"Bullshit quote memes piss me off so bad that I want to stab someone in their fat stupid face!" – Fred Rogers
I'm not prepared to get rid of our right to keep and bear arms unless we do get rid of the Second Amendment. But, doing that requires tinkering with the Constitution, which makes me nervous. Once you open the hood, you never know what else someone will fuck with. With the state of our idiocracy, opening the Constitution is just as likely to wind up creating a right to keep and bear rape monkeys as it is to have its intended effect.
So it is what it is. We have the Second Amendment, and while we can debate all we want about how we should interpret it, DC v. Heller pretty much did that for us. It is an individual right, and anyone who suggests that we might even ponder a dissenting view is not very likely to make it through Senate confirmation hearings.
So here we are.
Fallacy Killer Number One – George Washington Did Not Say That
Lets talk about one justification for our right to keep and bear arms — the notion that we need the Second Amendment so that we can resist "tyranny." This George Washington quote sprouts up like mushrooms on cow shit every time there is a mass shooting – to remind us that even though a dozen kids just died, it is worth it, because one day we will want those guns – like the day that Obama comes to herd us into concentration camps where we will be forced to have free health care, or education, or Koran lessons, or whatever the fear-du-jour happens to be.
"A free people ought not only be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government." -George Washington
Well guess what?
He never said that.
Here is what he actually said:
"A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well-digested plan is requisite; and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies."
Pretty big difference by shifting a few words around.
Fallacy Killer Number Two – The Second Amendment Will Preserve Our Right to Revolt
Just because Washington didn't say that, it doesn't mean that there is no "right to revolution" theory to be found in the Second Amendment. After all, Jefferson did say "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
In 1776, when the height of military technology was a musket and a cannon, both of which you could make by melting down church bells, there might have been something to it. When the contest was little more than numbers of guns you could drag through the woods, and how to play the weather, the government probably did need to worry a bit about insurrection – and that might have kept them a bit more honest.
However, the first time someone tried that kind of thing, it didn't work out so well. In fact, Shays' Rebellion just led to Constitutional tweaks to make the federal government that much stronger. The Civil War led to even more, with harsher consequences.
If 13 states, with the assistance of at least one superpower, didn't manage to get their way through armed insurrection, what the hell makes anyone think that armed insurgency is going to preserve our right to … whatever … not have affordable health care, or to coffee cups that say "Happy Birthday Jesus" on them?
Ok, fine… lets come up with a cause worth fighting for. Lets say that Obama refuses to step down in 2016, and he not only declares himself dictator-for-life, but he also starts dressing like Ghadaffi, decrees that the national religion shall be Islam, the national language will be Klingon, there will be an efficient rail network in the United States, the writ of Prima Noctae is now in effect, and there shall be martial law to enforce all of the above, as well as any other laws that the President invents, on a daily basis.
We managed to preserve our right to keep military grade rifles and machine guns, so we all muster down on the Town Common with our guns. We tried voting. We tried protesting. This is a reasonable time to start with the armed insurrection stuff.
So, you, me, all our neighbors, hell our entire city builds a perimeter around it. We fill sandbags, we all have ammunition, we all have food, water, supplies, and most importantly, we are all unified and in complete solidarity.
And we stand there, resisting whatever it is the government was going to do to us.
And then they fly over with one jet, dropping one FAE bomb, and roll in with three tanks, and in about 12 hours, our "resistance" is reduced to a few smoking holes. The Tree of Liberty will get its manure all right, but it will be the manure that you shat out as you ran for cover, as long range artillery rains down on our town, as we get carpet bombed from 35,000 feet, and as the sky goes black with drones and cruise missiles.
We're screwed.
So… if the 2nd Amendment's "right to revolution" implication is real, both practically and legally, it must also include a right to possess tanks, jets, rocket launchers, etc. Your puny AK-47 is useless. So, we need to have at least some of our volunteer resistance show up with Stinger missiles, some anti-aircraft batteries, maybe a submarine or two?
Oh, you can't afford that?
That's ok, we have some patriotic citizens who can.
Who? The same billionaires who already own the government, that's who. So what do they want to "resist?" I could only see them wanting to resist checks on their own power. So, if the Second Amendment implies a right to resist the government, then that would mean that we need our billionaire friends to start stockpiling these weapons now. We need a Koch brothers airfield with a few fighters and bombers, and Adelson should have a fleet of tanks somewhere, and I guess that George Soros would bring his collection of nuke-armed submarines up to date, right?
So lets drop the crazy scenario of Obama-cum-Ghadaffi, and just think about something we were really likely to see upset us. Do you think for a moment that you, living in some apartment in Salt Lake City, or a house in Wyoming, or a condo in Boca Raton, would be ready to go to war with the Federal Government over the same shit that would get the Koch Brothers to fuel up their private stock of A10 Warthogs? Really?
Because you know what the billionaires want the government to stop doing? They want it to get out of the way of their becoming trillionaires. If you think that the Second Amendment means what the Supreme Court said in Heller, and you believe that is a good thing, because it gives you the ability to resist the government, you might want to play out the long game in your head. The long game here is this interpretation leads to private armies, raised by limitless wealth, all of which looks at our quaint little republican form of government as nothing more than a paper justification to have a flag waving over a few national parks.
I don't particularly love the federal government either, but ultimately, it is the only organization that we have where we can even hope to band together with enough authority to avoid being under the rule of the richest local family. Yeah, in large part, we're there already. But, at least we still have some veneer of a republic.
So the next time you see some fool cheering the Second Amendment as the text that protects us from tyranny, ask them to play all four quarters of the mental game. It isn't romantic pictures of regular guys crossing the Delaware in rowboats. The endgame is Ancient Rome meets The Terminator.
[Update] – A few comments suggest that our modern military has not really been that effective against insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and elsewhere. I concede that point. But, I did not think I needed to waste a paragraph in the original discussing how I hardly think that Americans would be prepared to hide in the woods and caves, en masse, to support an American insurgency. Not a chance. When our intelligentsia is crying for "safe spaces," our would-be "Wolverines" scream to give up every civil liberty except the Second Amendment, who are we going to have lead this "insurgency?" Maybe the Crips and the Bloods. That ought to work out well. Sorry, but anyone you might want to be in power doesn't have the yarbles to do it, and those with the great bolshy yarblockos are not exactly going to set up a rebel government on the principles of Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Last 5 posts by Randazza
- Randazza: Damn right we should get rid of birthright citizenship - October 30th, 2018
- Randazza: Vermin Supreme's Pony Horde Rides on Kansas (Popehat Signal Activated) - June 22nd, 2018
- Randazza: Trump, Twitter, The NFL, and Everything - June 19th, 2018
- Randazza: Trying to make sense of Bourdain - June 10th, 2018
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The proposal du jour is to deprive people of what the Supreme Court has already recognized as a fundamental right based on arbitrary inclusion in a secret list, with no meaningful review. And that's far more troubling than whether Earl owns one or five shotguns.
Once we let that genie out of the bottle, there's no telling what it will do. I'd rather not give them the precedent.
And welcome aboard.
For the record, I agree that citizen revolt against the American military industrial complex is almost certainly futile. That said…
The idea that 1) the military would accede to the demands of a Gaddafi clad Obama making edicts from on high is not fully thought either. There would be a non-zero defection rate from the military. How large, I certainly can't say, but decidedly non-zero.
2) Between one third to one half of the nation's population are gun owners, and well outnumber the uniformed military at full capacity. It takes a meaningful percentage to levy a decent revolt, but ONLY a meaningful percentage, not a majority.
3) The population of the revolt would likely not congregate into a Wacoesque compound, or sandbag their villages and townships to form barricades. The insurrection is more distributed, such that any attempts to quash the rebellion incurs high rate of civilian loss, increasing the defection rate.
Again, I don't necessarily disagree with the premise or proposed outcome, but the work shown seems somewhat lacking
Welcome to Popehat.
You forgot about the part where Sgt Flyover will be carpetbombing his grandma and the rest of his family, because they happen to live in a town that is defying the federal government. The military is not made up of faceless, nameless drones; they are people whose interests lie somewhere between protecting the American people and getting a free education.
All that said, an armed insurrection would not work here. Maybe a general strike, but that's about it.
The wars to defeat the Iraqi and Afghani military took hours each. The wars to control those regions is going on a decade and a half, and frankly isn't looking very good. The primary weapon of the opposition: AK-47s.
Or, as the US-resident Australian comedian, Jim Jeffries says "You're bringing guns to a drone fight."
"The endgame is Ancient Rome meets The Terminator. "
One conventional response to this is to point out that the military is not a homogenous mass. There are states. There are individuals who swore an oath to defend from enemies foreign and domestic. Your "Terminator" may be more like Terminator 2's liquid metal, but with some (how much?) switching sides.
Another conventional response is of course guerrilla warfare – the sort that chased the US out of various locations. The Terminator is not omnipotent.
Ah, setting up a half-assed straw man argument in the first post. Strong move out of the gate.
While you see it a lot in angry online forums, I think the majority of people who like guns arn't especially interested in this particular justification except as the sort of thing that gets posted on said forums. Outside of supremacist militia cranks, at least, both sides of this argument are engaging in meaningless philosophy.
The interest is in individual self-defense. This is what drives people to actually seek licenses, buy and carry guns, and it's what drives Heller.
"And then they fly over with one jet, dropping one FAE bomb, and roll in with three tanks, and in about 12 hours, our "resistance" is reduced to a few smoking holes. The Tree of Liberty will get its manure all right, but it will be the manure that you shat out as you ran for cover, as long range artillery rains down on our town, as we get carpet bombed from 35,000 feet, and as the sky goes black with drones and cruise missiles."
Which is why Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan are now towering bastions of freedom and democracy, right?
Flying over with jets and annihilating people wholesale is obviously a capability the government has, but it has a political cost. An armed populace imposes additional costs on bad government action.
Plus, the bigger point you're missing is that "tyranny" isn't just fought at a national scale, it's fought at the local. If Kathryn Johnston didn't have a gun, then she'd have been just another poor black person that the cops robbed and framed, and the cops would have gone on to just keep robbing and framing people. But because she had a gun, and was willing to fight back, bad cops went to prison, a bad unit was dissolved, a civilian review board was created, people previously imprisoned based on testimony from those bad cops had their cases reviewed, at least some of them were set free. She fought tyranny, she changed things for the better, and she didn't need a W54 warhead to do it.
I would ask this sincerely, not rhetorically of the people who support the right to revolt under the second amendment. Under what circumstances are you justified in taking up arms against American solders and police? Who makes that decision?
@Fyodor "Under what circumstances are you justified …"
That is an excellent question. I recorded some earlier (derivative) thoughts:
https://web.elastic.org/~fche/blog3/archive/2013/07/31/insurrection-paradox
The problem is we've made it a topic that can not be discussed without people losing their minds. Its sort of like the special snowflakes at colleges now demanding that they be protected from the harsh light of reality, if you don't fall into line they scream and demand you be fired. Any discussion about guns leads to be on my side or I'm going to scream as loud as I can until you do. Eventually they run out of almost reasonable things to offer up and start rewriting history to support the narrative. This isn't a new thing, its been going on and growing for a while – heck look at Congress and the dysfunction they cause and rile up the base to support them on random things by saying whatever it takes to get the response they want. The downside is while they are busy riling the people up to "win" that battle they are ignoring that they have riled them up to go to war… and they go to war demanding that you keep leading them on the sacred mission to built a fence around every uterus so that no child can be born without taking a religion test lest we lose control of the country to those penguins from Madagascar.
@Patrick – but we are really good at quickly passing stupid legislation to accomplish nothing but make things worse, all while calling out any cooler heads as being "terrorist lovers" to cower them into submission to the really stupid plan. We found out about the secret laws, the secret courts, the secret lists… can we really deny them the chance to use them in even more unAmerican ways to shred the last vestiges of our dignity and freedom?
@fyodor As someone who believes in the right to revolt, but would almost certainly not be the one doing any revolt… It would take an AWFUL lot to justify me taking up arms.
Genocide would certainly do it though. If we ever elect a Hitler, I'd like to think that I'd take up arms, or at least support those who did in some other way.
First, get back to the Legal Satyricon! Am I supposed to hold down the fort by myself?
Second, the Framers lived through the Minute Men, The Green Mountain Boys, and Marion's Men, basically a rag-tag bunch of folks who mustered occasionally, themselves having more recently fought in the French and Indian War. Without a true standing army, the Second Amendment protected not only the prospect of revolution, but also of preserving the new republic. Rebellion qua rebellion was not condoned; treason is one of the few Constitutional crimes. It protects against third parties: the people being armed is how impressment was opposed in the War of 1812. Think Red Dawn for a more modern view of how the 2nd Amendment preserves the other rights.
In your hypothetical, Obama wins for life. No 1st Amendment, 2nd, etc. So, what's the point, right? But, as people have pointed out, the rebels won't neatly gather in one place to be bombed, waiting in Yavin for the Death Star to blow them up. They would be more spread out. And there is no guarantee Obama would be any more successful at maintaining his hold than Palpatine or, say, Assad. Moreover, a well-armed populace may serve to give prospective dictators pause before taking over.
I get that the prospect of civilians having military hardware is disturbing. I'm sure that's what William Legge thought when he authorized the raid on the armory in Concord, Massachusetts and why, the next day (independently), Lord Dunmore ordered the removal of gunpowder from the Williamsburg, VA, magazine. That didn't turn out well for them.
Although I'm all for some stronger and more sensible gun laws that will codify some of the responsibility that gun owners love to tell us is so important, I think the US military's experiences with insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq actually show that potency of small arms against a superior military power, assuming the right tactics are used.
Sure, a bunch of dudes with AR-15's aren't going to storm Washington DC and take over, but if there was a widespread revolt, armed people could certainly make governing difficult across the US. The average American is more wealthy and better educated than the average Afghani, and the size and population of the US is way bigger than Afghanistan and Iraq combined. If there was widespread resistance, it'd be all but impossible to stamp out completely.
That being said, if things got to that point, those people fighting back wouldn't be "preserving America" or anything like that, because the country would have to already be a huge disaster before more than just the extreme fringe of Americans would choose to live that sort of miserable lifestyle.
I'm inclined to agree with Patrick re: Secret lists and Phanatic re: political costs.
Honestly I don't have any dreams that an armed insurrection (should it become necessary) would work. Even if it were so necessary every gun owner in the nation signed up.
Having said that, the thought of such a bloodbath imposes a sort of self-correction on elected officials. Sure they abuse our rights, play with the constitution etc. But there are some lines they simply won't cross. At least their are limits.
That and self-defense issues obviously. My primary reason for gun ownership is that I enjoy the honing of skills. Secondary is defense of my house. A far distant third is that should the almost impossible need for a minute man style militia arise, I can help. (Seriously though I think we'd be looking at biblical end times if that ever came to play. We'd be talking about some massive incursion that's nearly impossible to conceive of.)
My distant 3rd is so distant you can barely see it on the list. That means even if "resist the government" is fourth, it might as well not be on the list at all.
The author is incorrect on the central points. (1) The right to bear arms matters a lot, and (2) the right to bear arms cannot be revoked at this point.
Regarding (1):
You can't reduce your cities to rubble. Your own side wouldn't even go along. Hell, we are unwilling to even reduce ISIS cities to rubble, and everyone agrees that they are the worst of humanity ever to have existed.
The Shoah could never have happened if the Jews were properly armed. Every other arrest would have been a bloody mess, and the SS would not have gotten very far at all.
Similarly, the Gulag Archipelago would never have existed if Russians were properly armed. Again, each arrest would have been a disaster all around, and you wouldn't get far before your whole police force was depleted.
Totalitarianism ultimately comes down to lots of totalitarian actions against individuals and this is where the right-to-bear arms is so significant. The Feds can overpower people individually but the government cannot sustain a million Ruby Ridges or even a thousand.
Regarding (2),
The right to bear arms in America is permanent, regardless of what the law says. There are already more guns than people in this country and the lower quality guns of 100 years ago still fire fine. Connecticut banned certain kinds of guns after Sandy Hook and had a collection rate of just 1%.
I am not gun nut. I don't even own a gun because they give me the willies. I am just pointing out what to me is obvious.
From Marc's intro post:
For his inaugural foray into fallacious nonsense, Marc should probably have stayed in his own garden. If you're going to expand the blog's focus to Second Amendment issues, Ken, you should bring in a Second Amendment heavy hitter. Welcome to Popehat.
I love it when liberals pull out the "lol you'll never resist the federal government with your little rifles."
