The number one reason I support the right to own firearms is protection against the state. If it was as easy to own and buy guns in Hong Kong as it is in the USA the current situation with the destruction of democracy and the imposition of authoritarian rule would have been a much fairer fight.
Beyond that, my extended family is almost entirely based in the Deep South of the US, one of my cousins is a professional firearm dealer, and another works for one of the largest sellers of hunting apparel. One of my best friends owns about 50 guns. The number of irresponsible uses of guns in my family and friends group are zero. Guns are a tool like anything else - if it’s legal to own a chainsaw, a hunting knife, or a sledgehammer then it is not ridiculous to have licensed responsible adults to own guns.
I applaud the sale of firearms and the continuing spread of the culture to all people, races, and genders. The more people learn responsible use of guns and own them, the safer they will be, the safer society will be, and the less likely some idiot group of politicians will ban them.
This is a strange fantasy that many gun supporters share with you that having a gun makes you a warrior. It is even bigger fantasy that a persistent resistance can exist in an isolated urban setting when under the control of an overwhelming well-organized, well-supplied, highly technological armed force that has no restrictions to be civilized or respect individual rights such as is the situation in Hong Kong. It is very nice that you all have this gun fetish and it keeps you happy, but guns can't substitute for sound institutions, social cohesion, and rule of law.
Can you tell me how long is the boarder between Pakistan and Afghanistan? Do you remember that a big part of the soviet defeat in Afghanistan was the US that was able to regularly supply money and guns to the resistance, giving them even land to air missiles? Do you know that the talibans had and still have bases in Pakistan that allowed them to lead the gorilla war that they did? Don't even try to compare Afghanistan with HK, because the two situations have nothing in common.
Do you know that the talibans had and still have bases in Pakistan that allowed them to lead the gorilla war that they did?
Yes I'll concede that fighting a guerrilla war without external support is difficult but it was always thus. Another example would be the Cuban revolution. However civil wars are often fought without any external backing being the decisive factor.
This isn’t a fantasy. It’s simply a fact when you have a huge number of people owning guns, implementing a dictatorship is harder. We also have a culture of loving freedom. In HK, you have a formerly free society that was brutally repressed by the authoritarian state. Saying “it will never happen” belies the fact it literally just happened!
I have family that lost everything to communism and had to restart in America. If you have never had to live under authoritarian rule, as a huge portion of civilization had to in the past and still currently do, it’s easy to think a reversion to the mean will never happen. But it can and does!
I'm from a former communist country. We had anti-communist gorilla fighters to the mid fifties. Guess what, the gorillas were hunted down and neutralized one by one. Guess why, they didn't have arm supplies, they didn't have outside power that would provide them with air cover, they didn't have safe bases for recruiting and training new fighters, for healing and planning operations. Without those basics your freedom loving people will be a sitting target. After a sufficient bloodbath, many will be killed, many will be imprisoned, many will be deported to other ends of the country, many will be broken, and the rest would prefer to forget and to return to some semblance of normality.
>> This isn’t a fantasy. It’s simply a fact when you have a huge number of people owning guns, implementing a dictatorship is harder.
> I'm from a former communist country. We had anti-communist gorilla fighters to the mid fifties. Guess what, the gorillas were hunted down and neutralized one by one.
What proportion of the population were those fighters? It's obvious that a small poorly-supplied force can't stand up to a brutal state, on the other hand "a huge number" of armed people might be able to, or at least put up a respectable fight. Furthermore, there's a deterrent effect from having an armed population that has to be taken into account.
I'm trying to explain that no matter of your handguns, tanks are an anti-infantry platform created with the explicit goal of killing people with handguns. The difference of putting a thousand and a hundred thousand people in front of a tank is how many times the machine guns will have to be reloaded.
