In the same way other countries who've banned firearms have carried it out? It's not like there's no precedent for this if you look outside of America.
America isn't other countries. Guns are as ingrained in rural America's culture as lifted trucks and beer. There would literally be armed revolts if the government tried taking peoples' guns away en masse.
Every time I see this argument come up people always try to frame it like it will be ‘nutters’ shooting ‘some’ people. You are very wrong, and that is the attitude that will get a lot of innocent people killed. This country is filled with rational, professional, well organized people who will kill before being disarmed.
> well organized people who will kill before being disarmed.
The collective noun for people who will kill rather than obey the law is "terrorists".
One of the conditions for peace in Northern Ireland was that political groups had to disarm in order to enter politics, because you can't do politics with people who are threatening to murder you. That's not a democracy.
One of the founding principles of the US was the right of its citizenry to protect itself from the overreach of the government, which was enabled partly through the right for citizens to own firearms and other weapons. They're a means of self defense, but more importantly as a way to keep the gov in check. No government can control millions of armed citizens--which is exactly the point.
Killing in response to being disarmed is probably one of the most "American" things its citizens could do.
You don't think trying to murder policemen because your country enacted gun controls to protect schoolchildren would be "nutters trying to shoot people"?
"Oh but I need this 1000 round per minute gun for pest control in my apartment! I'll murder people to protect my right to have it."??
I'm not sure where you got 1000 rounds per minute from, even a fully automatic rifle generally cannot fire that quickly (it would probably need to be belt-fed or you would be changing magazines more than thirty times per minute).
A semi-automatic rifle like the AR-15 is unlikely to surpass 100 rounds per minute.
The 1000 rounds per minute was intended to show that the post was knowingly exaggerated, however in part it was inspired by a "girl fires minigun" post I saw on Reddit. I can't truly recall but I think it was an M134 and that it did maybe 3000 rounds per minute.
Did you read the start of the thread that I was responding to.
The whole thread is reference to the parent saying people would rise up in armed revolt if the law was changed to tighten gun controls.
Assuming the national guard weren't sent in then as I understand it regular police would be charged with arresting those who refused to follow the legislation.
To me the meaning of that is clear - if the law is changed people will shoot (at) those who oppose them.
In this hypothetical case that would be police attempting to arrest them for unlawfully keeping controlled firearms.
You appear to be saying if tighter gun controls were enacted your family members who are policemen would leave their jobs in order to shoot anyone attempting to confiscate their controlled weapons? Do you think that's a reasonable position? Kill your own countrymen now in order to protect your right to more efficiently kill others in some intangible imaginary future scenario?
I think the implication was that a very large fraction of police/national guard/US armed forces would at least refuse to enforce such a law, if not join the rebellion itself. Indeed, I've never met a more adamant group of 2nd amendment supporters than my military friends.
But should such a dire scenario occur, I have always wondered how these small arms would fare against UAVs. The trouble is that we have precedent in this country that in a large-scale rebellion, it is taken out of law enforcement's hands and put into the military's hands.
>a very large fraction of police/national guard/US armed forces would at least refuse to enforce such a law //
Anything to support this? It's very sad to imagine that not being allowed automatic weapons at home, say, would turn LEOs in to outlaws. Do they perceive an actual threat? Do they not care about all the school massacres?
Are this large proportion of armed personnel in rebellion against the bump stock rulings that I understand were enacted recently?
The original context of this thread (starting with user yequalsx's comment) isn't about "tighter gun controls", but rather the a complete ban of all guns ("I hope I am now seeing the beginning of the end of acceptance of gun ownership.") I think that is the scenario -- actual confiscation of all guns -- user purple-again was addressing ("This country is filled with rational, professional, well organized people who will kill before being disarmed").
This is different from outlawing or more tightly controlling certain classes of weapons, which seems to be what you're talking about. I think not being able to easily purchase fully automatic weapons or crazier stuff like rocket propelled grenades, stingers, 20mm cannons, etc is something a minority of gun enthusiasts grumble about but pretty much everyone basically accepts. Nobody that I know of is revolting about that, cops/feds have no problem enforcing it, etc.