It's so much fun to compare with their "bombing foreign terrorists just creates more terrorists" and "Iraq and Afghanistan are quagmires where brave freedom fighters with AK's are resisting our colonial oil hungry troops".
It's almost like they hate the idea of bombing people overseas, but get very excited at the thought of bombing their fellow Americans.
Also, one can note that the left cries out in horror at any foreign bombing regardless of how precise and how few civilians are hurt, but automatically assumes that the feds would carpet bomb entire American towns with B-52s at the first sign of resistance.
It's weird.
I don't get this horror of "tinkering with the constitution." The Amendment process is in there for a reason; if you think the Second Amendment should be repealed (I have mixed feelings, but generally don't think so) then of course, advocate for it. Even in the fantasy world where that's successful, it's not like that would change the onerous process for future amendments.
"The wars to defeat the Iraqi and Afghani military took hours each. The wars to control those regions is going on a decade and a half, and frankly isn't looking very good. The primary weapon of the opposition: AK-47s."
+1
If the higher-time-preference people of that region can muster that much resistance, what is possible in the lower-time-preference west?
Our system is very non-totalitarian due to the right to bear arms and our legal system. George Zimmerman, a detestable character who attracted the ire of the Obama administration, fared just fine. How can one guy of middling intelligence endure the anger of the most 'powerful' government in the world? Astonishing! He killed the President's own son (according to the President), and then he became a professional troll who happily twittered away until he took things one revenge-porn post too far.
The feds would carpet bomb entire American towns with B-52s at the first sign of resistance.
I didn't even want to say that! I just typed it out automatically!
There's a natural right to self-defense, built into criminal and civil law. That's what most gun people are on about, I think. Also, the four corners you refer to…I don't think you've squared them either.
Not particularly convincing, for reasons other commenters have mostly outlined. Also recall the Battle of Athens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_%281946%29
Others already have noted that trillions of dollars of advanced US weapons have failed to subdue people in a bunch of foreign countries, but it's also worth pointing out that the men and women in charge of those weapons were willing to use them, at least in part, because they were using them on, you know, foreigners.
Captain Smith is going to be a whole lot less willing to drop bombs on a house of worship when it's the one that his parents attend, right next to the DQ that he's excited about visiting when he's home on leave. The notion that US servicemen are perfectly willing to bomb their OWN country into oblivion shows a remarkably dim view of our fellow citizens.
Isn't it far more likely that the government would try to enforce tyranny using traditional means of domestic policing? If only we had some examples of firearms ownership being an effective check against that!
Oh wait. These guys. And also these guys.[fn1]
fn1. I said "examples," not "sympathetic non-racist examples."
Wow. I had to double check that I was reading this on Popehat. A spittle-flecked screed that since citizens can't hope to resist "one FAE bomb" they should not be allowed to exercise their constitutional rights.
Pushing back against the thug on the dark street or the new jihadi at the 'holiday party'? Not a consideration–hide and call your betters.
Sad first impression. "Half-assed straw man argument" indeed.
PH just went down a few notches in my feed. Moving it to the Raving Lefties folder.
LMFTFY:
"So the next time you see some fool cheering [for us to erase] the Second Amendment as the text that protects us from tyranny, ask them to play all four quarters of the mental game. It isn't romantic pictures of regular guys crossing the Delaware in rowboats. The endgame is [government agents kicking down doors and searching for guns to confiscate. Because that's the end game of anti-2A "gun safety".]"
T
You have hurt my feels. I demand a safe space.
Unsurprising.
So the pic on the intro post was supposed to be ironic? Who knew.
The author should perhaps venture away from the coastline and deign to speak to the locals from time to time. True enough, there will be no Band of Brothers leaving their Post-Modern Micronesian Literature class at Skidmore to vanish into the woods and prey on regime supply lines. Those also aren't the only sorts of people in this vast nation of 300 million.
I am a gun owner. I've never fired it. In fact, as far as I know it was last fired at a Nazi in 1945 in Berlin. I'm quite sure it still works; I've thoroughly reconditioned it. I have plenty of 7.62x54r Soviet surplus stacked up in drums in my closet and a box of Hoppe's No. 9 stockpiled for when Obama decides the best way to control guns is to make them hard to clean after use.
Actually, only the first two sentences of that paragraph are true.
But here's one for you, Gun Nuts, and it will drive you bananas. If the 2nd amendment protects you against a tyrannical government, why does it not allow you to carry a firearm in federal government buildings – courthouses, post offices, IRS offices, and other loathsome occupation force buildings? Write your congressman; demand that this encroachment on your freedom is stopped.
Ewoks vs the Empire, Ancient Rome vs the Terminator?
I’ll take the team of individuals vs the Faceless machine, especially as the individuals are the ones pulling the trigger, remotely, on their own friends and family.
Starting with the “Militia” argument, when the Founders would have been astounded, not that so many Civilians owned firearms… but so few.
The military has a database of the demographic details of the rank-and-file. I'm pretty sure brass is smart enough to pull Cpt. Flyover from flight duty that day. (I don't think anyone below Captain is going to be put in charge of a plane in the first place.)
Even more likely, the fed gov will contract out to a bunch of Academi mercenaries from South Africa who don't give a shit about Flyover's grannie. I don't know why people always make the point about the US military consisting of US citizens. When has any ruler tried to put down a rebellion with soldiers from the region that is rebelling? Assuming anyone was ever stupid enough to try it, it must have been thousands of years ago because mercenaries have been pretty standard practice for this sort of thing since the earliest historical records.
The tactics will most likely consist of blocking all roads and other forms of transit into and out of the region that is rebelling. As the rebels get hungrier, they'll either peel off in small groups to trade liberty for basic sustenance, or they'll turn on each other, at which point the mercenaries will roll right over them.
I know, you probably think Americans are more principled than to give in to the federal government just because they're running low on supplies. But Americans are lazy and addicted to convenience. In my experience, they're not especially principled — but usually they are short-sighted and self-centered. Actually, to be honest, I'm not sure a typical American gun owner could be counted on to willingly follow orders as part of a militia, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt for the purpose of this thought experiment.
And yes, we're not doing a great job of controlling territory halfway across the world. The US government might not have quite as much trouble controlling territory that they already control, though. Neither Iraq, Afghanistan, nor Vietnam ever had an Eisenhower Interstate system.
But, I did not think I needed to waste a paragraph in the original discussing how I hardly think that Americans would be prepared to hide in the woods and caves, en masse, to support an American insurgency. Not a chance
Geez. I'm in favor of gun control and this is still a stupid argument. Yes, there would be an insurgency. No, an insurgency doesn't necessarily involve folks hanging out in woods and caves (your understanding of insurgency comes from watching 'Red Dawn' a lot, doesn't it? Tell me at least that it's the original, not the remake). The main hotbeds of insurgency in Iraq were in the cities, where the insurgents lived in their houses and then would go out and attack Americans. One of the reasons insurgency *works* is that the cost of entry for many insurgents is low — no enlisting in the military, no training, cheap weapons, live at home.
In fact, in many ways, insurgents resemble bloggers.
"Whaah, someone has a different opinion than I do!"
Also, nowhere in the OP did the author suggest citizens should not be allowed to exercise their constitutional rights. The OP argues that armed rebellion in the US isn't a particular good justification for one of those rights, but never argued that there might not be other more compelling justifications for that right.
Ken said Marc is a "First Amendment badass whose efforts to defend free speech are a frequent subject here." Ken also said to "watch for his posts on First Amendment and cultural issues here."
I'm looking forward to Marc's First Amendment posts.
This post is just a straw man argument – I always love when posts start "Let me give you my own single snarky hypothetical that will clearly be a realistic concern of yours." It belies your own prejudice to dismiss Second Amendment concerns out of hand when you think proponents are worried about "receiving free health care."
Others have covered some of the flaws, but here are a few I didn't see yet. As far as your concerns regarding some sort of anacho-capitalist-gov't to the highest seller: (1) Do you really think Citizens United changed a damn thing? Did K Street not exist? Did PACs not exist? Do you really think GE, Boeing, NRA, George Soros, the Kochs, Microsoft, etc, really was not represented much more strongly than the regular citizen?
(2) There is no need to go all the way to private armies just because you support the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment and the Federal Government are not mutually exclusive. Your logic here is basically "Honor the Second Amendment + Citizens United = Private Armies." Really? Because we haven't lived under that for how long?
Not a good first impression – this entire post feels like the talking points I expect from a 1L at a mixer.
Other people have addressed the ability of a comparatively poorly armed, distributed insurgency to stand up to a government armed with FAE bombs. But let's rephrase the basic assumption:
[2] The second amendment might thoeretically preserve a right to overthrow the government, but it is not practically useful because the government and its billionaire cronies have such an overwhelming superiority that any citizen uprising would certainly fail.
–> leads to –>
[1] The first amendment might theoretically preserve a right to criticize and call for reform of the government, but it is not practically useful because the government and its established media have such an overwhelming superiority that any collection of bloggers and self-published authors would surely fail.
I don't think Mr. Randazza would call for the unimportance of the first amendment, so tell me how my reasoning is wrong. Am I straw-manning his argument?
When has any ruler tried to put down a rebellion with soldiers from the region that is rebelling?
Um…
Uh…
Well, let's see: in Shay's Rebellion as a matter of fact. The post's historical piece of evidence witnessed the governor of Massachusetts trying to call out the local militia to subdue the rebellion and then being very surprised when they refused to turn out.
Please, please, know some history before you pontificate.
Two points that I seem to have missed.
1) Who's to say that at least some, if not all, current and former service-men and -women might not eventually find our current government the enemy of the people and act on their oath of office: to protect from ALL enemies foreign AND domestic, perhaps especially in reaction to any hypothetical order to bomb or otherwise attack and American city.
2) In light of the poor performance by our various "intelligence" (a term I use very loosely) and "security" (again, a term loosely applied) agencies at ferreting out various criminal and or military and or terror conspirators, what is there to say citizens couldn't come together on an effective plan to overthrow the government and carry it out successfully?
Based on this, I can only assume you're unaware that there are 5000 years of history to know, and there are probably very few human beings who know every detail of every rebellion of a few thousand people throughout all those five thousand years.
"We found out about the secret laws, the secret courts, the secret lists… can we really deny them the chance to use them in even more unAmerican ways to shred the last vestiges of our dignity and freedom?"
I would think that instead of simply complaining about how the government is corrupt, we might actually attempt to regain control of the machinations of democracy, instead of simply assuming that our country is a failure and that guns will solve anything, realistically speaking.
Fallacy of the excluded middle.
The States have their own State Guards.
If FedGov abused the peoples' consent sufficiently, state interposition combined with citizen militias would quickly make its position untenable.
Terrible optics, forceful resistance, and the prospect of interminable occupation against 4GW tactics.
The Second Amendment works just because the guns exist; they will probably never be tested directly.
Based on this, I can only assume you're unaware that there are 5000 years of history to know, and there are probably very few human beings who know every detail of every rebellion of a few thousand people throughout all those five thousand years.
Hey, genius, you're the one citing the entirety of history in your comment:
So, yes, if you want to cite it, you'd better know it.
But hey, I'll settle for you knowing the actual history cited in the post.
Uh… Lieutenants probably fly a plurality of fixed wing aircraft right now. They're just going to bench these guys from flight time for a few years until they get promoted for flying a desk? Not that I see what rank has to do with this anyway.
If Cpt. Flyover is benched because his town was on the bombing list one day, he's benched (and imprisoned or separated) permanently, you're not going to trust the guy ever again. But maybe you can have him help the security forces trying to control every house within rifle/laser dazzling range of approaching aircraft trying to land or supervising the tent cities for families who don't feel safe shopping at the mall or going to school off base anymore. (Having done a tour in Iraq and Afghanistan, I can tell you it's a lot easier to do this stuff when your family is thousands of miles away, but at a pinch I guess locked down permanently on the base/post will do.)
How many is "a bunch"? 250,000? Why isn't the US military that isn't trusted to do this performing a coup at this point?
Are these "regions" significant parts of states? That have this thing called "national guard" consisting of local residents who have a legal obligation to their governor, too? And tanks and APCs?
Whaaa? I assure you, no one trying to control a Baghdad slum or keep an Afghan road clear of bombs ever thought "this would be a lot easier with a better highway system." Army battalions aren't driving around from city to city to put down fires, nor would they want to. They (former we) are setting up camp near towns or inside city suburbs, staying there for years, and walking among the people getting shot at or bombed with the occasional raid when they know who to specifically target. Most of what's done is through the local police and army. I suppose you can convert all the local PD to SWAT style thugs, but you can't keep their families safe on a base.
There's this deeply weird assumption here that a few "Cpt. Flyovers" aside most of the military are good liberal drones who will starve cities into submission without any qualms.
Well, they'd probably just get voted out of office, or the people who make up the FedGov would quit their jobs.
Ignoring all discussion of the second amendment, just the lack of understanding of modern insurgency (AK-47s are useless without tanks and submarines? Have you heard of IEDs?) makes me much less likely to take anything Randazza says on this or any other subject seriously.
I can't imagine living my life afraid of everything like some gun-clutchers are. It's the government, it's the muslims, it's the druggies, it's the blacks, it's the aliens, it's the driver in the next lane, it's the ex-wife. it's that damn loud music!
Why are we even having this discussion?
About 32,000 people a year die from guns, but most of those are accidents and suicides. Let's not talk about that because I don't think anyone is talking about banning assault weapons to prevent suicides.
About 11,000 a year die from homicides. Roughly 2% of those are committed by "long guns": shotguns, rifles, assault weapons.
AND, the trend is down. The murder rate is roughly 60% of what it was 20 years ago.
So, why are we even discussing "military grade rifles and machine guns?" Why are we even getting into Constitutional territory over something that, even if it works perfectly, will get lost in the statistical noise? There's a tremendous amount of political capital being spent, and a tremendous amount of antagonism being generated, over something with at best a tiny real world impact. Is it worth it? President Obama probably increased Republican turnout by at least a couple percent last night, was that worth it for something with a theoretical maximum of 2% improvement on the murder rate?
Or, is the fear of "military grade rifles and machine guns" specifically due to mass shootings? Again, is it worth it? Is limiting access/banning a (very nebulous) class of guns the best way of preventing these attacks? Is it even in the top 5 most effective courses of action to prevent these? Do you have solid data, or even a testable theory, on why banning semi automatic rifles would prevent mass killings? Or does it simply seem obvious that making scary guns harder to get means fewer people will kill school kids? Are you arguing from emotion? Do you want to get into Constitutional territory with an argument based on your gut feeling?
The argument of this post is essentially, "You cannot resist the government with your guns if you do so in the stupid, narrow, and hyperbolic way that I describe."
Well, good to know. Looking forward to your First Amendment posts, Marc.
The stupid, it burns. First of all, government tyranny comes in all shapes and sizes and we have well upwards of 80k governments in this country, each of them having the potential to pick our pockets or break our legs. The utility of the 2nd amendment's resistance to tyranny isn't about how well it works on the most well armed of these governments but how well it works in making the yahoos in the other 80k governments rethink any dumb ideas they might have to behave like little tyrants.
Second, I believe the most recent successful sagebrush rebellion in this country was in 2014. That is slightly more relevant to the evaluation of the 2nd amendment as a 21st century brake on tyranny than the 1700s example of Shays rebellion. In what legal backwater is ancient example of real world practice more relevant than contemporary practice within living memory? The tyranny claims in the Bundy case are actually more interesting to boot. Shays Rebellion was about claims the government could not lay a particular tax. But in the Bundy case we have the BLM explicitly and flagrantly violating federal law in its wild horse policies (it won't sell to people who will slaughter horses) which means all that land has too many horses because BLM can't store all the horses needed to keep the land up so they've been pushing out the cattle ranchers for decades. Only a crazy man would stand in their way. Enter Mr. Bundy who fits the bill of too resourceful and ornery to give in to the pressure and crazy enough to grab for any theory to hand.
Personally, I don't think I'll ever personally go into the field to fight a hypothetical tyrannical government, but I'm certainly available for duty to provide a sea for those fish to swim in should we ever lose the republic.
I would like to just give this statement a huge YUP.
It's also why I've thought that Levin's amendment "solutions" were a bad, bad idea.
As others have pointed out, the purpose of of an armed domestic insurgency isn't to stand toe-to-toe with the regular armed forces. It's purpose is to wage distributed asymmetric warfare across wide swaths of territory, thereby raising the costs of effective occupation to prohibitive levels. See: any US (or Russian) attempted occupation of hostile territory since Vietnam.
