to attack people with their own agents. They just need to make it known that someone won't be protected, and let the criminal element do the rest. In some places, weapons for self-defense can be a defense against that kind of government.

geon 12y ago

It is not so much about the weapons, but that you won't even have the chance to use them. How would you organize your coup? The government listens to all your calls, reads your email/im, knows where you travel and what you buy. You would be branded a terrorist and detained before you could say "unconstitutional". Like guns would even make a difference...

FroshKiller 12y ago

Fire is a cheap and freely available force multiplier.

sosborn 12y ago

>What can a "well regulated militia" do against smart bullets, M1 Abrams, Apache helicopters, etc? First of all, have you seen how much of a fight low tech militias have put up against the U.S. lately? Secondly, don't forget that the people trained to use that technology are U.S. citizens too and will fight for their family before they fight for their county (most of them anyway).

Shivetya 12y ago
There is one thing to note about the "difficulty" the modern US military has faced versus low tech militias. The US military has been required to exercise due caution so as not to cause significant collateral damage. The trade off is lives saved today versus those lost tomorrow. If WW2 had been fought the same way it may have taken years longer. You do not end support for an enemy until you beat the population that supports them. There is no infinite number in resistance, ww2 proved that.
vacri 12y ago
There's no government that would turn the US military against the US population. It just wouldn't happen. What is happening though is the militarisation of the police, and making it more and more 'normal' for the population to accept it. The idea of a national army being turned against it's own people is hopelessly outdated in the modern, western world. There are more efficient and more subtle ways to control the population.
- walshemj 12y ago
  Read up about the bonus riots, not an episode the US military is particularly proud of I would bet.
walshemj 12y ago
They don't in most cases come out and fight - they use the most effective tactics for their lower quality troops and poorer equipment.
- sophacles 12y ago

tsotha 12y ago

No revolution succeeds when the military is united against the rebels. Any scenario which has the US government successfully overthrown includes some significant part of the military either deserting or switching sides.

ctdonath 12y ago

Every year in the USA, some 18,000,000 (yes, eighteen million) snipers engage in live fire live target training. They operate independently with their own weapons, camo, comms, transport, and other gear (much if it high quality) - and do so as lone operators with minimal government involvement. "Operation Deer Season" is a resounding success.