Right, but if the type of people having their guns taken away (say repeat violent offenders) or the type of guns being taken away (say automatics) are reasonable enough in the eyes of the people, you don't see a ton of resistance. Gun laws have been incrementally tightened many times in the past. It's lobbied against, voted against, and there is outcry by some gun owners, but not mass rebellion.
I think banning bump stocks, which are just a crude workaround of the longstanding automatic gun restrictions, are something we'll probably see without mass revolt or officers refusing to enforce.
I wasn't really attempting to express an opinion on how valid or likely this claim is, just to clarify what I took to be GP's point.
But for fun, I'll try to address the question. I live in a conservative state and do some work with public health policy, working with local politicians and have friends in LEO and military. Here are the common arguments/viewpoints (I am not endorsing them):
- The biggest proportion of gun deaths are suicides, so focusing on random massacres or inner-city violence, which are tiny blips on the mortality radar, is not a productive or a good-faith basis for banning guns.
- There is a (somewhat justified IMO) fear of a slippery-slope approach to gun regulation. It is not controversial or speculative to say there is a large contingent on the left that would like to totally ban them if it were possible.
- Guns are very limited in the damage they can do. A bomb in a high-school assembly could do a lot more damage than the most well-prepared shooter, and with much less risk to the perpetrator. At best, guns are not the most dangerous thing to be focused on and at worst, banning them could push psychopaths into more dangerous alternatives.
LEOs and military folks lean conservative. That means they tend to generally distrust or even fear the very government they work for. LEOs in particular are well acquainted with the damage guns do on a daily basis but frequently do not see banning them as a solution because:
- It is impractical
- The people killing each other with them are for the most part poor or (by definition) criminals, so no one cares about them
- The original intention of the 2nd Amendment was to protect the people from the government that, again, they distrust and fear, so even if banning guns would save lives, which they would dispute, it is a worthwhile cost to pay to protect against tyranny.
- There is a viewpoint that gun control actually increases violent crime, and therefore deaths, because guns serve as a deterrent. I have been in an extremely long-running debate with a local politician about whether this is the case.
As a result of all these arguments, I think a serious effort to confiscate guns would make many, many people in conservative states, including LEOs and military, very highly irritated. Irritated enough to rebel? I have no idea.
Again, I am not endorsing most of this, but there is one argument that resonates with me from a public health perspective. Gun homicide is an extremely rare cause of death. I personally feel that it would be orders of magnitude more helpful if the left would channel its energy into increasing funding for your friendly neighborhood National Institutes of Health.
It isn't clear who you're threatening to shoot. All you've said is "There is an organized group of citizens ready to carry out extrajudicial killings if gun laws change."
To the rest of us, that sounds like the violence threatened by a terrorist group--and maybe you shoot policemen, maybe you shoot your neighbors, I dunno, I'm not the one talking about keeping my guns around to be able to shoot my fellow citizens.
What's interesting is that rural America was in favor of increased gun control in the 1960s when blacks started to assert their right to own guns. Ultimately peoples' attitudes can be swayed and changed and it isn't really hard to do it. Witness our embracing of torture, taking shoes off to board an airplane, fear of sharia law, etc.
Yes, and blacks were taking up arms because they were literally being bombed. The whites wanted to control their rights to have guns so they could continue controlling the black populations with violent force.
So you highlight how gun control has been used as an oppressive tool in the past. What are we do to when only our corrupt government is allowed to have guns?
If you're going by second amendment rights, at this point it's more to the spirit of it for civillian fighter jets and tanks to be legalized than guns.
To some extent, I actually imagine it'd be safer for the average citizen.