Moreover, the current value of an armed domestic population isn't in the actual use of the arms for these ends. It's in their potential use for these ends. Any potential hostile occupier can look at the numbers of civilian firearms owned, plus the numbers of potential civilian combatants, plus the sheer size of US territory, and know that any attempted hostile occupation of the US will be an absolute nightmare. Best to seek power by other means.
I suggest you stop hanging out with effete coastal liberal intellectuals. Come to Appalachia sometime. I could introduce you to a few dozen individuals in my small town alone who love spending their free time tromping about the woods gaining proficiency with various long-barreled small arms. Half have service time under their belts as well. All of them would not hesitate to give any potential occupier a very hard time.
This entire article depends on the author's assumption that Americans are too soft to endure a war. This reflects a woeful underestimation of our character, ignorance of diverse lifestyles, and completely ignores the role of our veterans in training the militia. It also fails to apply this lack of stomach for war against the loyalist population, who would be comprised of the whiney soft people the author mistakes for the revolutionaries, to discuss what would happen to the government's war effort when their constituents are demoralized and broken.
effete coastal liberal intellectuals
Which one? The one who won World War I (Wilson) or the one who won World War II (Roosevelt)? Or the one who killed Bin Laden (Obama)?
Which one? The one who won World War I (Wilson) or the one who won World War II (Roosevelt)? Or the one who killed Bin Laden (Obama)?
Because of course the progressive minded college students screaming about micro-aggressions are the exact same pool that the military drew upon for the doughboys, the GIs, and today's special forces.
@wysinwygDECEMBER 7, 2015 AT 9:12 AM
Gotta fisk this:
"The military has a database of the demographic details of the rank-and-file. I'm pretty sure brass is smart enough to pull Cpt. Flyover from flight duty that day."
Are they going to pull half their pilots? Two Thirds? What do you think those pilots will do? Just let it happen?
"Even more likely, the fed gov will contract out to a bunch of Academi mercenaries from South Africa who don't give a shit about Flyover's grannie. I don't know why people always make the point about the US military consisting of US citizens."
Because its very important given that they will be enforcing the tyranny. Sure some will comply, but many won't. And they have the knowledge to fly jets, and run tanks, and fire artillery.
"When has any ruler tried to put down a rebellion with soldiers from the region that is rebelling? Assuming anyone was ever stupid enough to try it, it must have been thousands of years ago because mercenaries have been pretty standard practice for this sort of thing since the earliest historical records."
Uhh ALL THE TIME. And even if they aren't from that region, they are still firing on Americans.
"The tactics will most likely consist of blocking all roads and other forms of transit into and out of the region that is rebelling. As the rebels get hungrier, they'll either peel off in small groups to trade liberty for basic sustenance, or they'll turn on each other, at which point the mercenaries will roll right over them."
You assume there will be regions of rebellion, but you assume wrong. They won't be able to block ALL roads across the country, because there will be uprisings everywhere. The rebels will intermingle with those who are not. This will not be like any other battle.
"And yes, we're not doing a great job of controlling territory halfway across the world. The US government might not have quite as much trouble controlling territory that they already control, though. Neither Iraq, Afghanistan, nor Vietnam ever had an Eisenhower Interstate system."
It will be MORE difficult here than overseas, because there will be no front line. The US government only has 1.5 million soldiers, and there are 100 million gun owners.
You know, all this talk about the effectiveness or lack thereof of armed insurrection in the United States just reminded me: We STILL haven't heard Via Angus' position on the Bundy Ranch incident! I mean, seriously, isn't that exactly the sort of sharp, insightful commentary we come to Popehat for in the first place? Who better than our intrepid bull-on-the-ground to provide a unique, cow's-eye perspective on the issues plaguing America's ranches?
(With that out of the way, it seems like a lot of people have already said more or less what I wanted to say, re: how we've been trying to fight an insurrection armed with nothing but small arms and the Afghani equivalent of Radio Shack for years, so I won't go into too much more detail, there. I would like to point out, however, that Griffin3's comment above, extending the logic used in this argument to the 1st amendment as well, was particularly apt. Seriously, you should all scroll back up and read that one again.)
I am *way* more concerned with the throwaway line about Citizens United. If it's not sarcasm, and this is a First Amendment champion, we are in deep doodoo.
The biggest thing that would cause our side to rebel would be confiscation, or enforcement of registration. Connecticut has a 1% success rate at registering "assault weapons." They have not tried to enforce it, because they would be outnumbered, and probably leave a lot of dead bodies. Confiscation would be worse.
But nobody seriously wants an armed rebellion. We are students of history, and we know the horrors that will bring, and that its possible it won't turn out well for our side.
But the threat of it is enough to stave off the actual occurrence. And we work via the ballot and the courts and the media to change things. And we have mostly succeeded.
As one fellow put it, "the greatest check we have on tyranny is a culture which creates men who do not want to be tyrants in the first place." With apologies to him, the second-greatest check we have on tyranny might be a culture of ornery, arms-bearing intransigence that makes any would-be tyrant consider his ambitions more trouble than they'd be worth.
No lock or alarm system on earth is going to thwart a burglar who really, REALLY wants your stuff. But that's not an argument against locks. In the real world, few burglars are obsessive or cupiditous enough not to factor them in, and are usually content to choose easy prey over difficult prey, all other things being equal. Similarly, the sort of attitude that Americans have about firearms and anti-government resistance might not save them if worst came to worst … but my guess is, the prevalence of that attitude tends to make governmental overreach seem more troublesome in the eyes of would-be overreachers, and helps discourage them from bringing matters to such a pitch in the first place.
@Alex: Same here. To see a First Amendment expert decrying Citizen's United is rather disconcerting, especially as a throwaway gag line in an otherwise awful post that wouldn't be out of place on your average Facebook feed.
Eh, fair enough, but neither is voting nor saying anything on a blog or protesting likely to make a difference either. I think it's equally true that for any situation like you outline, you would argue that the reasonable, intelligent, educated sort of people you would like to be in charge and set up a revolution guarding civil liberties would be exactly the sort of people to trim their sails, go with the flow, and suck up to real power or stay in hiding.
Humbert Wolfe's epigram applies and yet does not cause one to disparage the freedom of the press:
"You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to."
It's incredibly rare for any revolution to be led (and remain led) by the type of people you would like to be in charge.
I like this guy.
My history education must be severely lacking. I was unaware the individuals you named personally and solely acted in accomplishing those goals. Is that why we don't know the identity of Bin Laden's assassin? It was Obama himself!
It's a fascinating turn of the modern mind that assigns the credit and the agency for the blood, sweat, tears, and heroic actions of the common soldier to the political leader who directed them but took no physical part in the struggle. It's doubly strange to see this appropriation when the question at issue is the personal willingness of certain individuals to act in this heroic capacity undirected by (and indeed in opposition to) the type of centralized authority to which you assign the credit. You can't perform this transference-of-personal-heroism to liberal leaders when the question at issue is the willingness of people to violently oppose them in the first place.
So, nobody is coming to get your guns not because of their fear of you shooting them, but because they were soundly defeated at the ballot box.
In 9 days you you can celebrate the anniversary of the Romanian Revolution of 1989. They didn't hide in caves. They fought in the city streets. You can find pictures of civilians sitting on captured APCs with a little bit of searching. Eventually the army turned against the government as well.
I think we know what would happen if Obama tried the scenario in the OP: he'd get the Praetorian Guard treatment.
Thank God that the Second Amendment protected the Romanians from their dictatorship.
Patrick Non-White says December 7, 2015 at 7:54 am :
This.
Senator Di Fi floated that proposal again last week. Now President Obama has taken up the cause.
That proposal, if made law, is not a slippery slope. It is a chasm.
A few points of interest flashing by as we fall into it:
He's on the secret no-fly list. Let's make sure he doesn't have a gun.
He's on the secret no-fly list. Let's seize his property so he can't fund terr'ists.
He's on the secret no-fly list. Let's forbid him to speak, so he can't propagandize for terr'ists.
He's on the secret no-fly list. Let's search him every day and twice on Sundays just because.
Children under the age of five, as well as U. S. Senators have been placed on the the secret no-fly list. The list is at best full of arbitrary decisions by nameless and faceless government officials with no accountability.
It's no surprise that Senator Di Fi would propose such totalitarian policy. She proposes totalitarianism every time she opens her mouth. But when President Obama supported the proposal, it became clear that there is considerable national political support for leaping into that chasm.
Totalitarian government doesn't arrive instantly, everywhere and all at once. Totalitarian government comes on little cat feet. It sits overlooking harbor and city on silent haunches, and then strikes where it will. It never moves on without a revolution.
A First Amendment lawyer who thinks the government should be able to ban political books and films? Aye dios mio.
It's a fascinating turn of the modern mind
About as useful as that fascinating turn of the mind that starts talking about "effete coastal liberal intellectuals." But if you want to go with the common soldiers, I'll note that they voted overwhelmingly for FDR in 1944. And (shockingly) military members donated more money to Obama in 2012 than they did to Romney. So there's that.
I'm curious as to the implicit assertion that if Obama goes dictator (he can't do that, that's MY plan, dammit! but I digress), the military will just blindly fall in line wholesale and allow it.
Uhm so how about this case where a land owner with help forms militia.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-ranchers-nevada-militia-insight-idUSBREA3G26620140417#ko5ZmEshQbcK3jYI.97
And you could only come up with one counterexample in a 5000 year target. There are a few candidates for "genius" here.
It was mentioned off-hand. I have a suspicion that you don't go obsessively reading about every historical example you see used in blog posts. Obviously, people whose opinions differ from yours should be held to higher standards than you are.
Oh, BTW, when Shay's rebellion was eventually put down, what sort of military force was used? (Hint: neither Uncle Sam nor the Commonwealth of Massachusetts signed their paychecks.)
@Dylan:
Maybe not. Then again, maybe he wasn't really "benched", but transferred to a different post or any of what I'm sure are hundreds or even thousands of administrative excuses. And maybe all he knows is that some rebels — not good, red-blooded patriotic American boys like Cpt. Flyover, esq., but real subversives and deviants — were causing trouble back in his home town, but got put down by his comrades in arms.
You can spend all day making up narrative and counternarratives. At the end of the day, it's all speculation.
Sovereign governments can't, by definition, perform coup d'etats. The US federal government would be suppressing a rebellion. The rebels are the ones attempting to perform a coup.
That would be the official line, anyway. Not sure why it isn't obvious.
Maybe not in those terms. (Actually, probably exactly in those terms.) But they may very well have said something like: "Wow, it would be a lot harder to set effective roadside IEDs on a three-lane highway." Or, "man, it would be great if there was a good road surface out to that hill — it would be perfect place to set up artillery," or "this village is swarming with insurgents, I just wish there was an alternate route," or "I wish there was a way we could more effectively encircle this village to cut off the insurgents' supplies" (the interstate system divides the US up into chunks; the part of the country with any worthwhile infrastructure or significant population density are carved up into fairly small regions that could probably pretty easily be encircled just by putting armor on all the overpasses).
LOL, it's pretty interesting that you think "good liberal drones" would be the super obedient authoritarian sort of soldiers who would do what their superiors tell them without question. This is pretty much the opposite of all the research on morality and political affiliation. Just to mention a few of the reasons why this doesn't make much sense:
1) A relatively small proportion of US military are liberal in the first place.
2) Liberals tend to be more anti-war and anti-military than conservatives.
3) Conservatives think liberals are pro-government, but actually liberals tend to be more anti-government than conservatives in practice.
4) Liberals are less likely than conservatives to put moral value on hierarchies — conservatives are more likely to obey orders without question, and liberals are more likely to be anti-authoritarian and question such orders.
5) Liberals are more likely than conservatives to empathize with or take the side of people rebelling against authority.
Which isn't to say conservatives aren't as moral as liberals or anything like that. I count both conservatives and liberals (and many of not-easily-classified opinions) among my friends and loved ones, and in my experience, politics is not any kind of predictor for character.
Still, based solely on the statistical evidence available, conservatives are much more likely than liberals to do something immoral because they were ordered to do so by a superior.
Uhhh did you actually read my post? Its both, duh.
As a matter of both Constitutional and personal principle, I support the Second Amendment because at the end of the day I don't fucking trust the government. Not all the way, anyway. For today I am OK. If Trump wins? I might go buy a gun just in case.
But I disagree Marc that the bajillion gun owners in the US can't mount a legitimate insurrection. Especially the really fanatical ones. Those guys are crazy, and I totally think they can fuck some shit up. Take out power and water supplies. Fuck with basic services. Cause widespread panic. Sure, the Federal Government has superior weapons. But unless it wants to go full scorched earth, those crazy gun nuts are scary as shit because they CAN mount an insurrection. Small or big.
But this is where I think your premise and these comments (ok, I didn't read all of them) make themselves a little irrelevant to the moment: government tyranny is not the current crisis.
Whatever side of the 2A debate you choose, it's gotten pretty fucking hard to deny that we have a gun problem of some kind. Does that mean abandoning the second amendment? No. Does that mean everyone must give up their gun? Maybe not… or, I dunno, maybe just for a minute until we can get a handle on why the fuck we seem to be slaughtering each other en masses at record numbers. Like a time out for people having guns.
Yes, a national gun time out is probably not a feasible solution. I know. But what is a solution? So for all the die hard "don't take my RPG" gun nuts out there… you want people to stop talking about taking your guns? Fine. Then put your energy into figuring out how we can make ourselves safer — from each other — TODAY. Not in the distant future against some imagined future tyranny. Today. What do we do today to stop this really horrible, really real danger that is happening right now?
And don't put up the bullshit "more guns will make us safer" answer. More guns make you safer in the event of an insurrection. More guns haven't done shit to stop people who want to shoot up churches and schools and shopping malls.
@Patrick Henry, the 2nd:
Your "fisking" was pretty pathetic; the only part worth responding to is here:
I think it is vanishingly unlikely that all the nation's gun owners will simultaneously act as one in response to any particular provocation.
I mean, they're not a hive organism, so they need to organize the old fashioned way. The lack of existing command-and-control systems means they would have to simultaneously realize the threat, agree about what to do about it, and subordinate themselves to some sort of novel hierarchy, preferably without any infighting or squabbling (they have to defend against heavily armed mercenaries while they do all this, remember).
But before we get there, we'd need a clear provocation that would get all these people off their asses at the same time. What sort of event would have to occur to make this happen? Nothing since the civil war has been egregious enough. So what do you think it is that would suddenly and spontaneously unite all US gun owners into the greatest military force the world has ever seen?
@Lagaya1:
You must be fun at parties.
I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a government to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this government. Modern government has gone beyond that.
God himself could not sink this government.
the government coming to get their guns.
“We need strong central government to protect us from the billionaires who control the government” is something I occasionally say as satire, and yet now and then someone says it seriously. I'm not worried about the occasional billionaire who got that way by selling a better mousetrap – as opposed to those who gamed the system to outlaw someone else's mousetrap.
We don't need private guns to protect ourselves from affordable health care: there are official guns to do that. If Congress were serious about making medicine more available rather than about controlling it, they'd start by repealing some of the maze of restrictions that benefit only an elite (who, of course, employ experts at explaining that any such repeal would mean millions of dead children).
Dylan: Legally, the National Guard is a Federal entity, of which pieces are lent to the respective States until the empire ‘needs’ them. Which way they'd jump is not obvious to me.
Its easy to deny: Crime is at a record law. How do we have a "gun problem"? We certainly haven't been "slaughtering each other en masses at record numbers". 1993 Firearm Homicides: 14K. 2013 Firearm Homicides: 11K.
Except it has. There have been plenty of mass shootings stopped by more guns. More guns do make us safer.
wysinwyg: Did you really say that, if the army removes the head of government, it's not a coup because they were in the employ of the sovereign?
(I hope people can figure out whom I'm addressing even if I don't use an at-sign; what a weird convention)
Yes, governments are by definition the victim of coup d'etats. Your proposed scenario is that the US military is so untrustworthy in this hypothetical insurgency that the civilian government is going to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of South Americans to come kill in their stead. My question is if they can't be trusted to fight the insurgents, how can they be trusted not to fight the mercenaries or the civilian government that hired them?
This shit is Underpants Gnomes levels of strategic thinking.
I can speak for Utah, I guess. Adjusting for out-of-state permit holders, let's say a reasonable guess of the number of concealed-carry folks in Utah is 300,000. So that's 300,000 armed people, serious enough about owning and carrying a weapon that they've gone through the hassle of the class, fingerprinting, and background check. That's also 300,000 people who are relatively politically conservative, spread out over a pretty damn big state with terrain that makes Afghanistan seem like the Nebraska prairie.
Say the law of land is that the LDS church must now perform and recognize gay marriage, and the US Army is going to come in and make sure it gets done. (Not the first time the US Army has been sent to Utah because they don't like our take on marriage). What do you honestly think is going to happen?