You imagine that a totalitarian regime will be hesitant to use excessive force against its own population. A corrupt and decaying regime might be, like the russian military coup 1990. Compare it to China 1989 or if you want to be more recent to the arab spring civil wars and you will realize that handguns matter only if the military decides to not intervene. Tunis - the president fled. Libya - the rebels were cornered until someone sent the heavy guns. Egypt - the military changed the president twice. Syria - it is a mess, but those with the heavy guns will write the history. That's why gun ownership is a fetish that gives people the illusion of having control over much more complex reality. A single person can't stop a militarized regime. A million single persons can't do it either. Only if united in a coordinated and resourceful structures, they can oppose another organized and resourceful structure.
> I'm trying to explain that no matter of your handguns, tanks are an anti-infantry platform created with the explicit goal of killing people with handguns. The difference of putting a thousand and a hundred thousand people in front of a tank is how many times the machine guns will have to be reloaded.
I don't think anyone would seriously think that someone could mount a resistance with handguns. IIRC, the US figured they're more or less useless militarily prior to WWII. You'd need to use rifles.
And IIRC, tanks haven't rendered infantry obsolete. They require infantry cover otherwise they're vulnerable, and there are environments where they just don't work well. Also, the tactics taken up by such a resistance would have to avoid head-on confrontations with tanks unless they have (captured) the right weapons to do so, since to do otherwise would be dumb.
> Compare it to China 1989...
The Tiananmen protesters were totally unarmed, and Chinese gun laws are extraordinarily restrictive, so I don't know what that's supposed to prove here. I'm not as familiar with the details of civilian gun ownership in the other countries you mentioned, but some cursory research shows that both Libya and Egypt have pretty restrictive civilian gun laws. There are also counterexamples to your thesis (e.g. Afghanistan) where poorly-equipped fighters have been able to effectively resist modern militaries.
> A single person can't stop a militarized regime. A million single persons can't do it either. Only if united in a coordinated and resourceful structures, they can oppose another organized and resourceful structure.
This is true. But arming those million single persons is a prerequisite for them to coalesce into an organized structure that could oppose a regime. Arming them doesn't mean a resistance will be successful, but disarming them would guarantee that any resistance would be a failure.
> the tactics taken up by such a resistance would have to avoid head-on confrontations with tanks unless they have (captured) the right weapons
See, there it is where it breaks down. A light militia which gun enthusiasts imagine cannot succeed without the cooperation of the armed force. Capturing heavy weaponry needs the leap of faith that the owner of this heavy weaponry will be ready to part with it. If they are ready to do so, then you don't need your handguns and rifles because you have the mindshare. If the other side has the heavy weapons and the means to produce lots of them while denying this capability to the resistance, then your rifles won't make a difference.
Both Libya and Egypt have tribe social structures out of the cities. Those tribes have guns of their own no matter the laws. The proliferation of local militias after the government breakdown in Libya did not happen out of the blue.
The reason I mentioned Moscow in my comment is to show that people were not armed in Russia either. However, the tanks were not ready to shoot and the coup failed. Authoritarian regimes do not fail because a few people with rifles make noise in the wilderness, they fail when they run out of the conviction of their own enforcement structures that the regime must survive. The revolutions in Eastern Europe happened without a single gorilla fighter and those were some of the most policed societies in history. Have you ever asked yourself the question how did it happen?
Afghanistan is not an example of poorly armed population. Those poor fighters had Stinger missiles. Afghanistan has a porous boarder with Pakistan that allows for the movement of people, money, guns, and drugs. It is like the EU but without the human rights. What's more, the mountainous terrain makes the effectiveness of deploying heavy guns rather limited.
> Arming them doesn't mean a resistance will be successful, but disarming them would guarantee that any resistance would be a failure.
Yet, last year a big part of the executive branch of the US government tried to subvert the elections and to remain on power. Stopping it did not take mobilizing local militias. Actually, local militias were part of the problem, but their mobility was hampered in various ways, including denying them air transport. That's why I say that reality today is much more complex than waving guns around. Power and influence were exercised a few abstraction levels above that.
