>the idea of giving the government, military, and police a monopoly on weaponry (or radio receivers, for that matter) sounds even more insane.
I've heard this line of reasoning often when discussing this topic and never really understood.
I'm curious - the government/military have tanks, aircraft, nuclear weapons etc. There is a massive imbalance of power regardless of whether citizens have guns. In what scenarios with respect to the government/military/police do you see being armed as providing an advantage?
I can see the advantage from the police side in terms of more easily justifying shooting people ("he had a gun / I thought he had a gun"), but not from the citizens' side.
I'm not advocating either side, I'm just curious to understand the genesis of this argument.
Keep in mind that military is a tool of the last resort for the tyranny when dealing with its own population.
One typical scenario in the suppression of the free speech is the (illegally) armed brownshirts breaking down the door of the family house where the wrongthink assembly is taking place and lynching the people inside. The police shows up in the morning and -- wow, another one of the unsolvable crimes by the unknown perpertrators with the unknowable motives. Add guns and suddenly this is impossible. Storming a firearm-defended position is not something a brownshirt mob is able to do.
The second scenario is the police overreach. The shocktroopers in blue show up at the ghetto and load up the whole households of 'undesirables' into the black cars to never be seen again. Again, this all falls apart if the population is armed. Once it is clear to the masses that the purge is going to take place, the ghetto becomes a killing field because every window is a gun port and the stopped cars are the perfect targets.
The point of the armed populace in 21st century is not to win the war with the tyrant's standing army. It's to make sure that the tyrant cannot disappear the large swathes of population without taking casualties and without making what's going on obvious to the public.
No idea what events you are referring to by 'multiple times'. For scenario 2 I mostly think of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising where they did eventually burn it completely -- but it took a large amount of resourses, a considerable time -- and most importantly it created a point of resistance making it impossible to pretend that nothing atrocious was happening.
Of course, that's not the best example to cite when trying to argue that the police, government, and military should have a monopoly on the tools of violence.
> I'm curious - the government/military have tanks, aircraft, nuclear weapons etc. There is a massive imbalance of power regardless of whether citizens have guns.
Well look at lessons from history - which of those weapons end up actually being used against rebelling citizens of a country?
From my limited knowledge it's hand weapons plus armored vehicles, and rarely, very rarely, tanks.
Against that an armed populace can stand. Plus don't forget the populace would be a guerrilla force, while the government would be visible.
A typical scenario: The government wants to arrest someone. What weapons would they use? Not heavy ones! If the citizens have no weapons the government doesn't need any weapons at all, but if the citizens have someone as simple as hand guns suddenly things are not so simple for the government.
In short: The government doesn't want to wipe out its own citizens (nuclear weapons? seriously?) they want to selectively remove undesirables. And against that, personal weapons are quite effective.
If the US government thinks rebels are a real threat to its territorial integrity or sovereignty the laws of armed conflict will be abandoned in short order and they’ll use every advantage they have to crush rebellion. If the ATF can do Ruby Ridge and Waco and get away Scot free with precalculated murder (the first) or setting tens of people on fire deliberately and interfering with evidence what do you think the military would do with a threat they were taking seriously? They’d kill everything that moved. The Russians have shown the world how effective guerillas are against state backed monsters in Chechnya. Monsters win. The fact that the US can’t ein in Afghanistan with its rules of engagement is a fact about the RoE, not the US capacity to defeat insurgencies.
If the ATF can do Ruby Ridge and Waco and get away Scot free with precalculated murder (the first)
But they didn't get away scot free, did they? Among other consequences, the governments' actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco inspired a couple of psychos (McVeigh and Nichols) to commit an atrocity of their own to take revenge. [1]
Fast-forward to the occupation of the Malheur refuge by the Branch Dildonians several years later. This time, the government waited them out. They knew better than to take a third swing at the hornet's nest. They were arguably afraid to go up against US citizens using violence as a first resort.
You can see that as a good thing -- and I do -- without having any sympathy at all for the beliefs and actions of the Malheur occupiers, with McVeigh, or with Randy Weaver for that matter.
> But they didn't get away scot free, did they? Among other consequences, the governments' actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco inspired a couple of psychos (McVeigh and Nichols) to commit an atrocity of their own to take revenge.
No one was charged or convicted as a result of Ruby Ridge or Waco. No one involved was fired or demoted. No one paid any personal price for killing people who need not have died, or for destroying and tampering with evidence. Everyone involved got away Scot free.