Anton:
Two minutes with Wikipedia can correct your misconception here. National Guard units by default answer to their state governors as commander in chief. They are only under federal control when activated under federal orders for specified times and purposes. The state governor, on the other hand, can call them out for disaster response or civil unrest at any time if they aren't on federal orders. National Guard units active under state orders are not subject to the Posse Comitatus limitations of regular armed forces. National Guard units activated under Title 32 for federal purposes are also exempt from the PC, but only if the governor consents to such activation.
@Patrick Henry – you see, that's exactly the kind of answer that gets people calling for gun control.
There have been 353 mass shooting so far in 2015. (Some sources said 311, some said 351, but, you know, a lot).
There is no rational world in which that's not a problem. That overall gun homicides are down from 12 years ago doesn't mean it's not a problem. And if it were true that somehow gun ownership prevented there from being even more mass shooting, than yay, but it still doesn't make 353 mass shootings in less than 12 months not a problem.
I support the Second Amendment. That doesn't mean I have to stick my head in the sand and deny that there's a very strong relationship between mass shootings and guns. Because of the shooting.
I also didn't say that respectable law abiding gun owners are responsible for the mass shootings.
What I did say is that many (most?) people will stop calling for stiff gun regulations or rolling back the second amendment if we find a solution to all these mass shootings.
Arturo:
Or four. If you mean large shootings on random, unconnected people with no reasonable motive, it's four.
There's no rational world where every problem is solvable, or worth the cost of the proposed solutions. Relax, you're living in very close to the best possible world.
@Dylan
"If you mean large shootings on random, unconnected people with no reasonable motive, it's four." — that is not what I meant.
Also, I am relaxed. I live on a tropical island in the Malacca Straits. Mass shootings this year: 0.
@Arturo Geovanitti: "There have been 353 mass shooting so far in 2015. (Some sources said 311, some said 351, but, you know, a lot)."
Four is a lot?
@Arturo Geovanitti says
OK, let's get a handle on what's going on. According to the FBI, the US's murder rate has dropped from 8.2 to 4.5 per 100,000 between 1995 and 2015. Gun murders, specifically, dropped from 9199 in 2009 to 8454 in 2013. So it's certainly arguable that we're "slaughtering each other en masses at record numbers" in 2015 the same way we had a record number of shark attacks in 2001. Furthermore, gun laws loosened over that period, notably the increase in concealed carry permits and the ending of the federal assault weapon ban. That's not nearly enough to justify drawing a conclusion that "more guns will make us safer," but it's definitely suggestive that "more guns don't make us less safe."
So we're safer in general, but there are more mass shootings now. (Why? At first glance the increase doesn't seem to be congruent to any gun related legal changes.)
Before we can figure out how to make ourselves safer, we need to understand what's going on. The FBI has already done a lot of research on this problem, naturally. Here's a good starting point. I'd like to point out two things: 1.) Only about 1/4 of the incidents that the FBI studied were carried out by people using rifles, so is focusing on rifles really low hanging security fruit? 2.) The FBI proposal includes teaching citizens a strategy called "Run, Hide, Fight" in these situations. Even though the police arrive to incidents like these in a median of 3 minutes, sometimes the only option you have is to try and defend yourself.
It's the only thing that's reasonable to worry about as a group category if you're disregarding the fall in total numbers.
Thank you for your concern for US citizens and interest in US gun laws. I myself am very concerned about piracy in the Malacca Straits and advocate sinking all non-military and large commercial traffic to suppress their depredations. You can't say it isn't a problem, and no leisure and fishing boats in the hands of private citizens is a small price to pay for public safety and lower shipping insurance rates.
That was my turn of phrase for a social phenomena Marc himself brought up. He cited the "intelligentsia crying for safe spaces" social set as a reason why he doesn't take the prospect of an armed insurgency seriously. If you don't like discussing this particular class of persons, bring it up with him.
And? What does this have to do with anything?
Question For Everyone Who Supports Insurgency: Seriously, what do -I- get out of this? I work in IT for a Fortune 500 corporation. Please tell me what benefits I get out of this that will make it more attractive for me to join the insurgency rather than support the status quo.
=====
@Caleb:
OK, so that's the method…but what's the goal?
I mean, you're effectively saying "We want the government of the United States of America to stop occupying the United States of America." That insurgency is just another Civil War. Eventually, you're going to have conquer/acquire territory to win. You're going to have to transform from an insurgency to a government to win.
Yes, you might get a few state governments to join you…they probably won't be the ones you are expecting, though. That could provide the basis for your new federal government.
But really, you have to decide what the end goal of the insurgency is. What is the victory condition?
Been to Appalachia, met those guys – and what's with the hobo beards, by the way? – and have walked away unimpressed. Again, same reason: no end goal. Just "We'll fight and after a while all the people will join with us and AMERICA RESTORED!" But no actual plans on how to continue or recreate governance.
=====
Arturo Geovanitti:
Ah, but that would actually involve finding a solution to a problem, something I've noticed that both sides are actually not interested in.
More Jews and fewer trains that run on time, mein freund.
But no one is supporting an actual insurgency. They're supporting the means to conduct one if a sufficient cause arose.
I don't see where Dylan contradicts me significantly. We agree that units of the National Guard answer to the Governors until the President claims them. Now, can we imagine what the President might do if Governors proposed to use the NG to resist some Federal decree?
Castaigne assumes that the goal of bringing down the empire includes that of erecting a new empire. I wouldn't assume that.
Many commentators have already pointed the inaccuracy of this post out, but I'll jump in too. As author (and admitted gun nut) Larry Correia so aptly put it:
"You ever note in every discussion about the topic of the 2nd Amendment being powerless against a modern government, it is always the peacenick afraid of guns with zero understanding of fighting, combat, logistics, or tactics arguing about how easy national confiscation would be against the trigger pullers, veterans, and people with a clue?"
Now, granted, this is not exactly a polite or non confrontational way to phrase it, but the statement is nevertheless accurate. I note that the author of this piece, at least according to Wikipedia and his posted bios, does not have any type of military or law enforcement background. He is also not an accomplished scholar in military history or a related field. So why is it that he is so confident in this opinion? If the author happens to read this comment, I'm not trying to be belittling or insulting; I'm simply pointing out that you have no real grounding in the relevant subject matter. Did you, then, consult with subject matter experts?
As a military veteran and current private contractor for the Federal government with extensive experience overseas, I not only have relevant personal experience, training and education (including a Master's degree focusing on a related subject) but have also spent the last ten-plus years in daily contact with the undeniable subject matter experts on insurrection and irregular warfare. Members of the JSOC and USSOCOM, the 75th Ranger Regiment, Army Special Forces and the supporting Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command , NSW, MARSOC and the Marine Corps' Reconnaissance battalions, and the Intelligence Community. My experience, and that of the vast majority of the professionals mentioned above, indicates that the author's point is nothing short of laughable and that a population armed with light personal weapons is more than capable of effectively resisting a government they refuse to accept.
I do not expect my claim to be taken at face value, but I do raise the question. Has the author consulted with subject matter experts, and what do they say? If not….why not, and why would you expect your opinion to be taken seriously when you are speaking on a subject you have no expertise in?
This must be what it's like for Ken/Patrick to have twitter people law-splain to them on Twitter.
Reality contradicted you on which entity has first call on the National Guard and which is the borrower. Why this matters is because the National Guard is composed of people who know these things and they affect their loyalties. If I said German forces could be used by a US NATO commander to take sides in a US dispute with Germany because NATO "legally owns them" in the event of a war you'd call me a fool, and rightly so. Your mistake is of the same type but lesser degree, yet it is of a degree that matters.
But perhaps your experience in the National Guard or in the regular Army working with permanent Title 10 activated National Guardsmen was different than mine. The ones I knew considered themselves members of their state militia first, backup federal soldiers second.
@Anton Sherwood:
Nature abhors a vacuum. No, I do not believe that if FedGov is obliterated that we'll all suddenly live in an anarcho-capitalist utopia of everyone getting along peacefully under the NAP. It's a nice fantasy, but just a fantasy. If you're setting up Constitution & FedGov Redux, you're still setting up something new.
And you could only come up with one counterexample in a 5000 year target. There are a few candidates for "genius" here.
I came up with a counterexample in the proof used in the post. That's a pretty big example. It also was the result of the five seconds I took to think about it. If I could be bothered to take more, I'd come up with more.
It was mentioned off-hand.
It's good to know that you're okay being completely wrong as long as it's "off-hand."
I have a suspicion that you don't go obsessively reading about every historical example you see used in blog posts.
When they're used as a central point in an argument? You betcha, as the crazed former Governor of Alaska might say.
Shorter comment for you: don't make historical claims that you simply don't have the knowledge and expect people to do more than laugh.
with the undeniable subject matter experts on insurrection and irregular warfare. Members of the JSOC and USSOCOM, the 75th Ranger Regiment, Army Special Forces and the supporting Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command , NSW, MARSOC and the Marine Corps' Reconnaissance battalions, and the Intelligence Community
The subject matter experts on insurrection and irregular warfare don't speak English.
And? What does this have to do with anything?
That there were probably a lot of effete coastal liberal intellectuals in the military, hence the votes. Try to keep up.
I am likely under some form of surveillance right now by the FBI – my friend (allegedly) committed a crime and is now in a Federal holding cell, and has been for nearly 2 weeks and has not yet been charged.
I am not involved in the crime, and thus I should have nothing to fear…but it is a real eye-opener to change from one of those dewy-eyed sheep who hear about Edward Snowden and think about it in a purely theoretical way, to the realization that the machinery put in place by the Federal Government – the Eye of Sauron as it were – is almost certainly turning to me, if only in a small and (hopefully) disinterested way.
So it is in that context that I post this – I don't know diddly about Revolution, but I am dead set against rolling back the 2nd Amendment in any way. I don't have any intention of being anti-government, but I *am* anti-*corrupt* government. (Citizens United can burn in hell, figuratively speaking.)
And from the reading I have been doing I just don't see much action on the part of the 'powers that be' to address that corruption. For example, I am old enough to remember the Church Commission as a little whelp. Where is its equivalent today?
So, if I have no intention of using a weapon against my own Country why, then, do I cherish the right to Keep and Bear Arms?
Well, as the Wise Man once said – I just don't want to get killed for lack of shooting back, no matter the threat. And that applies to my family and loved ones as well. And as this country fails to change or reform I see that the potential for a wide variety of threats are present and growing stronger.
I am a decent and law-abiding American, but what I see happening across the country today scares me in so many ways. I dunno what i hoped to bring across here, but hey… "May you live in interesting times" sure seems to cover it.
OK, having said all that – can anyone turn me on to Caitlyns latest posts? I'm dying to know what he(r) new outfits look like!!!
I would think that a professional would tell you that it depends. Light personal weapons can be used to effectively resist a force armed with much heavier weapons up to a point.
@Castaigne
That's outside the scope of the discussion. Marc's original point was technical, not normative. He maintains that armed civilian resistance is useless in the case of some conflict with the US armed forces. My point is that it is not, regardless of why there is an armed conflict in the first place. Maintaining otherwise is simply ignorance of military history. It doesn't matter if you are Vietnamese Communists, Arab Jihadis, or redneck reactionaries. The technical point is that an armed, hostile population poses a significant barrier to the strategic goals of an occupying superior military force.
I still have no idea.
You don't need succession plans to run a successful insurgency. Sure, it makes the transition period more stable, and lessens the chance of break-away competitors. So yes, best practices is to have your ducks in a row before launching a rebellion. But there are plenty of instances of rebellions that successfully resisted the established power, only to be left with the "now what?" question after. As a technical matter, it is not needed.
Castaigne: Why dismiss dissolution into smaller units as a possible outcome?
Dylan: I bow to your knowledge of NG members. (I've only known one, and would not consider him typical of anything.)
@ Total
Unlikely, at least in combat roles (which is the relevant subset here.) Combat has a way of ensuring one is not effete. Either that, or dead.
@Caleb:
I'm afraid I disagree with that.
I would be in agreement with him, though, since there should be no armed civilian resistance in the first place unless there is a specific end goal for that resistance. Also, while people tout 4GW as being the "killer app" for armed civilian resistance in the USA, I maintain that said insurgence ain't going to get NO support from the general populace without a really good reason for insurging.
(That isn't a verb, but what the hell.) But I'm getting off topic. What I mean is…
More to the point: That barrier is only significant depending on the size of the armed, hostile population opposing the occupying superior military force.
That's where I think we're talking past each other. I think you have this image of 100 million people rising up in insurgency. Let me tell you (internets), that probably ain't what's going to happen. 95% of the gun owners I know (and I know a lot here in the Deep South, both conservative AND liberal) are pretty much going to be "Uh, NO.", if the reason isn't good enough.
(The other 5%? They're a bunch of Walter Sobchaks and I don't hang with them. They'll start an insurgency if they think there are too many people in front of them at the check-out.)
I would argue that you do.
And have you seen how that has turned out historically, especially after World War 2? I tell you, the statistics show it is very, very, very bad. For more historical examples, the Russian Revolution of 1918 was a perfect example of what you described…and you can see how that turned out.
There's a book my mom gave me when I was a kid. One only needs the title to learn its lesson: "If You Don't Know Where You're Going, You'll Probably End Up Somewhere Else"
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@Anton Sherwood:
Because I think balkanization will turn into the Yugoslovian break-up conflicts, except with nukes and lasting for 150 years at least. Or, if you play pen-and-paper RPGs, it'll make Twilight: 2000 look fun.
(Twilight 2000: THE QUEST FOR GAS!)
God this writer makes my head hurt. The amount of dumbassery contained in a single post is amazing. I like how he mentions, oh Shay's Rebellion, the Civil War, this little thing called the American Revolution… Oh wait. He didn't mention that. Armed insurrections against superior powers have happened plenty of times. You have to assume that many of our own military are willing and ready to carpet bomb and murder their own citizens. You act as if the Civil War wasn't hard fought. It very much was. Why? Because the entire military didn't remain loyal to the north. They were split. THAT is realistic, not this fantasy notion of everyone taking orders from King O
Unlikely, at least in combat roles (which is the relevant subset here.) Combat has a way of ensuring one is not effete. Either that, or dead.
You've been watching too many John Wayne movies. Combat doesn't care whether you're effete or not; it kills everyone equally.
I reject the notion that the 2nd Amendment includes some type of "right to revolt". Not only is no such right in evidence in the plain language of the amendment (or any other part of the constitution), but the very idea is absurd. No system of laws can grant (or protect) a right of the people under its jurisdiction to disregard it. If that were a right, that would imply the authorities have no power to punish or suppress the flouting of the law, implying that the whole system of laws is really no system at all.
That being said, what a system of laws can do is set up conditions that affect its own failure modes, in much the same way that a nuclear power plant can be designed to shut down in case of malfunction. In this sense, the 2nd Amendment can be seen as an attempt by the framers to ensure that, should their new system of government fail and its constitution no longer be worth the paper it was written on, it should fail to revolution, rather than to centralized despotism.
I'm just a bit tickled that this post is followed on by Ken's "Talking Productively About Guns"
Emphasis on the second word.
A civil war in the US would be an ungodly mess. And if it happens the way Marc supposes with a naked coup then the military will fragment as will state governments.
And at that point yes, any armed township "self defense" or militia would be small beans, and maybe pulled into whatever local governance.
And that's not even counting if, as in Marc's hypothetical, the military starts bombing towns.
That'll cause some… fragmentation.
Say you suppose that the military itself is completely "loyalist" and there's no alternative power structures or backlash against the US military bombing US cities.
Well congratulations, you're engaging in as much fantasy as the guy thinking he'll put on a colander and go into the woods playing Wolverines.
Here's the thing about carpet-bombing your own cities. You had better make sure none of your personal guard has loved ones in that city. This is much easier on a society segregated along tribal lines (e.g., Iraq) than in the U.S.
If only there was an armed opposition the Communists never would have taken power…
The question I have when the molon labe types start yelling about the armed citizenry being the only thing standing between despotism or a return of the Queen's Army is why they always assume the majority of gunowners will be fighting against the forces of unfreedom.
I live in fly over country, and I only own one small gun, a 22 rifle. I know a number of people though who own a number of guns. I was just out last weekend shooting handguns with some of them. Let me tell you a little bit about them. They will in fact, stand up to government officials and will not simply run away. Many of them are former millitary themselves who have seen real action.