* * *
From a more protectionist standpoint, you could say that an AR-15 or an AK-47 will allow you to stand up against your government. This isn't really realistic, however - no civillian weapon, especially not a semi-automatic rifle, will reliably take care of a tank, fighter jet, drone or military robot. [0]
> From a more protectionist standpoint, you could say that an AR-15 or an AK-47 will allow you to stand up against your government. This isn't really realistic, however - no civillian weapon, especially not a semi-automatic rifle, will reliably take care of a tank, fighter jet, drone or military robot. [0]
It gives you some leverage however if you need to get some ingredients for your IEDs.
A few guns might make the difference between efficient large scale killings like Auschwitz and a case where a large number of civilians get away and hide until the international community can come and help.
Yep, people with rifles and improvised explosives are completely ineffective against a modern military force. That's why the US was in and out of Afghanistan in less than a year!
Our "corrupt government" would crush us with jets, tanks, nukes, laser weapons, missiles, helicopters, drones, ships, chemical weapons, smallpox, and probably many more things regardless of whether we had AR-15s or not.
Libya and Syria are probably good examples of this not being the case. Libya had the benefit of NATO coming to the aid of the rebellion and stopping the airstrikes, Syria also had outside involvement. When a government goes to war with it's civilians other nations tend to get involved.
Even if that isn't the case, all those weapons are on the ground or in port at some point. Meaning an attack with small arms to get in there and preemptively blow them up will work. These weapons also have to be maintained meaning they need a base. You have millions of citizens with weapons and a military that's a much smaller fraction of that, with bases that have a much smaller fraction of personnel. The base is going to be overrun. There is also the chance of military personnel defecting, so that some of these weapons never get fired.
Chemical and biological weapons are a really bad idea. The problem is a civil war isn't going to be geographically defined in this case. There is no polarization along something like a Mason-Dixon line. You will end up killing people that don't revolt, which will probably make them rethink their not revolting. How would you feel if your family and friends were killed in an attack, and they weren't on the rebel side?
The other problem is even if you increase the military's size to win the civil war, you have the second problem of the very people that you could grab immediately to fight are probably going to be a majority of people who have been opposed to gun ownership, don't have weapons and don't know how to use them. It will take time to become proficient and the other side has both the weapons and training.
Even with advanced military tech, the numbers game combined with a guerrilla approach, and the fact these are civilians and it would be hard to identify civilian combatants from non-combatants, will make it a losing battle. We already haven't done well in Afghanistan or Iraq for similar reasons, and despite the enemy being technologically inferior, we have never been able to secure those regions.
You would have probably been against the American Revolutionary War then? Meh, let's let the British tax us. They're big and powerful. They're the Government.
And what about something like Vietnam? Who won that one?
And even if you're right, that the US government is just that big and bad. What if half the military defects and joins the revolt?
People have the right to defend themselves, and must be trusted to do so. Otherwise you get something like England. Say the wrong thing and you go to jail. The 2nd Amendment keeps the government in check. Eventually, given enough time, it will need checking.
Generally I am against loss of human life, be it in war or gun violence, but I'm not sure how I would have felt at the time of the Revolution, and I'm not sure you do either.
But really, that is just a weak strawman. The US government/military is MANY orders of magnitude more powerful than the British vs the colonists. The US military could nuke every single state capital in a few minutes, for example. If you take the argument to it's logical conclusion, we should have legal access to weapons equivalent to that of the military, which we already definitely do not.
I am just pointing out that an untrained populace armed with even military-style assault weapons is really just laughable if your enemy is the largest military that has ever existed with technology and weapons that could annihilate humanity. I just don't agree that it is productive to use that as an excuse against thoughtful regulation in the face of the actual, currently occuring epidemic of gun violence (accidents, suicides, school shootings, domestic violence, gang violence, etc) where people are really losing their lives.
You missed the part where I mentioned Vietnam, and the part where I asked what if half the military defects?
I'm against loss of human life too, that's why I'm pro-2nd Amendment. People can defend themselves. People can fight off tyranny. Given enough time, people will need to do that again.
