You’re looking at it from a hypothetical perspective having been brought up to believe that the right to bear arms is important to your particular country’s paradigm of freedom and back filling your opinion from there.
I’m looking at it from a pragmatic perspective, without religion what else could act as a trigger? I’m Scottish, 45% of the population voted for independence from the UK 2 years ago (including me) and it’s a reasonable assumption that a higher % would vote for independence post the EU referendum. But people aren’t willing to kill over it or die for it.
Can you illustrate to me any set of circumstances where you personally would take to the streets with your automatic weapons? How would that play out in modern day US? If the government was suppressing you and whichever group you identify with strongly enough to kill for, what would your strategy be for overthrowing them? Would you only target military personnel or would you target civilians like how things played out in NI? What would you do if you did manage to overthrow the government? Form another government, rinse, repeat? Or is your aim to live happily ever after in an anarchic libertarian paradise where everything just functions perfectly due to the invisible hand?
To be honest with you, we can keep going back and forth for as long as you want arguing about topics that we’re never going to agree on (or talking at cross purposes on things neither of us actually cares about) but I’m taking the win based on the fact that I’m free to live my life without being in a constant state of paranoia.
I was thinking about this the other day, because I just sunk another ~$3k into another rifle. Honestly, being from central PA it’s almost viewed as a moral citizen’s responsibility in the same way we go vote and the Swiss keep their arms at home. To be clear, AR’s are statistically FAR less likely to be used in crimes than handguns. The owners are more responsible, partly because they’re more expensive and good rifles actually require extensive vetting (8-9 month period of jumping through legal hoops and background checks). In the current state, I don’t envision taking to the streets in the same way I didn’t’ envision a country the scale of Russia carrying out a sudden invasion land grab. But I have a few guns, I keep them locked away in PA with my parents (they aren’t for traditional home defense) and I don’t have a paranoid mindset. They’re simply there for occasional target shooting and as outlier insurance. I don’t live in fear, I don’t think about the guns, they’re just there. Much like my pistol in my house in MA. I don’t plan on using it the same way people with expensive alarm systems on their doors don’t plan on people trying to enter (same probability, same cost) and it is largely forgotten.
Also, I look at the fact that the UK troops were colluding and even at times actively participated in killing, torture, bombing and committing arson against the Catholics as uneven “enforcement”. I’m puzzled that that is even a question, but if you’re committed to drinking the coolaid I’ll just leave it at that.
In the same vein, it’s pretty obvious that the same people that fought for independence built the constitution and added the 2nd amendments a short time later, even referencing Britain by name in their arguments (Federalist #46). Clearly things have evolved since, but I also am scratching my head that that isn’t widely understood outside the US.
No shit. From my living abroad, I realized foreigners are just as ignorant about America as I am about their countries, but this is a little much.
And to add and repeat, there are tens of millions of people that will kill or be killed in America if somebody ever knocks on their door demanding their weapons. Fact.
Fewer guns = fewer gun deaths. I’m surprised that in a forum full of presumably analytical thinkers that there are so many people who don’t understand this.
I have no problem with people who want no gun control. I do have a problem with people who think that there’s no cost to having no gun control. There’s a reason the USA is the only developed country in the world with gun violence that rivals impoverished nations.
Why would an infantry officer have any information about that whatsoever? If you had said 4 high ranking government officials, that might actually mean something, but infantrymen have zero input into federal policy so they don’t have any factual basis for speculating on what the effect of an armed populace might or might not be on overreaching execution of federal policy.
The point I (they) were making was against the argument that an armed population can not stand up against a modern military (rather than federal overreach itself). In other words, they were just saying that the assault weapons can and do serve a purpose. I never made the case that there is no cost in terms of deaths. I did however, make the case that ARs are a false boogie man as they account for an extremely small proportion of gun deaths.
I believe that. The real boogie man is quite simply rampant gun ownership. Having a gun on you lubricates fatal violence. Road rage incidents quickly turn into shootings, while domestic violence more often turns into the multiple murder/suicides.
An AR ban is the first step towards tackling the real boogeyman, which would lead to the type of gun control seen everywhere else in the developed world (with a few small outliers) where gun violence is nowhere near the statospheric levels of the states.
Of course…this will never happen, because American politics has devolved into a sport, where people pick teams and automatically hate anything the other side does, for whatever reason.
I love the references to the “developed world.” As if a “developed” country would never oppress its population. Some people never learn or are ignorant of history.
Come out to West Texas and “come and take them”. You’d have massacres on both sides. (You do realize that the vast majority of the population has some kind of firearm out here, right?)
There’s a reason why we chose to drop a bomb on Japan rather than invade. That’s what “invading” West Texas would be like.
The cost would definitely be high. I would not want to be tasked with entering any gun heavy part of the country with that task, we’ve already seen what a few wackos can do.
“invading” West Texas wouldn’t be prevented by randoms with guns depending upon what ROE the “invading” force is using and who the “invading” force is.