It's the argument that lead to the second amendment of the US constitution, this argument is obviously completely irrelevant in the 21-century. But facts have long gone from american politics.
I have a few questions for you that should make you think:
How big is the US Army? How many of those soldiers would simply go home in such a scenario vs those staying loyal to the government for whatever reason? How many firearms in the US are in private hands?
Tanks, planes etc are for force on force warfare, not asymmetric scenarios like a "government turned evil, we need to rise up"
The citizenry being armed is an incredible advantage when it comes to stopping a tyrannical government because, as is the case of the USA, it protects freedom of speech (no one's changing the 1st amendment while there's a 2nd), which is the main block to tyranny. If that fails you have guerrilla warfare to fall back on, which is incredibly effective.
> Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.
It's also a logical implication of standard liberal (e.g. Locke) thought. Since all men are equal before the law and are innocent until proven guilty, and have the right to protect themselves and their property, why should anyone be denied a weapon when others can be?
In what scenarios with respect to the
government/military/police do you see
being armed as providing an advantage?
I heard a podcast a year or two ago [1] that said the current interpretation of the second amendment only started in the 1960s - and far from being a right-wing view, it was started by the far-left Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
The Black Panthers decided to 'observe the police' by following police cars with shotgun-carrying armed patrols. That motivated things like the Mulford Act [2] - a Republican act banning carrying loaded guns in public.
So in other words, part of the genesis of the individual rights interpretation of the second amendment, and the notion of using personal guns to oppose an oppressive state, is literally one white cop in a car being followed by six black panthers who are keeping an eye on him.
I can see the advantage from the police
side in terms of more easily justifying
shooting people
The Black Panthers' activities in the 1960s certainly didn't eliminate police brutality towards minorities.
(Incidentally, the podcast also says the NRA in that era was a sports-shooting magazine that barely had a political arm, and didn't oppose gun control)
Keeping your government honest/keeping it from slipping towards tyranny doesn't require power parity with the standing army. At the end of the day, all politics and all government is local. You remove a government's legitimacy by rendering your territory un-governable. So who are the implements of state power at the local level?
Police chiefs. Mayors. Governors. District attorneys. Tax collectors. Etc.... You don't need tanks and aircraft to render these people incapable of performing their functions. Small arms (and maybe some improvised explosives) are sufficient. That's the true leverage and power of an armed citizenry backed by a supportive population. Afghanistan has repeatedly (and continues) to prove this.
Isn’t New Hampshire’s state motto “Live free or die”?
It wouldn’t work in the US anyway. The gloves would come off in a long running civil war as they always do and there would be collective punishment, population resettlement and other war crimes. The US is as likely to follow international law in a war it genuinely feels is an existential threat as anyone else, not at all.
People who claim the US wouldn't bomb itself to smitherenes in order to maintain order seem to forget General Sherman's march to the sea.
Every argument the "Guns will protect us from the government" crowd claims was already proven false over 100 years ago, and that was when the average citizen was still on equal footing in terms of firepower.
There's also the fact that in the past 120 years, there has not been a concerted effort to "Rise up" despite many actual atrocities. So, gun owners, what would it take for you to attempt to march on Washington with your arms readied? The only time it ever happened was because people were denied the "right" to own other human beings. What is finally the breaking point that gets people willing to die against the might of the war machine?
Of course there is an imbalance of power. There's no way an individual that feels threatened by the external collective can fight back with a gun or two. Even if you're the prepper type who's stocked up on ammo and well prepared, that fight is eventually going to end with you losing. Life isn't Rambo where an individual takes on an entire collective and comes out the winner.
Even then, it is better to go out with at least a little bit of a fight if you're attacked. In the end I suppose it doesn't matter whether you're carrying or not, because even if you are able to defend yourself from an attack by the collective, that is only a momentary win. They'll get you in the end anyway.
I've heard this line of reasoning often when discussing this topic and never really understood.
I'm curious - the government/military have tanks, aircraft, nuclear weapons etc. There is a massive imbalance of power regardless of whether citizens have guns. In what scenarios with respect to the government/military/police do you see being armed as providing an advantage?
I can see the advantage from the police side in terms of more easily justifying shooting people ("he had a gun / I thought he had a gun"), but not from the citizens' side.
I'm not advocating either side, I'm just curious to understand the genesis of this argument.