Well, that would be why we have an amendment to the constitution that says 'the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.' As long as we follow that, guns won't be whites only.
what kind of magical thinking is that, that what the constitution says determines who has guns? anyway, it isn't the point. the point is that the majority are if anything more likely to support a tyrant than not, so the idea that gun nuts will save us from a tyrant they have at least a 50/50 shot of supporting is silly, and that's without considering the possibility that they'll save us from a tyrant who actually isn't a tyrant at all.
Pretty much anyone can get a gun, right? Because of the Constitution, right? Where's the magic thinking?
You say most people would support a tyrant, which may not be true but let's go with that. Given that, why wouldn't you want the opposition to that tyrrany to have guns? Your take seems defeatist. You want to just try to live peacefully as tyranny spreads?
One doesn't need a Constitutional right to keep and bear arms in order to keep and bear arms, only to do so legally. Expecting a tyrannical US regime to respect the 2nd Amendment in order to legitimize the means of its own demise seems shortsighted, and other countries manage to have revolutions and coups without a legal firearms market.
> I am just pointing out that an untrained populace armed with even military-style assault weapons is really just laughable if your enemy is the largest military that has ever existed with technology and weapons that could annihilate humanity.
Tell that to the Nazis. They were the military superpower of their time.
Except for the nuclear option every armed enemy can tie up >10 soldiers if they are going to try to keep people alive for slave labour/selective genocide/etc.
Edit: my point is that the Nazis had a giant technological advantage as well as a giant army and even powerful allies and still they were vulnerable to all kinds of sting operations.
Third reich army was trained. It was army. This is not an example of "untrained populace". This is example of well trained army from country with great military tradition.
The fight against nazi was ultimately won by armies, not by "untrained populace".
> Third reich army was trained. It was army. This is not an example of "untrained populace".
Yep. That is my point.
> The fight against nazi was ultimately won by armies, not by "untrained populace".
Also true. But local groups (and of course SOE operations) helped tying up their resources so they couldn't help on the eastern front or start the invasion of Britain.
From Wikipedia[0]: The following afternoon, on 8 May, ... At this time there were no fewer than 400,000 German troops in Norway, which had a population of barely three million.
The Brits weren't actually that far ahead of the civs in the ARWar, it was mostly a numbers issue, not a tech issue.
Vietnam wasn't on US soil, home-base would be infinitely cheaper.
> And even if you're right, that the US government is just that big and bad. What if half the military defects and joins the revolt?
The higher up they are the more nonexistant that chance gets, and the higher up you are the more likely it is that you have a kill-switch to any devices that can be used against the nation.
> People have the right to defend themselves, and must be trusted to do so. Otherwise you get something like England. Say the wrong thing and you go to jail. The 2nd Amendment keeps the government in check. Eventually, given enough time, it will need checking.
Actually, you have the US. People have been arrested for bible burning, [1] promoting Communistic views, [2] Japanese Internment Camps, [3] and more. It's absolutely anti-democratic, but the 2A supporters never will speak against these practices.
I don't think it's fair or accurate to say folks wouldn't speak out against those things.
Your argument is that people shouldn't have guns because we probably couldn't beat the government. I'll take my fighting chance. It's better to die free.
It's never going to be en masse. Australia enacted sufficient gun control to drastically limit mass shootings by introducing licensing, purpose and registration requirements as well as banning semi-automatics. There was a buyback scheme which most people complied with.
I do wonder if American resistance to sensible gun control will cause a flip straight over into hard restrictions, but it's difficult to see what the trigger event for that would be. Left-wing paramilitaries? (right-wing paramilitaries are seemingly tolerated!)
"sensible"? Since massive amoutns of guns have found their way to the public since the 1990s the crime rates across the US have been dropping dramatically. And even so the US isn't even close to the top of the list worldwide in per capita murder rate even though lots of people have weapons.
If anything those numbers show that there is at the very least no correlation between numbers of guns and crime, and may well indicate more guns means less crime. Since the US constitution protects ownership with the "shall not be infringed" clause and the stats show there's little downsides why stomp on people's rights?