One of the triggers that will cause them to revolt is when the government officials show up at their doors demanding their guns. Many of them will choose a fight to the death over giving up their guns, which they associate with all the other personal liberties. I mean it. Most of these people hold strong beliefs about liberty, and are quite willing to die to protect it. Remember it is this population from which many soldiers and police officers come. They sing the national anthem at the games. They cheer the soldiers going and coming from service. They show up at memorial services for friends and sons who died or were wounded in war. They would be just as committed to the cause of liberty as would any Taliban or ISIS fighter to their version of Islam.
Finally, these are not just a couple of one off wackos, but represent fine hard working upstanding citizens. If you start killing and arresting these people, you will very quickly find the entire community up in arms (literally) against the government officials. This will not be some peaceful walk to close an interstate, but will in fact be armed resistance in thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of communities all over flyover country.
I am not really sure where I fall on more gun control and / or better enforcement of gun laws, but I do know the logistics of removing guns from private hands would almost certainly lead to more death and violence than we already have.
@DRed:
*sarcastically* Yes, the various White Russian factions were completely unarmed and provided no opposition whatsoever.
Mainly because they assume that the majority of people are just like them. And, of course, they believe that their agenda is "freedom".
There's also the point of why would the "rebels" hole up in one location against the "Loyalist" forces?
All that fancy technology and equipment means the "loyalists" would have a massive logistics, manufacturing, and support chain that could be hit with both men and material.
Yes, it would be horrifically ugly, but Randazza's hypothetical already crossed the Rubicon, so instead of concentrating in one spot wouldn't the rebels melt off and waiting until they could assassinate someone supporting the regime? Or cause some damage or sabotage?
Again the "Loyalists" would have to deal with rebel sympathizers in -well- all branches of the military and Federal LEO.
And the converse would also hold.
Again… it'd be an ugly, ugly mess.
The US civil war was horrific and that had some semblance of borders.
I really grow tired of this argument. Yes, 40 guys with ar-15s are not going to overthrow a tyrannical government, and yes they'd be wiped out by an airstrike. But this is not a realistic or even meaningful argument — it totally misses the point.
If our government, God-forbid, ever became tyrannical and needed to be overthrown, there would be a civil war, and a large percentage of the military would be on the side of the civilians. Check out https://www.oathkeepers.org/. The civil war would consist of citizens and soldiers fighting together to overthrow tyranny, just like in the Revolutionary War.
I find this scenario extremely unlikely, and I have a lot of faith in this country. That said, I do grow tired of the argument against being armed to fight tyranny because 40 guys would get wiped out against a modern military — it's silly, it's not realistic, and it cannot be used to argue for or against our founding fathers' desire that we be able to overthrow tyranny, should it ever arise
DaveL: No system of laws can grant (or protect) a right of the people under its jurisdiction to disregard it. But a contract can specify conditions/procedure for its own dissolution. I'd love to see that in a Constitution.
That being said, what a system of laws can do is set up conditions that affect its own failure modes . . . . Similarly, I'd like to know if any State Constitution has provisions for what to do if FedGov breaks down in certain specified ways.
@Castaigne
The same thing you got from the Russians and Americans each having enough nukes to eradicate the human race many times over. The same thing you get from the fact that Target can theoretically plop down a store right next to Wal Mart:
Deterrence.
Whether or not an armed insurrection could succeed at overthrowing the government isn't really material. As long as it's got the ability to make the situation horrific enough, it will act as a check on the government. Sure, the North won the Civil War, but there's still serious discussion over whether or not fighting that was was the right decision, whether the decision to not accede was worth the tremendous cost.
So long as government is sane enough to not want to go run the risk of destroying the country, and as long as there are enough crazy fringers out there that are willing to do so, we're almost assured of not having to deal with a tyranny.
So, what you gain as an IT professional in a Fortune 500 company is the security that you don't have to worry about jack booted thugs of any political stripe rounding you up and burning your city.
If an insurrection starts, everyone's already lost and all we can hope for is to minimize the total damage.
Agreed. Nobody is going to resist the government with guns. Maybe that shit worked in the 1700s, but stockpiling assault rifles and ammunition isn't going to do squat against an attack helicopter or unmanned drone. All you'll do is make the ground of your last stand radioactive from all the depleted uranium bullets they use to mow your sorry ass down with. If you're lucky, you'll hear the sonic boom of the F15s before you go boom.
The way to fight the bad policies of our government is with words. The pen is supposed to be mightier than the sword, anyway. Our government is supposed to be of the people and for the people, so let's all work towards fucking making it that again.
But having said all that, I also think that the ship has sailed for making this a non-gun society like the UK. You could ban sales tomorrow but there's already billions in circulation, and more importantly, ingrained culture.
The key to all this I think is that we all have to change as a society. We need to look at the root causes of why we want to shoot each other in the first place. No amount of laws are going to make us what we're not: peaceful. We have to stop being superficial and dig deep.
*Hugely* disappointed in your first post, Mr. Randazza. From the utter lack of understanding of the material, to the poorly framed straw-man rhetoric, this is not what I've come to expect from Popehat. If your subsequent posts are frequent and as low-quality as this one, I'm going to have to reconsider having Popehat in my feed. I'll miss Ken's writing very much, but wading through tripe like this isn't worth it.
For a piece on the subject of gun rights/control written by an actual reasoned adult, please see SimpleJustice today.
@Brad McQuaid:
Uh, which civilians?
Oh God, Oathkeepers and Three Percenters. Gotcha.
So, they'd be on the side of majority of the rural civilians, and in favor of nuking every metro area in the USA, according to the time I've spent on the Oathkeeper forums. Good to know.
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@Hasdrubal:
I'm sorry, I find that absolutely laughable. No, I don't believe that at all. I don't think it creates deterrence.
I should also point out that MAD didn't create deterrence during the Cold War. As history shows, it was only absolute luck we didn't end up annihilated. There were what, 43 incidents that only pulled back at the last minute.
To be honest, it would be the OathKeepers rounding me up, from their rhetoric. "You work for a crony capitalist Fortune 500 company! I hereby sentence you to death for crimes against patriotism!"
"No, wait, I vote Rep–"
"DIE, COMMIE LIEBERAL! MOLON LABE!"
*braaaaaap of the machine guns executing all IT*
So no, I don't feel terribly secure by their "deterrance", thanks. Maybe if I told them that the fringe on the flag meant it was an admiralty court…
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@Mark Wing:
The answer is simple: one side is right, the other is wrong, and God dictates that the wrong be executed. *shrugs* BLAH cannot be wrong, it can only BE wronged! etc.
Mark Wing:
What last stand? When I was in Mosul the insurgents didn't group up with AKs and attack people. Or declare a people's republic in some warehouse and dare us to come kill them.
They packed 2000+ lbs of homemade explosives in dumptrucks and blew them up near US and Iraqi government compounds. Or they walked up to two Iraqi soldiers standing watch in a market, shot them in the head with pistols, and walked off into the crowd, never to be heard from again and no one saw anything. Or they dropped pipe bombs with a remote trigger in a trash bag on a street and blew them up the next time a police officer walked by. Or they set up a car with 80 lbs of home made explosive in a neighborhood and when it was found early by the Iraqis they blew it up and then three minutes later shot at the responders with their AKs for 20 seconds before vanishing into the night. The helicopter that had been overhead when it blew up didn't help at all to identify or track the shooters.
That's about half of the incidents I personally dealt with. That was in early 2009 when the security situation was the best it had ever been and they were ready to remove all US forces from Iraqi cities. You may heard a bit of how Mosul developed last year.
And in the few months I was there they killed lots of Iraqi soldiers and police and a few of the US soldiers in my company. My battalion killed zero of them, but we did kill some innocent civilians while shooting at teenagers throwing grenades. I had 20 men with body armor and real military small arms and four armored vehicles and .50 machine guns and sometimes I had helicopters with rockets and chain guns working for me to look for threats and ready to kill any they saw. It didn't matter to the things I actually had to deal with.
The big problem with insurgency in urban environments is intelligence and knowing who to target. If you're smart and can rely on enough people to help you or can terrorize people enough not to identify you the drones and aircraft don't do any good at all unless you just want to kill everyone. Unless your opinion of liberals (or whoever) is that they won't endorse burning away entire neighborhoods of Iraqi women and children but will in Oklahoma City I'm not sure why you think any of that shit matters.
@Dylan:
Serious question: Why didn't you just kill everyone in the vicinity, or shell it, or whatever, and just label the "innocent civilians" as collateral damage? Was the ROE too restrictive?
If you don't know who to target, target everyone. You are guaranteed at that point to make the kill.
Again, why wouldn't you in the first place? Call it "collateral damage", pretty it up in the report with official-sounding language ("In order to achieve target parameters, we had to maximize the LZ kill zone to Alpha Brotango standards. This created some collateral damage, but resulted in maximum quality achievement ratios in operational goals."), and get your "embedded" journalist to whip up some excellent propaganda on it to make everyone look like heroes from a recruiting ad. If it's really necessary, make sure the whole crap is classified for 100 years and no hey problemo.
The reincarnation of Himmler wrote:
Are you trolling or are you an escaped Serbian war criminal in disguise? Absolutely serious question.
To not be a war crime the expected civilian deaths (collateral damage) have to be proportional to the military advantage achieved. Shelling a neighborhood because some kid threw a grenade and then ran into it has an expected military advantage of zero and anticipated civilian casualties of lots. We only target people actively attacking us who we can identify with eyes on or something like a building or compound with a known military use where we can calculate how many people might die and use the least damaging munition to minimize that.
But I think you're trolling. Or do you think the National Guard should have killed a few hundred people in Ferguson, MO pour encourager les autres not to shoot at some cops?
@Castigane
This is tautologically true. But it is outside the scope of the OP. I read Marc as asserting that regardless of the population's motivation, regardless of how high a percentage the population actively supports armed rebellion, it is useless against the US military. He doesn't qualify with 'unless the government does something really unpopular, in which case it would work.' He just says that armed resistance is pointless.
Use your creativity, and imagine the most horrific, barbaric, unpopular action by the government you can think of. Imagine people of all ideologies, ethnicities, and classes coming together and saying: 'yup, rebellion time.' It that case, a popular rebellion would certainly have a significant military impact. That is my only point.
Then you agree with me, and not Marc. Obviously, a few nutjobs with guns and a grudge aren't going to do anything. (Otherwise, they would have already.) Also obviously (to me, anyway) a full rebellion with the vast majority of the population behind it spells trouble for TPTB, regardless of their military capabilities. Somewhere on this spectrum is the inflection point where armed civilian action becomes effective. We might disagree where that point is exactly. But we agree its there somewhere. Marc is saying it's all pointless, and there is no spectrum. I'm saying he's wrong. That's it.
Please do.
Once again, you agree with me. I'm not saying the 1918 revolution ended well. It didn't. But it was a successful rebellion, it that it felled the existing power structure. The fact it failed to maintain order afterwards was a failure, but it wasn't a failure of insurgency. (The insurgency being completed once the existing government fell.)
1) No, not trolling. Yes, I was being serious with that question.
1a) No, not sociopathic either. I absolutely have empathy towards other people I care about.
1b) Nope, don't give a shit about non-Americans.
2) No, American born and bred.
Yeah, I know, "Geneva Convention", blah, blah, blah.
But, y'know, c'mon. That's all just lip service. I'm talking about the real practicalities here.
That sounds…counterproductive. So, restrictive ROE. Well, that sucks.
No, not trolling. I figure if one of my grandfathers can deliberately throw willie petes on captured Japanese wounded and laugh about how funny it was to do that to "the gooks" – and suffer no repercussions for doing so – that surely you guys in the modern military can come up with sufficient justifications for "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
It's just the enemy, so who would really give a damn aside from some journo looking to get a Pulitzer?
Marc I generally agree with you but you are very very wrong in this regard. 4G Warfare has been gestating for about 60 years now and still the professional militaries of the west struggle with defeating it.
So, we need to have at least some of our volunteer resistance show up with Stinger missiles, some anti-aircraft batteries, maybe a submarine or two?
All you need is a rifle to get the ball rolling. The rifle gets you the foot in the door and you acquire the rest. Please see Robert Taber's classic study of guerrilla warfare "The War Of The Flea". Please note Robert Taber is not a right wing nutjob but is an avoid communist providing real world examples of Cuba, Congo, Vietnam, Morocco, and Cyprus where lightly armed revolutionaries bled out 1st world powers.
I have heard that in the worse days before I got there some units did some "shoot everything" type stuff. Google "death blossom."
And in Afghanistan a helicopter rocketed two guys who were lookouts for another guy burying a bomb. Later on we discovered they were kids (an 80 lb body gets an amazing amount of hang time from a HE rocket exploding at its feet, fyi), and the bomb burier who got away was their dad. It would have still been legal (I think) even if we'd known they were kids, but I doubt the commander would have approved it if he'd known because it could have been counterproductive and we'd have known where the bomb was anyway.
The Iraq and Afghanistan experience is that when a squad kills Iraqis/Afghans in questionable circumstances like what your grandfather did it comes out later because one of the soldiers involved gets in trouble with some other UCMJ issue and trades that information for leniency on his DUI or drug use or whatever. Or it gets recorded in cell phone video and someone posts it on social media or shares it with the wrong person. And while a mass existential war of revenge might incline people not to care about some incidental shooting of prisoners, the current military cares very much.
@Caleb:
OK, done.
That's where I have a hard time with that, because my viewpoint of people in the USA starts with "I bet Trump will get elected and then people will be CHEERING the Muslim Resettlement Zone and related camps. And very few people will give a shit when the machineguns start up."
But um, OK, we've got rebellion time.
I would suspect a Twilight: 2000 scenario starting up.
In case you are unfamiliar with that, it's an old game wherein WW3 breaks out when the Soviet Union launches tanks into West Germany. After the "limited" nuclear exchange, civil war breaks out in the USA between MilGov, CivGov, and "Free America". We further begin to nuke, poison gas, and biological warfare ourselves into destruction, after deserting our military forces who are in Europe with an "You're on your own."
Take out the whole European thing and that's what I think we'd have.
Except that there isn't going to be a full rebellion with the vast majority of the population behind it. Sorry, I don't see it happening. At all.
What is the point of your insurgency if the only result are warlord city-states or the creation of (and I'm deciding to pick on him today) the Trumpista Fascist State? Your glorious insurgency for freedom and the Constitution has failed. Didn't reach the end game. It would have been better not to do it in the first place.
Except that the insurgency became the government and the point of the insurgency was doing that.
I think you're confusing the method as being sufficient. An insurgency that starts up, concludes, and then lets whatever happen is an insurgency without purpose. It's chaos for chaos's sake. Might as well just have anarchy. And I don't see the Oath Keepers letting me take over as the Ultimate American Slave Master after their successful insurgency.
Sure. I don't find it likely either. But that's not the point of the OP, and you are deliberately going off topic. Marc specifically assumed such a rebellion in his post. Re-read it again, starting at "Ok, fine… lets come up with a cause worth fighting for." He then goes on to assert that even in that scenario, armed civilian resistance is pointless. That is where I disagree with him, and that is where I say he's wrong. You may think that whole scenario is whack. That's fine. (Of course, you again disagree with him, just for different reasons.) But within the scope of Marc's point about the effectiveness of armed civilian resistance given a mass uprising, he is wrong. Any discussion not on this point is irrelevant.
Again, granted. I don't think an armed rebellion is very likely to produce any given positive outcome. But if it is militarily successful in overturning the status quo, then my point is made. It's a question of what could be done, not what ought to be done.
Marc's OP was only about method. He said it would never be sufficient in any circumstance. I say it will, it the right circumstances. It's like we're arguing whether a particular engine is capable of bringing a certain car up to a certain speed under any conditions, and you want to talk about where to drive it.
It's like the author of the post and quite a substantial number of commenters have never actually paid any attention to the history of the last 100 years.
If 50 million people marched peacefully on Washington DC and demanded tangible change, I think that would be orders of magnitude more effective then everyone shooting at each other. Again, I'm not advocating for any ban on guns. It's just that I don't see any problem that more or bigger guns are a solution to.
And I'm also sure that some armed uprising where it's "patriots" shooting everyone and planting road side bombs isn't going to make us a great country, either. I wouldn't call the insurgency model in Iraq a shining example of effective change, even if it appeared to thwart a much larger power.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Yes? How is that armed insurgency working out for the insurgents? Good luck finding soft Americans willing to live like Pashtun tribesmen or pretty much anyone in Tikrit.
As a US Citizen living in the Malacca Straits I am concerned about piracy too. One of the area fishing boats was pirated just last week. Thankfully no one was hurt. I disagree with your proposed solution for piracy, though. Just as I would disagree with a solution to the mass shootings problem that involved suspending the 2A or confiscating everyone's guns. (The bit about a "time out" for gun ownership was humor, not an actual proposal).