So, if you want to stop an authoritarian government in your country, guns are the last thing that one should invest in. Maybe one should invest just in case of some very improbable scenario, but usually, if it comes to the guns, then the fight is already lost.
> The reason I mentioned Moscow in my comment is to show that people were not armed in Russia either. However, the tanks were not ready to shoot and the coup failed. Authoritarian regimes do not fail because a few people with rifles make noise in the wilderness, they fail when they run out of the conviction of their own enforcement structures that the regime must survive. The revolutions in Eastern Europe happened without a single gorilla fighter and those were some of the most policed societies in history. Have you ever asked yourself the question how did it happen?
I'm well aware of that. I'm not disputing that an authoritarian regime can fall that way, and in fact that's the only way some can fall (e.g. a well-established one). However, your thesis seems to be that civilian arms are pretty much totally useless in every case, which I disagree with.
> Yet, last year a big part of the executive branch of the US government tried to subvert the elections and to remain on power. Stopping it did not take mobilizing local militias
That's a different problem: that American "militias" are groups of fringe wackos drawn exclusively one from one end of the political spectrum.
> So, if you want to stop an authoritarian government in your country, guns are the last thing that one should invest in. Maybe one should invest just in case of some very improbable scenario, but usually, if it comes to the guns, then the fight is already lost.
It's not like people can do one anti-authoritarian thing, and one anti-authoritarian thing only. Personally I think an armed civilian uprising would mainly be an input into a very chaotic transitional period, not some standalone effort, but those cases, I'd rather have it than not.
I agree entirely, even though I am not from the US. The US has a mental health and poverty problem, NOT a gun problem. Plenty of examples of wealthy countries with lots of guns (Sweden, Switzerland) and little to no gun violence.
The (largely theoretical) argument is asymmetric warfare where the dictator and their family/sycophants/officers need to be constantly preoccupied with a credible threat of an assassin around every corner. This asymmetric warfare is then sufficiently destabilizing that (when combined with sanctions and external pressure) it leads to a successful overthrow.
Of course, it's not realistic that the civilian populace will be capable of engaging in open-field combat with the military.
It really depends on your tactics. Hong Kong is an interesting battlefield as it has very few advantages for a traditional military. Dense population and few open areas provide many tactical advantages for an insurrection.
With these advantages and coordinating securely being generally available, I think an insurrection could create a lot of troubles for an occupying force. Lots of opportunities to document and share atrocities the occupying forces would commit as well which would at the very least ensure sympathetic governments and organizations would help continue the smuggling in of supplies and weapons.
I'm playing the chinese government. You are the HK citizenship, well-armed with handguns. You have the city, you are protesting against my actions and during a protest the local police stations are occupied, occupied are also the universities, the tv stations and the local government. Self-proclaimed leaders of the protest go on air and announce that they are seceding from the totalitarian regime and HK is independent nation. Freedom loving citizens are blocking the road with mainline China, they are taking control of the airport and the sea port.
The Chinese government in a few steps:
1. Cut off the internet, jam the radio signals and the satellite signals to blackout the entire island. Impose a sea blockade.
2. Stop the drinking water.
3. Wait 72 hours and gather the bodies. Blame local terrorists for destroying the water pipes.
And this is only the simplest way to smash the resistance. Without mobile communications and GPS, all groups will be cut off from each other, exposed from the air to drone attacks, and totally unable to retreat, because there is nowhere to go.
HK vs the CCP isn't a great case study, because the center of power is outside of the country and it isn't mixed in with the disgruntled people.
A better counterfactual case study would be North Korea, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or present-day Myanmar; where the regime largely lives amongst (albeit in a stratified/segregated way) and selects from the populace that it controls.
I'd be especially interested in the early days of the regime, before its power is fully solidified and when it's the most unstable.
Soviet Russia was in a civil war for six years and the history there is complex because initially it was supposed to be the democratic revolution.
Nazi Germany was like present day Russia - formerly authoritarian state that lost a big conflict, had democratic transition which was shaken by a series of economic crises. A large part of the population considered the strong leadership and revanchism for embodiment of the national essence. The economic elite welcomed the predictability of a well-oiled corrupt regime.