Statistics. I suspect there is endless argument about statistics that people on all sides of the gun debate could make about what they mean or don't mean. I have no intention of joining that particular debate for the purpose of a comments section battle.
But as to the idea that perhaps there is a solution, or solutions, that exist somewhere in between a hard "Guns, yes or no?"… I stand by that idea. As I stand my the idea that the daily violence where firearms is the weapon and groups of people are the target in a non-warfare context within American borders is something we should try to, ya know, have less of (however you want to define "mass shooting" – as there is more than one possible definition). And I stand by my idea that if less time and energy was spent on the current go-nowhere gun debate, more could be spent on thinking about what other solutions are possible, maybe that would be a good thing.
Now if you're an "everything's fine" kinda guy, OK. If you want to keep having the same pointless gun debate, go for it. If you want to spend your time dreaming up imaginary rebellions…OK. Everyone needs a hobby.
To me everything does not look fine. Which is not to say I am running around pulling my hair out in a hysterical panic. I just think that collective brain power could be put to better use than "guns, yes or no?" type thinking.
You should meet my neighbor. He and his buddies like to hike up and down mountains in the dead of winter for days on end with as little gear as possible. For fun.
My area is also chalk full of people who voluntarily get out of bed before dawn to sit outside with a gun and freeze their assess off in whatever the weather is doing for the sole purpose of killing something..
This is not to mention all my ex-military acquaintances (of which there is significant overlap with the above.) Basic is not pleasant; neither is sitting in an FOB during a sandstorm while the mortar sirens go off. Yet they signed up for that voluntarily.
You need to get out of the city/off the internet, man. At least meet some new people outside your usual social circles. Not everyone in this country is a self-interested ball of lard, fluff, and cowardice. It almost seems like your impression of your fellow citizens and your attitude on firearms is related. Wonder why that is…
"How is that armed insurgency working out for the insurgents?"
Pretty well by most object-based measures, actually. We – their most powerful enemy – are mostly out of their countries without having achieved many of the objectives we set out to achieve. They bogged us down in a decade of war. Depending on who's counting they suffered very badly in the process, but they may well consider it to have been worth it.
"Good luck finding soft Americans willing to live like Pashtun tribesmen or pretty much anyone in Tikrit."
Well, now you're moving the goalposts. The core of the potential insurgency has already largely self-selected, and they do not reflect the "soft" traits of Americans as a whole. But most participants need not even take any direct action, let alone join the partisans in the field. In fact, the uprising needs people in the cities living otherwise normal lives – they will provide needed supplies and information.
The fact that you hypothesized the following strategy for the insurgency shows that you know little about insurgency, strategy, or this area of history in general:
"So, you, me, all our neighbors, hell our entire city builds a perimeter around it. We fill sandbags, we all have ammunition, we all have food, water, supplies, and most importantly, we are all unified and in complete solidarity."
Are you kidding me? Of course that rebellion would be smeared in short order. That assumes a government willing to bother – but one thing about the information age is that the cost of overreaction has been significantly raised – though not impossibly so – even for truly bad guys. But why should they fight that way when they can fight exactly as all modern terrorists have, with respectable* results? Strike with relative anonymity, provoke a mistargeted overreaction, recruit the newly disgruntled into the movement, repeat. Shoot, the soldiers themselves might not even have to do that much camping.
Finally, there's this:
"If 13 states, with the assistance of at least one superpower, didn't manage to get their way through armed insurrection…"
Thirteen states, with the assistance of at least one superpower, got exactly their way through armed insurrection 78 years prior to the start of the Civil War, and as others have noted the thirteen you had in mind came respectably close to outlasting their opponent and were only suppressed at staggering cost. (The North suffered 88% of the US death toll from World War II.)
If the question is "What cause would so unite and inspire the people as to provoke a potentially successful rebellion?" I admit I don't know the answer. If the question is whether a suitably inspired rebellion would be assured success, the answer is unquestionably no – war has always been a game of chance and rebellion in particular a game of long odds. But if the question is to what extent a broad rebellion, suitably inspired and led with moderate competence, would benefit from widely distributed small arms, history shows overwhelmingly that it would.
*"Respectable" here being an amoral term evaluating only the achievement of the actors' goals.
Who is the Jewish traitor pussy who wrote this nonsense?
Regarding the pointlessness of armed resistance, no matter how f***ed things get–some not-stupid people will still say: "If you can't do something smart… do something /right/." See Warsaw ghetto, see Sobibor.
I REALLY hope it never gets to where I, or anyone I respect, think[s] it has gotten that far.
Because I have complete confidence that if it does, the USG will get to where "collective punishment" seems like a good idea. Like with native Americans and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War.
Peace, popehat regulars.
It seems to me from the comments I have read here saying that American troops would not participate in putting down an uprising, most strange that the same sorts of people who now posit this for the purposes of this discussion, were, not so long ago, worried about those same American troops gathering in underground bunkers and swarming out of every Walmart to take over America.
in your hypothetical example, it would be lunacy for an entire city to fortify. Any resistance would be guerrilla warfare such as what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You're being intentionally silly. Obama knows he can't cancel an election. He'll go pant suits and plastic surgery while Hillary pushes up daisies in the Rose Garden.
Klingon and Prima Noctae? Totally.
And this is where you are missing the point. Sure you COULD do that. But you start to kill enough innocent people, and you start to lose the support of the other innocent people.
The US government will not get away with indiscriminately killing innocent civilians to get at some rebels- not long term anyway.
@castaigne
So far as I can tell, nobody took you up on your question of what's in it for you as an IT worker at a Fortune 500 company. There is a real answer and it starts with the defenestration of Brendan Eich. As a practical matter, IT workers are in the racist/sexist/homophobic cross hairs and it's likely to get worse before it gets better. Code which you depend on to do your job properly and not get fired is starting to get evaluated by people who are counting how many transgender coder submissions have been accepted in an open source library. And now it's really starting to get weird:
http://www.itworld.com/article/3001440/linux/are-feminist-sjws-targeting-linus-torvalds-for-sexual-assault-charges.html
By the time it comes to open rebellion, your workplace is likely to have devolved into (if it hasn't already) a maoist horrorshow that will have predictable effects on your personal yearly bonus and even employability. The people who are just fine with leaving you alone to work in peace? Those would be the 2nd amendment nuts you seem to be distrustful of. The guys constantly monitoring you for badthink, those are likely on the other side.
Wow, Popehat sure went down a few notches fast. :-/ For all the reasons outlined in many posts above, Marc sure didn't think his cunning plan all the way through. And here I'd been reading about the exploits of Marc with satisfaction. Shame on me.
Welcome to Popehat. Hope your stay is a short as your first article was brilliant.
I had totally forgotten how comically butthurt people get when someone says something about guns that they don't like.
@TMLutas-
I think the question of what's in it for Castaigne has mostly been avoided since it's not a particularly good question. Surely what's in it for Castaigne depends most on the nature of the rebellion, which is largely undefined. In Rebellion A, the answer might be "Nothing," since it's a movement that prides itself on being ethically-conducted but has goals that would run counter to his interests. Rebellion B might just say "Join or die," in which case his interest is obvious regardless of the goals of the movement (it's not clear just how much of a pragmatist he is, though – commendably, even this might not be motive enough). Rebellion C might not be coercive but happened to arise in a situation where his interests were threatened and they were going his way.
But with such a wide spectrum of possibilities allowed by the question, who can say?
@Ken White,
Scan the comments of any firearms thread at Volokh. Rest assured you won't have that memory lapse again.
My goodness, that was bad. No, not "I disagree, and thus you are terrible!" bad, but, "I can't believe how sloppy and intellectually dishonest that was" bad. This is compounded by the high quality of work and thinking of which Mr. Randazza is reputed to be capable.
I suspect, as often happens to clever people–and I'll count myself amongst the guilty of that lot, albeit at the low end of the cleverness scale–that Mr. Randazza has waded well out of his area of expertise and into an area in which his thinking and rhetoric are lazy and untested. A bit of unsolicited advice, sir: perhaps you ought to stick to the First Amendment until you've had a chance to hone your logic and practice a bit more intellectual rigor and honesty.
@Caleb:
I'm sorry, but we're going to have to disagree. I find it to be essential to discussion of the topic. It's obvious we're not going to have agreement on that.
I do not recognize distinctions between could and ought. The two are inseperable for me.
And I have to ask, how many people is that? Out of the 350 million people here in the USA? Because I have 13 million people surrounding me along who won't. And that's just a fact.
I think your view is biased by the small amount of people you hang with. That leads us to…
Yes, I'm sure Randazza needs to leave the area where 83% of the American populace lives. I see this type of crap over at Free Republic all the time – this hard-edged belief that rural people who are all ex-military man-bears are the fucking majority of this country. It. Just. Ain't. SO. There's this thing called numerical superiority that is required to make military operations work. Considering that only 2% of the American population is in the military at any one time and how many don't keep their skills once they get out, I'm not seeing a game plan here.
Come live here in the metros for a while. Hell, even the whitest suburbs of Atlanta will probably non-impress you with the lack of man-bear mountain man you get. And then realize that this is 290.5 million people who are living in these areas. There is no material for an insurgency here.
=====
@Mark Randazza:
Badly, of course. Completely ineffective at meeting its goals.
Trufax.
======
@Jarrod:
I would argue that we had no objective to achieve – a failure of the administration that put us there – and so had nothing to do but some vague nebulous "free people" thing. So that's not really a win for the insurgency; we didn't leave because of them; we left because the next administration decided "Fuck this." and got out.
Yup, and it's pretty much these guys. Or this dude. And maybe some Hammerskins. It's why I'm not particularly worried about it. In my experience, a lack of these "soft" traits usually also indicate a complete incompetence in the planning stage.
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@Online:
Yay, the supremacists have arrived!
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@Patrick Henry, The 2nd:
This assumes there are innocents. I don't start with that presumption.
And let's assume for the moment that you are the insurgency. If you are, your default presumption is that everyone who isn't yours, is against you, right? That there are no neutrals, only the Patriot Insurgents and the Statist Oppressors?
So why should your opposition hold a different position?
I'd be willing to place bets on that.
=====
@TMLutas:
What, the numbnuts who was so fucking stupid as to make an obvious political donation? He did that to himself, bro.
No, brogrammers are in the crosshairs, like this assfuck Those of us who have followed BigCorp HR policies for over a decade now don't have this problem. We know how to act in a corporate-approved manner rather than just swaggering around with our cock out.
At least they know what code is, as opposed to the usual being evaluated by someone with no IT experience whatsoever.
More seriously, I've heard all that crap and it's a tempest in a teapot that's mostly creating furor with Redditors and the MRAs. Here in Corpland, we've seen no reason to give a shit, mainly because we don't do open-source here. Proprietary everything, my man. (It's not enterprise-y if it isn't.)
Yeah, I've heard about that, and it's a conspiracy dreamed up by Eric S. Raymond with no actual proof, which is unsurprising considering he went full whack-a-loon over 15 years ago. Dude, even Torvalds is laughing this shit off as bogus. You gotta quit reading that tabloid rag Breitbart.
Oh yeah, it's a horrowshow already. I can't walk around chanting "N—-, n—-, n—-!" or singing about the chinky-chinky-chinamen anymore. The secretaries will no longer let me have my ass-slaps and titty-grabs. There's just no more BRO here. Terribly sad.
You say that, but my experience actually points to the opposite. It's my supposed fellow conservative allies who are always doing the monitoring for badthink. SJWs in my workplace? Non-entities who I don't need to worry about – primarily because when at work, I keep it completely professional, just like everyone should.
No, I have nothing to fear in the corporate workplace. And praise God, I'll never work for small business ever, ever again.
=====
@Ken White:
Ayup.
I didn't notice who first misspelled jus primae noctis, but it needs to stop.
Mark Wing: When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. On another hand, if nails do exist, it's good to have a hammer in your toolbox.
Castaigne: I do not recognize distinctions between could and ought. The two are inseperable for me. Seriously, you see no difference between, say, “we have the technology to end all vertebrate life on land” and “let's kill everything that walks”?
Castaigne: This assumes there are innocents. I don’t start with that presumption. Wow. I guess you vote for Tough On Crime candidates who have no patience for sissy stuff like the Fourth Amendment?
Military success is, to a large degree, measured against objectives. If the enemy's main objective was to have us gone without giving up their freedom to operate, and that's what ends up happening, the enemy has achieved his objective even if the root cause of what happened had more to do with our mistakes than his successes. If I'm on the other side, that's a win in my book.
War is more of a game of chance than we like to admit. It's best to not have to rely on your enemy's mistakes, but rebellions are rarely fought under optimal conditions for the rebels. The ones that succeed do tend to have good leaders, but they always wind up catching and exploiting breaks. The victory and its consequences are no less real because you got lucky.
@Anton Sherwood:
I would definitely question why you were talking about the first sentence if you didn't intend to do it.
Yes, I did, do, and will. And proudly. Why? That's something that might give you insight to my motivations.
You see, back in the 1990s when this "tough on crime" bullshit began to escalate, I had a bunch of my conservative friends and family tell me how we needed to put TOC guys in power. Vote 'em in, support 'em, so on. And I kept telling them this was a bad idea, this would lead to things that they didn't want, that it would be a decision to regret. They disagreed. They kept pushing.
So I said OK and proceeded to give them exactly what they asked for. Every ToC act, proposition, candidate – public support, voting, donations, what the hell ever. And I made sure they knew it.
Now, they're going the libertarian route. "This is too much." "The surveillance state is awful." "The justice system has been borked by this 'tough on crime' crap." And I routinely remind them – this is what they asked for. This is what they wanted. I told them the logical conclusions of their desires and they didn't care.
And it comes back as "But I didn't mean for this to happen!", or more rarely, "I didn't mean it to affect ME. I'm a law-abiding citizen!" Something similar to those. And I say too bad. "But I don't want to support this anymore." Also, too bad. No takesie-backsies. This is what you wished for and you will receive what you wish – and LIKE it.
Still waiting to see if they're going to pressure me to support Trump. I don't think they'll like that wish either.
Castaigne: So, if I understand you right, thinking about a bad thing that could happen (let alone openly pointing out the possibility) is equivalent to wishing for it to happen, except when Castaigne does it.
Castaigne: I think balkanization will turn into the Yugoslovian break-up conflicts . . . . Because the same thing also happened in all the former Warsaw Pact states when they lost their overlord, right?
Will there be WiFi and hot showers in the woods during the insurrection? If not count me out.
I don't know, but I'm pretty sure Illinois can protect me from Lester Crown
The nice thing about your first PH post being of Facebook quality is that you have set a remarkably low bar, which I suspect you will clear easily.
Other than that, many other posters have pointed out the profound flaws in your thinking… or in the thinking of whichever person 'informed' you.
Christ but we've got asshole commenters.
Claiming that you can't resist the government because all you have is a pea-shooter compared to their tank's/planes/submarines is pretty much farce.
This would be like a patent lawyer claiming that it's impossible for the wheel to be invented today because racecars.
Cuba, Congo, China, Vietnam, Cyprus, Morocco, and a few others that I probably have missed are not only recent examples (within the past century) but also were completed by a tiny fraction of the population. All were minor uprisings with little more then a bit of food and a rifle plus a handful of ammunition.
I am not saying that its advisable or desirable. But you cannot claim that its not doable.
They are like the man but I am a ruminati!
I know the block quote
It's back to Youtube threads when ViaAngus is over my head.
For a first post, it's a pretty poorly constructed one.
Considering their body count and the extent to which official government forces are unable to protect their victims, the Crips and the Bloods have a pretty good little insurgency going right now.
Remember that Skynet was defeated by human beings who were vastly outnumbered, vastly underarmed, and vastly less durable than their opponents. Right now, our universities are clogged with worthless PC Bros. But those pathetic children don't represent even a hundredth of the actual people who will be defending themselves.
Ancient Rome vs. Terminator? I go with Rome every time.
My main reason for supporting the Second Amendment is that it gives life to the Third and the Fourth. If you go to bed each night untroubled by the likelihood that a burglar will break in, you have widespread gun ownership to thank for it. "Home invasions" (break-ins to occupied homes) are headline news here, but routine in other parts of the world.
In its country of origin, the saying "An Englishman's home is his castle" has become laughably quaint, like "A woman's place is in the home."
I think those crazy fringers can do a pretty good imitation of jack-booted thugs, what with blowing up federal buildings and setting off bombs at the olympics. I'm pretty well convinced that, should they come to power, they are going to round up everybody who knows more than they do or doesn't hate Obama enough.