History of North Korea is not my strong side, but the North had huge chinese and soviet backing during the war while the South part was a military dictatorship until the nineties.
Myanmar military is maybe the most interesting of all these cases because this is not a regime with an ideology. Its backing is purely economic by Japan and China who have financial interests in the country, and the army officers internally, who can profiteer from an army-owned economy. For sure, there is some jingoism used by the army's propaganda; however, I don't follow the conflict and narratives there to assess properly what's going on there. However, as far as China is ready to sell the regime weapons and the regime has access to enough money to by them, the protests are doomed. Having access to power is existential for those guys and they won't let it go. Best scenario is if Japan and maybe China broker some deal "amnesty for democracy", but I doubt that they have the motivation to do so.
Because they are enthusiasts who believe that personal weapons stop oppressive governments. They've watched Hollywood movies and they believe that they know how to make revolutions.
My mental exercise means to show that a highly nationalistic totalitarian regime which believes in itself and is faced by an existential threat will not hesitate to create a bloodbath. The communist regime can't afford to loose HK because "losing face" won't even begin to describe the situation. What's more, HK is not a defensible strong point. It can't ensure its supply lines and is dependent for its drinking water. Its enemy is a few kilometers away and has the second biggest fleet in the world.
What HK has is soft power. It is a free trading zone that has benefits granted to it by the US government, and it has its reputation. However, the chinese government proved that it is ready to throw all these advantages to enforce its control over the island and to unify its nationalistic narrative. Therefore, this soft power is good for nothing.
I think living under the steel toed boot of communist dictatorship is something worth fighting and dying for. But I’m a freedom lover from the Land of the Free, not someone who could mentally accept living under a dictator at any cost.
One nice thing about having such a large military budget is our civilian population contains many millions of people with formal military and combat training.
So yeah, there’s certainly Internet tough guys who just need an outlet to express their frustration. But there’s a large community of people that do in fact know which direction to point their rifle.
Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26455436 aren't acceptable either. Please stop posting flamewar comments—it's not what this site is for. An experienced HN user like you ought to know and do much better.
> If it was as easy to own and buy guns in Hong Kong as it is in the USA the current situation with the destruction of democracy and the imposition of authoritarian rule would have been a much fairer fight.
Unless anti-tank munitions are also available, armed HKers would've just led to armoured fighting vehicles on the streets. The State will always have more firepower than you.
And China has also drones and an organized military. A military face to face with a nation state is always a losing bet. Which is why there are guerilla tactics but you can't expect a whole population to adopt guerilla warfare, there's not enough room in the jungle. What works is to make the economic cost of repression very costly with massive strikes and massive refusal to pay taxes, an organized military is very costly and when soldiers don't get paid they may disobey too. You also have to make the moral cost of being on the good side of the gun costly too then parts of the military may go into disobedience/mutiny. But this is generally taken into account by states and they will avoid sending batallions from a region in that region.
On a different note, how do you justify having 50 guns for personal protection?
> On a different note, how do you justify having 50 guns for personal protection?
The point is exactly that the gun debate shouldn't be just about everyday personal protection. In case of a massive conflict it's great to have enough supplies to last years and to hand out to those who need them. You may not be able to just go to a store and get more.
Beyond that, my extended family is almost entirely based in the Deep South of the US, one of my cousins is a professional firearm dealer, and another works for one of the largest sellers of hunting apparel. One of my best friends owns about 50 guns. The number of irresponsible uses of guns in my family and friends group are zero. Guns are a tool like anything else - if it’s legal to own a chainsaw, a hunting knife, or a sledgehammer then it is not ridiculous to have licensed responsible adults to own guns.
I applaud the sale of firearms and the continuing spread of the culture to all people, races, and genders. The more people learn responsible use of guns and own them, the safer they will be, the safer society will be, and the less likely some idiot group of politicians will ban them.