I have been fortunate to have an acquaintance who forwarded to me a cartoon of four happy hunters riding in a car with the body of a dead liberal strapped to the hood like a deer carcass.
It isn't romantic pictures of regular guys crossing the Delaware in rowboats. The endgame is Ancient Rome meets The Terminator.
You realise that the Terminator lost, right?
How funny. The same people who would argue for the 2nd amendment to guard against tyranny are arguing in this comment thread all the reasons why government tyranny wouldn't work and is a ridiculous notion.
The author demonstrates her complete ignorance of insurgency strategy and tactics with this pap.
@McBeese: that's… a comically bad misreading of what's going on
They're not showing much gratitude for that Clark-free RSS feed you gave them for Christmas.
McBeese: that's… a comically bad misreading of what's going on
Its likely intentionally. I doubt his original comment was in good faith.
He disagrees with me. How could it possibly be in good faith?
Blacks in the segregated South did a pretty decent job of resisting the government – their local governments in this case – when those governments were cheering on the night riders during the desegregation era, into the 1970s. Nick Johnson's Negroes and the Gun discusses this at length. Condoleeza Rice has also talked about it.
Consider the possibility that it's not only the federal government that sometimes needs to be resisted, and local armed citizens may be capable of pulling off effective resistance. .
Marc makes the common mistake of assuming that in any violent conflict between the American people and the American Government that the military will not only fall in line but also be employed to maximum effect. Both assumptions are ridiculously simplistic and therefore false.
Arms widespread in the hand of the American public at the least tremendously drives up potential costs of any violent conflict. Think of it this way, the difference between a disarmed vs armed public is the difference between Tianemen Square vs the US Civil War.
When the costs of violence are high some kinds of abuses of power are deterred from the start. The 2nd Amendment is the nuclear weapon of democracy, stopping a war before it can start.
But if it actually came to civil war? Who would win? Ask the Germans about their experience with extended supply lines during WWII for an idea of how a new American Civil War might play out.
In contrast to the doomsday scenario Marc offered, I offer the scenario given by Bob Owens in December 2012,
http://www.bob-owens.com/2012/12/what-youll-see-in-the-rebellion/
Baloney Mahoney- Actually the biggest weapon of the opposition is a dogged tenacity and fanatical blindness.
Son, you have an unrealistic view of how many soldiers it takes to wipe out a town these days. All it takes a few drone operators & a few dozen others from some other part of the country to wipe out a single town. China does this routinely to quell dissent in particular provinces.
The US military doesn't need supply lines to fight targets within the USA.
@perlchpr says "You realise that the Terminator lost, right?"
You understand that The Terminator was a movie, right? – & that in reality, he would've won.
God save us all from keyboard warriors who think that movies are realistic, & think that real wars work the same way.
Welcome to Popehat. Seems to be mixed feelings about your initial foray here but that's why we have comments and discussion forums around the net.
One thing no one addresses in the mythical insurrection scenario is that if enough people believe the government has "gone rogue" (Klingon? Really?) and there is widespread rebellion the government really won't stand much of a chance. Not without external help – and that would simply be doubling down on their woes.
First – as others have pointed out – the military is all-volunteer and a pretty damned good one at that. But between their oath and having family at risk around the country I'd expect a minimum of 30% to go AWOL rather than start shooting their countrymen.
It's estimated that only between 3-10% of colonials participated in the American Revolution in some meaningful way. Today that 3% is bigger than our current military plus all sworn LE officers combined. Just 10% is close to 32 million souls (25M just counting adults). And, unlike conventional warfare, we won't wear uniforms. Nor will there be some kind of regional delineation like North v. South with battle lines and relatively clear allegiances.
Second – we've shown that an air campaign can cripple an opponent. The hard part is occupation. Ask any veteran of Afghanistan or Iraq. For that you need a sustained supply of food, ammo, weapons, vehicles, replacement parts, missiles and electronics. And guess who supplies all that kind of stuff to the military?
Yup. Your neighbors and fellow citizens. Some of these people espouse liberal beliefs – abortion, gay marriage, Obamacare – but if you get between them and their Constitutional rights they will turn so conservative they'll make Reagan look like a Communist.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a spike in missiles that don't track, dud ammunition and detonators that don't. If that's not enough, the truckers who transport the stuff will see a rise in "accidents," cargo theft while they eat, hijackings and load spills. Best of all, given the size of our nation, the government lacks enough trained personnel to protect all of their own bases, critical government buildings and suppliers of materials to DoD while waging an effective war on a resistant population. They won't be able to control food distribution, for example. Or energy facilities.
The serious questions come at the end game. Do we keep our constitution, revise it somewhat or do we make a new one? And what do we do about those who supported or even aided the opposition? Those are questions for another column.
Regards,
@Marc
A lot of folks here seem to be making an equally simplistic assumption that all the gun owners are going to support the secession or whatever. About long supply lines, have you considered aircraft?
But hey, there are other simplistic assumptions floating around here. For example, how many secessionists speak Chinese, Spanish or Arabic? Chinese troops in the USA? Probably not, but certainly Chinese money and weapons on one side or the other or maybe even both, depending on how they perceive their interests. If the drug cartels suspect the secessionists threaten their business, expect them to join the fun in a big way. In any event, if the secisch and the feds are fighting it out, who's gonna guard the southern border?
The application of 4th Generation Warfare to an American civil war does not require "hiding in caves." It only requires using our ubiquitous deer rifles to target the war makers and decision takers of the regime, to include intellectual apologists for tyranny. We know that the collectivists will fight to the last federal agent and oath-breaking soldier. Will they fight to the first Senator, the second congressman, the third White House aide, the fourth profiteering businessman, the fifth talking head? My grandfather had a saying, "Son, you don't poke a wolverine with a sharp stick unless you want your balls ripped off." For the record, he was talking about my Grandmother, who was known to be so fearless that she once waded barefoot into some bottom land they were draining and chopped the heads off nine water moccasins with her garden hoe. Don't go down this road, or expect that you know how total strangers will react when poked with a sharp stick, or with the muzzle of some government goon's rifle. We won't fire the first shots, but we'll damn sure fire the last.
Let folks read Mike Vanderboegh's response.
Don't be too sure and the "plucky rebels" have a better than 50% chance of a win.
Y'all need to study 4th generation warfare. Its not going to be a bunch of guys wearing handy grey uniforms standing up to be gunned down.Its war against the foundation of society, the political class, media, educators and all the infrastructure not its military its dirty and its not safely across the ocean. Exactly as Bill Clinton did in Kosovo.
The rebels learned this time, play nice. Lose hard.
The tyrants can't hide, can't keep important things secret (remember the OPM hack?) can only keep your important personnel like drone operators safe only by massive lock-downs and can't in a cost effective manner stop such things if it starts.
This also doesn't include the high possibility of inner city ethnic violence, like the ethnic cleansing in California and of the possibility of succession, military mutinies narco-trafficer invasion or any of the other atrocious things down to an outright disruption of the food supply.
Fact is the rebels haven't fought because honestly they don't want to rule and don't want the responsibility for breaking what the love, America.
Do not however count them out, its been simmering for decades and the amount of immigration combined with the shafting of the middle class combined with government misrule have brought it far too close for comfort,
This is the thing about these tyrannical dips; they are cowards. Of course they will send their willing minions to do their dirty work, but they will never confront us themselves. BUT that will not deter US from confronting THEM.
So you think that we are not going to resist the government with our guns. What makes you think that the tyrants won't reconsider when THEY start dying off. When traitorous Senators, congressmen, JOURNALISTS, and those in academia start dying, what then? And those rich businessmen? They will be hiding in a bunker never to see the light of day, for if they do, THEIR ASS is also on the line.
You see, we've been watching. We saw Clinton's rules of engagement in Serbia, where he declared MEDIA to be a legitimate target, as well as politicians, and others. In fact, what makes you think that YOU will be immune from the resulting civil war should they try to impose more of their dictates upon us? If Obama tries to confiscate our weapons, I don't think ANYONE of us will be immune from the fallout, but I can assure you that no one in his right mind is going to go after the military. They are going to hit the levers of power – IRS offices, DHS, NSA, FBI, ATF, – you get the picture. They can't effectively guard ALL their assets ALL the time.
Do you even know the effective range of your typical deer rifle? Forget the so-called "assault weapons" with their limited range of about 500 yards. There will be traitors that never even saw the threat before they met their fate.
Then we will really see if THEY have the will to fight US.
Eric Frein. With 2 bullets killed one state trooper and critically wounded another. Eluded 3000 law enforcement personnel with the latest in law enforcement technology and equipment for almost 2 months within an area of 50 square miles at a cost of $10 million. 29 police officers were injured during the manhunt from traffic accidents with each other.
Think about that. 2 bullets.
Attempted civilian disarmament will not end well for its supporters.
Nop says, "God save us all from keyboard warriors who think that movies are realistic, & think that real wars work the same way."
Wow. You said that after claiming that logistics are irrelevant to warfare?
After claiming a few drones can take out a town? Wow.
Field Marshal Nop has a lot to learn!
Field Marshal Nop said, "The US military doesn't need supply lines to fight targets within the USA."
Holy crap! I was wrong when I said Nop claimed logistics are irrelevant to warfare. I overlooked his key phrase, "… within the USA."
Yep, I misunderstood Field Marshal Nop. In actuality he is far far worse! Nop doesn't even understand how logistics works!
Let us marvel at the wisdom of master communicator Nop!
——————————————————–
"You forgot about the part where Sgt Flyover will be carpetbombing his grandma and the rest of his family, because they happen to live in a town that is defying the federal government."
Son, you have an unrealistic view of how many soldiers it takes to wipe out a town these days. All it takes a few drone operators & a few dozen others from some other part of the country to wipe out a single town. China does this routinely to quell dissent in particular provinces.
—————————————————————
See how Nop cleverly missed the entire point of what Nop criticized?
How is the case any different if 'Sgt Flyover' is piloting a drone as opposed to a piloting an Apache?
Geez, an unusual level of drivel for a PH commentator. Dude, the assumption is not that you, me and our 14 neighbors get down our rifles and start a revolution, it's that 70 million Americans do, which they well might under the scenario you sketch. Of what use are your A-10s and so forth against 70 million angry armed men? You run out of bombs pretty quick, not to mention gasoline and guards around your airfields who can prevent the enraged mob from tearing down the fences and repurposing your fancy weaponry.
Yes, rifles are not going to cut it if you're a tiny militia minority. But nothing will. They wouldn't have done so in 1776, either. It wasn't — it never is the pure quality of weaponry — that matters. That's why the Nazis didn't win the 2nd World War with the V-2 and Me-262. It's the numbers, multiplied by the cohesion, leavened slightly with the quality of weaponry. And there is much more of a difference between a man with his fists and a man with a gun then there is between a man with a gun and a man with an A-10, particularly when the man with the A-10 needs an airfield, big support staff, factory and reliable supply of aviation fuel to operate. This is one reason why Afghanistan is not a bucolic peaceful land, despite the presence of loads of fancy weaponry saying it should be, and gangs of scruffy riflemen who say it shouldn't be.
Remember how much disruption two guys with one rifle and a ratty old car caused in DelMarVa over a period of three weeks a decade or so ago.
Imagine what a half-dozen pairs of guys could do in a half-dozen large cities.
"You Are Not Going to Resist the Government With Your Guns."
Why not? My people did exactly that. The result was the Federal government didn't win and my people did not lose.
My people are not the only people who did not lose to the all powerful "Government".
@Marc Randazza:
But, I did not think I needed to waste a paragraph in the original…
Translation: I did not think of that manhole-sized gap in my argument, and I'm pissed that you pointed it out. Admit I was wrong? Never! Double down!
@Ken White:
I had totally forgotten how comically butthurt people get when someone says something about guns that they don't like.
You're enabling him. This isn't going to end well.
I thought an open mind and openness to correction were hallmark virtues of free speech?
@BillCa:
I agree with your basic message.
And, unlike conventional warfare, we won't wear uniforms.
And presumably no other fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance, nor will you carry arms openly, right?
You realize this means those of you who are caught can legally be "tried" and shot for being spies or francs-tireurs. And I somehow doubt that any regime worth rebelling against will be a stickler for due process even in peacetime.
@Guy Who Looks Things Up:
A lot of folks here seem to be making an equally simplistic assumption that all the gun owners are going to support the secession or whatever. About long supply lines, have you considered aircraft?
Speaking of simplistic assumptions, have you considered aircraft's limitations? Like the need for special fuel and airports? Limited carrying capacity (there's a reason Desert Shield took months while we geared up — sealift takes that long, and that's how the bulk of our stuff actually got to Saudi Arabia)? Visibility — and vulnerability to shoulder-fired weapons (like the ones we gave the Afghan fighters back in the '80s)?
@Castaigne:
What, the numbnuts [Brendan Eich] who was so fucking stupid as to make an obvious political donation? He did that to himself, bro.
G*d forbid he speak out on a political issue. Of course he should lose his job for holding unpopular views.
Yes, I did, do, and will [vote for Tough On Crime candidates who have no patience for sissy stuff like the Fourth Amendment]. And proudly. Why? That's something that might give you insight to my motivations.
You see, back in the 1990s when this "tough on crime" bullshit began to escalate, I had a bunch of my conservative friends and family tell me how we needed to put TOC guys in power. Vote 'em in, support 'em, so on. And I kept telling them this was a bad idea, this would lead to things that they didn't want, that it would be a decision to regret. They disagreed. They kept pushing.
So I said OK and proceeded to give them exactly what they asked for. Every ToC act, proposition, candidate – public support, voting, donations, what the hell ever. And I made sure they knew it.
Now, they're going the libertarian route. "This is too much." "The surveillance state is awful." "The justice system has been borked by this 'tough on crime' crap."
And I routinely remind them – this is what they asked for. This is what they wanted. I told them the logical conclusions of their desires and they didn't care.
And it comes back as "But I didn't mean for this to happen!", or more rarely, "I didn't mean it to affect ME. I'm a law-abiding citizen!" Something similar to those.
And I say too bad. "But I don't want to support this anymore." Also, too bad. No takesie-backsies. This is what you wished for and you will receive what you wish – and LIKE it.
So, you cut off everyone else's nose to spite your conservative friends' and family's face — even after they've seen the light.
* * * * *
Yes, 4GW is older than many people think. A French officer who fought in Vietnam before it was Vietnam (not to mention Algeria too) gave us this concise and concrete counter-insurgency guide.
As Colonel Roger Trinquier explained, it works like this:
Terrorists show the people that the government can't protect them. Then, they "collect" funds, "recruit" fighters and scouts to alert them of government troop movements and the like and "persuade" people to shelter and feed them and not snitch on them.
Some of that popular support may come from conviction and/or affection (helping out family or friends in the movement). Much of it, though, comes from coercion, up to and including credible threats of death.
Once the "people's movement" has enough manpower, solid allies, "safe houses" and money not to mention weapons, ammunition and other supplies, they become:
Guerrillas, armed bands who now attack government forces when they're vulnerable (and hide among the people when the crack troops come calling). The guerrillas establish their own bases, collect their own taxes/protection money and draft/impress/dragoon their own manpower.
Terrorists and guerrillas "hit and run," striking fast and then dissolving among the people. Government forces either do not know which individuals are fighters, do know but cannot prove to others (especially outsiders) who they are or cannot catch them. Remember, the "resisters" are getting shelter and warning from "civilians".
You know how cancer chemotherapy causes nasty side effects? That's because it's powerful but not too discriminating.
Same goes for government responses if the state doesn't have its own many strong (and courageous) allies among the people. Lacking a scalpel, it uses the sledgehammer: taking and executing hostages, arresting, imprisoning and executing individuals and families on scanty evidence (or at least evidence admissible in a court of law and recognizable to outsiders) and even destroying blocks, neighborhoods and villages.
As recently as a century ago and even until World War II, those tactics were no problem. Those few outsiders who knew what was going on, understood — and in general were loath to lift lids off cans of worms by intervening.
But in an age of worldwide media (both broadcast and print), pervasive propaganda, universal (and sometimes radical) mass ideologies and global Great Power competition, everyone needs to look good. Looking bad means that allies and trading partners, let alone neutrals — who answer to broad electorates concerned about human rights, or want to look good to other countries who do — abandon you and even consider siding with your enemies. It could mean a superpower supporting "the resistance" instead of you.
Keep in mind that being good and looking good are only very loosely correlated, especially when the looking is done from hundreds or thousands of miles away and filtered through not exactly disinterested entities, in particular news media and governments (the two not exactly being at arms' length either).
So as a beleaguered government you're between a rock and a hard place. Observe civil liberties, due process and decent rules of engagement and your more determined enemy wins battle by battle, salami slice by salami slice. Crack down and you look bad, lose international support and even attract aid to the rebellion, not to mention alienate your own people (now much more likely to find out thanks to said news media).
If the government forces are never safe from the guerrillas, they may retreat to their fortresses. That leaves large swathes of countryside and even some cities to the tender mercies of the rebels, who now for all intents and purposes are their own state within the (official) state. In their territory, they can now build a proper army which, with hopefully some foreign support (especially if the official state has little or none), can start to take on the official forces in a civil war. This is the final stage of a "people's war".
That's how a lightly armed but determined group can overthrow a heavily armed but not broadly popular government.
@ Fyodor: "Under what circumstances are you justified in taking up arms against American solders and police? Who makes that decision?"
I like the answer supplied by the 1784 New Hampshire Constitution's paraphrasing of the Declaration of Independence's second paragraph:
Other states' constitutions contain similar provisions, all founded on the right of revolution, which William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England called in the 1760s the right of “redress against public oppression" See .for relevant state constitutional provisions, Wikipedia,
For my money, anyone who believes that the Constitution does not incorporate a right of self-defense (with whatever weapons is necessary) — including the right of revolution — simply has not spent enough time studying the Natural Law philosophical father of the American Revolution John Locke's Two Treatises of Government Book II, An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government (1764 ed.), See particularly Chapt. III, sections 16 and 17. (Book 1 demolishes the Divine Right of royalty to rule.) The Lockean view of Natural Law "fundamental" rights is incorporated throughout the Bill of Rights and imbued in the separation of powers in the Constitution's remainder.
I wonder if the people who fantasize (and let's face it: it's a macho fantasy) about civil war ever think of the US turning into something like Somalia, Afghanistan or Syria. The country would be divided up by warlords, with some religious zealots taking control of large parts of the country.
I once had a conversation about gun control with a fellow who grew up in Wiemar Germany before the Nazis took over. He said that the Nazis and communists would have regular gunfights in the streets, and he spent that part of his childhood cowering in his house hoping not to be shot by a stray bullet. His view was that in any armed rebellion, it was the political and religious extremists who were armed well-enough to "win".
But there's something else more important: the hostility to any form of regulation of guns belies a hostility to the democratic (small-d) process. Democracy doesn't work unless the majority agrees with *them*. A majority of Americans want some form of gun control, but they block this. I wouldn't trust these people to be leaders of any rebellion.
We live in a country where our phone calls and internet usage is monitored, private corportions maintain huge databases about people that are shared with the government, people are put on secret lists that restrict their travel, other lists that restrict who cars can be sold to and loans given to, and militarized police can kill with impunity. So at what point is the government "tyrannical" and requires an armed rebellion?
The moment people start planning an actual rebellion, they'll be quickly identified and droned.
Many things are impractical. Nothing is impossible.
How many times have I seen the argument "You Are Not Going to Resist the Government With Your Guns"? Over the past 20 years, it must number in the hundreds. It's VERY popular in progressive circles. Those folks are definitely in love with the theory of 'the military will destroy all who oppose my ideology'.
While this is a fun theory to kick around, at the end of the day it is false, because there are many of us, who have proven that we will do what we say, who WILL resist with our guns. We can resist and we will resist. Case closed… but just in case, here is more food for thought. We are inside the wire. How many of us are current and former military? We know the tactics, speak the language, operate the equipment, wear the uniforms, prepare the logistics and we are all across the supply lines.
Your tactical scenario of setting up large targets for bombing runs is ludicrous. See Mike Vanderboegh's post for a more accurate assessment of future ops.
The forces of resistance have given fair warning of what is going to happen, should we continue down our current path. What more can be said? Besides, we will find out the answer to the question soon enough, if the DC decision-makers are as clueless about Pandora's Box as you are.
Oh yeah. We do have insurrections against local governments already. Take the riots in Ferguson, Missouri recently. But the media generally treated it as uppity black people misbehaving. Any group that rises up will be painted as lazy minorities, religious zealots, crazy gun nuts, weirdo southerners who are still upset over the civil war, hippies stuck in the 60s, etc.
Having guns gives Americans the illusion that they'll have an uprising one day if the government gets "tyrannical".
In Europe, where many countries are "disarmed", people still raise hell with protects, strokes, road blocks, etc and often force the government to back down on policies. It's not 100% effective, but the average European will do more to resist government policies they don't like than the average American, who just whines loudly for a few weeks, maybe goes to protects that get broken up by the police, but then eventually gets bored or distracted and gives up.
@Publius
It's only a half-assed strawman argument if nobody–or at the very least, only a tiny, marginal fringe–is espousing the rebellion argument. If you're remotely engaged with pretty much any community of gun enthusiasts and not willfully blind (and deaf,) you would know that the "we need them to rebel" argument is not rare, nor are its proponents a tiny, marginal minority.
My crowd is basically the least gun-ho you can get–we're basically all upper-middle class folks mostly interested in the Second Amendment for abstract libertarian reason and because we like shooting on the weekends. We don't always like the government, but overall we've benefited from it more than we suffered, and we've benefited more than most. Out of all the random pockets of people you can call "gun guys," we're about the least likely to seriously contemplate armed rebellion as a means of political redress.
And yet we still have plenty of guys who will seriously argue the point Marc Randazza is arguing against.
Speaking of quasi-strawmen, most of you trumpeting "but Iraq and AK-47's" rebuttal do seem to ignore Marc's second, relevant point that kind of preemptively undermines your argument.
If people are going fixate on flaws in the mechanics of nightmare scenario (which serves only as an exagerrated hypothetical that might actually unite all of us in rebellion), then we must also note it would never happen like that. A plausible scenario would involve–as Marc pointed out–not supervillain levels of pissing every off for the sake of it, but rather a careful, considered action to consolidate as much power as possible while still keeping the most wealthy, the most powerful, and the most well-armed on your side for as long as you need them. You're right that Herr Obama's sudden, complete takeover would suffer from heavy defections, but if you're going to mess with the hypothetical, we know his takeover won't be immediate and overwhelming. It will begin with steps that the majority of the "I served in the military, I know how to wage a war against my own government" crowd finds palatable.
If history shows anything, this crowd wouldn't object all that hard to locking up all Japanese/Muslims in the interest of national security (kudos on that, even Hitler had to slowly build up to that by first marking/registering all the Jews), an unaccountable police state, substantial erosion of due process and 4th amendment rights, or the expansion of federal powers at the expansion of states rights (on certain issues, like abortion, gay marriage, and controlled substances.)
No, a smart dictator wouldn't just declare himself Caesar overnight and order the military to bomb every city that won't submit, hoping they all obey. No, he'll consolidate his power gradually at the expensive of acceptable targets (in the eyes of his military and the most armed and well-trained citizens) and by the time he openly declares his ambitions, any who might defect or rebel will realize that they've already neutralized or alienated all of their potential allies, or they'll have committed so much to the new order and stand to gain so much that they stay on willingly.
As Marc and others have noted, solidarity is as important, if not more so, than the guns you have. In Iraq and Afghanistan, they have guns (though honestly, their IEDs are more important to their insurrection, and we're not guaranteed the right to have those), but really they could be be resisting us effectively with knives and rocks–their real weapon is the fact that they're willing to die to hurt us or to protect those who do, and that the people who do support us are largely unwilling or unable to do much about it. Over here, we lack such solidarity, and the only potential tyrant dumb enough to go out of his way give us a reason to band together like that is probably a false flag operation that WANTS us to overthrow the government.
So what you're saying is that you have too much to lose by rebelling against the government that has made your life comfortable and made you feel rich? The question really is at what point do you reach a threshold that says "logic, persuasive arguments and the normal rules aren't working. We're going to have to use force to effect the necessary changes" and give up all that cozy living?
How bad must it have been for those colonists in the 1770s? Were they so oppressed they had nothing else to lose? No. Most of the founders were men of substantial wealth. From all reports they could have continued getting rich with the status quo, yet they fought. They risked it all for something intangible, yet important enough to them to die for. Something called Liberty.
An excellent diatribe on why rebellion will be slow to come can actually be found in the science-fiction compilation N-Space by Larry Niven. A section called "Niven's Laws" begins the diatribe and he goes on to describe why we feel rich – but aren't. And why we could not only lose our freedoms, but civilization itself. Imagine reverting to a feudal society with slavery.
Each of us has to ask ourselves that question. At what point do we think it's time for the shootin' to start? (And are we sure we have the right targets?) Our liberties are being eroded, we know. Just like the frog in the kettle knows the water is getting warmer. The fire is stoked, I think with wood provided by the legislature, split into hundreds of pieces of kindling (regulations) by bureaucrats with only the courts keeping them from making the kettle boil. No single act is a "trigger" or excess by itself. In this way there is no identifiable "bad guy", no dictator or monarch issuing unpopular decrees.
As a last point, the number of actual combatants against the British during the Revolutionary War was estimated at about 3% – or about 115,000 men. But they were actively supported by about 10% of the population who provided aid, food, shelter and other support. I've seen estimates of passive support (providing a tidbit of info or simply not asking questions) was as high as 20%. Just three percent today would be over 9 million men. It's food for thought.
Small arms can be pretty effective at fighting a tyrannical government, if you can fight a guerrilla war in that government's support area. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we used aircraft, drones, and armored vehicles. This required the supply of huge amounts of fuel, ammo, and spare parts. It required many mechanics to keep the machines working, as well as the men to operate them. It also required troops to guard those men so they could get their jobs done (and sleep now and then). All of those men required food, ammo, transportation, and hundreds of other items. All that stuff was made back here where there was no war to disrupt production.
Try running a factory when rebels can cut your power lines, hijack the trucks bringing parts, and scare off your employees – those that didn’t quit anyway when they found out which side they were making stuff for. Try refining some jet fuel with snipers anywhere within 2 miles. And try to take a convoy deep into farm territory, find where the farmers stashed their grain, fill up your trucks, and make it back with the food. You may also find your drone pilots distracted when they find they can't step out of the building without drawing sniper fire.
Not that it's easy to fight a guerrilla war even when your base is secure – ask any of our guys who fought in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. But with a secure supply base, a conventional military can beat guerrillas, if it's willing to endure the losses. The only way to carry on with that war when your own supply sources are rebelling against you is to get weapons, food, uniforms, etc., from foreign sources, and you'd better hope they like you enough to either give you the materiel or extend credit.
And before you worry about that, which side will your troops be on?
Guerrilla warfare takes on many forms that can be just as disabling as an airstrike. You mentioned homefront employees quitting their jobs. There would also be those who monkey-wrench the works. Using the wrong grease or contaminated grease or hydraulic fluids, creating cold-solder joints that break under vibration, over-torqued bolts and some myopic QC inspectors. A resistance group could do small things like sand in a fuel tank, water in hydraulic lines, pinholes in coolant lines, etc. Putting oil on a downhill curve ahead of a convoy or supply shipment could be gratifying, especially at night. It's not that these things do great damage but when the occurrences are frequent enough it forces your opponent to use manpower to guard assets or infrastructure instead of fighting.
In a modern civil war their best tactics would be to exert control over what people need. Food, water, energy. Strangling the distribution of these products through rationing or limited distribution to approved locations might work. Limiting fuel uses and distribution during winter will keep us busy just trying to stay warm and fed.
BillCa:Yes a beleagured government might do that – at least as far as fuel is concerned – at the risk of driving the undecided majority over to the rebels. As for food, if this is "conservatives" revolting against a "progressive" government, it's also country against city – either the government and rebels quietly cooperate to keep food distribution going (which includes motor fuel for tractors and for food delivery, and power and heating fuels for cooking), or the progressives' political base will starve first.
Lawyers may have a mental block when it comes to understanding this subject: their profession depends upon the assumption that most people will leap to obey government authority in the form of laws, injunctions, and verdicts. When people ignore the court's findings, they rely on the moral authority of the court to get some men with guns out to enforce the findings, When too many men with guns refuse to obey, the only legal skill that is still relevant is negotiation.
An armed society is a polite society. We just need to teach those armed and impolite criminals some manners. Then they will be polite. Because they're armed.
The reason why so many people get "butt-hurt" over this particular issue is that this argument has been made, and torn down, over and over again. It's a superficial argument that can be be summed up as "It's impossible to resist tyranny, so we might as well give up our guns right now, and hope that our government never becomes tyrannical."
It's a notion that I personally find deeply offensive. It assumes that the only time it's justified to fight tyranny is when you will be certain that you will win, and since it's impossible to win, we're just supposed to clench our teeth and take it.
Sure, it will be impossible for the civilians of the United States to win an all-out war against its own Army. But then, what makes us think that a would-be tyrant wants to rule over a sea of radioactive glass?
Such a stance also ignores the flip side of the coin: if the population is motivated enough, then it's hard to see how an army of 2 million people can withstand the forces of an army of 80 million people, assuming each and every rifle is handed out to willing militia-persons…and this doesn't count people wielding pistols.
Of course, it's stupid to suppose such polarity, on either side. Civil wars tend to cause both the army and the population to split up into groups. That alone will mean that the winner of any insurrection will be up in the air.
The truth is, it's impossible to know how any given insurrection or civil war is going to play out. We need to know reasons, demographics, and who knows what else, to even hope to guess. Who would have predicted that the stubbornness of Charles I would have resulted in his beheading and the establishment of a republic? Or that upstart colonies would defy the authority of Parliament and go on to establish a government that becomes THE super power of the world? Or that the waffling of Louis XI would destabilize the government so much that the country would kill upwards of 30,000 to 50,000 of its own citizens, yet would simultaneously go on to conquer half of Europe, all while the surrounding countries are wondering how they would carve up this weak, unstable country between themselves?
Who's to say there will even be a Federal Government worth its salt to even fight an insurrection, and that the militias won't be doing their best to maintain order and re-establish a Federal Government?
Who's to say that the right to keep and bear arms will even be used to support a given insurrection? The insurrectionist Shining Path of Peru was having a lot of success, both against the government, and against the citizens, until citizens started using mere double-barreled shotguns to fight back.
Rifles are barely on the radar of "guns used in crime". Why would a government of the people, for the people, by the people, with free elections, properly representing the people, be so afraid of insurrection that they have to remove as many rifles as possible? Indeed, if insurrection is both impossible and undesirable, then there's really no good reason at all to take these weapons away.
everytime i hear this argument, i keep hearing adrian in rocky 4 telling rocky he can't win. some people just lack imagination.
In resonse to your update Mark: The insurgency in Iraq was largely the result of a full dismissal of a functioning proffesional military with access to weaponry along with a native understanding of both the culture and geography in which the conflict took place, something the invading forces lacked, and an influx of men from around the world pouring in to fight foreign invaders. The idea that such a hat trick could be pulled off by the relatively small minority of far right militia movements and their hunting rifles is crazy. The U.S. military will know the lay of the land as it is literally their own back yard. It's a kooky fantasy.
The idea that such a hat trick could be pulled off by the relatively small minority of far right militia movements and their hunting rifles is crazy. The U.S. military will know the lay of the land as it is literally their own back yard. It's a kooky fantasy.
With due respect, you neglected to define "relatively small minority" in your response. I'm not picking nits here either. As you put it, it's likely you're right. A small minority of far-right militia aren't going to have much success, not without a catalyst and some positive major media exposure. See, for example, the minuteman border project or either of the Bundy rancher standoffs.
The big IF in the room is how such tyranny comes about and how obvious it become to the average Joe with a mortgage to pay and 2.35 kids to raise and whether he feels it's bad enough to risk everything to take a stand. Likely most people won't as long as they're "comfortable" in their living conditions. But would just 3% of The People qualify as your small minority? That will be the voices of 9.6 million people you'd hear. Almost twice as many voting taxpayers than the NRA has.
I'd also suggest that as conditions ripen for a conflict we would see an uptick in aggression against the government. It might start as multiple arrests of "right wing militia cells" around the country planning "terrorist" actions by official reports. We'll see a lot of failures of smaller groups to accomplish anything but get caught or killed in the beginning. These will be the ones compelled to "do something" without having much support, cohesion or leadership.
I'd also suggest that if the government failed to act properly and legally regarding some important manner then took to declaring its critics as subversives or terrorists then enough people might band together to fight. (E.g. If someone did a Snowden-like leak of credible evidence that the election was decided in 2014 to give Hillary her turn and she would appoint Loretta Lynch and Sheila Jackson Lee to the Supreme Court and normalize relations with Iran.) Just 5% of adults would create a force of over 12M opponents and it's unlikely they would have only mere hunting rifles.