One aspect of the U.S. Second Amendment that I struggle to understand is how owning firearms can be seen as a check against government power in the modern era. No matter how much money an individual spends on collecting weapons, they can never match the resources of a government with access to advanced technology like orbital GPS networks, fighter jets, drones, bioweapons, logistics, and nuclear weapons.
When the Amendment was written, weaponry was still in its early stages of development, and the assumption was that a well-armed populace could, with sufficient numbers, overthrow a tyrannical regime. However, in today’s world, this seems unrealistic. Even if someone owned a thousand .50 caliber Desert Eagles, it wouldn’t make a significant difference against such overwhelming governmental power.
The Vietnamese and Afghans could probably tell us a thing or two.
One aspect I don’t think many appreciate is the deterrent effect of private gun ownership. The fascists would have already overrun us were we not armed. Notice the major ICE raids have been in NYC and California? Those are the two places in America with the strictest, and often dumbest, gun laws. Anecdotally, being visibly armed likely saved me two ass beatings in the past year. LOL, one guy was so fucking mad he was shaking, choking himself to be polite.
Most of our military might can’t be brought to bear on civilians. The examples you gave are purpose built to fight another military on their turf. The Air Force isn’t going to deploy fighter jets to put down a riot. And NONE of those things will continue working about a week after civilians pull support.
Almost every tyrannical regime in the 20th century systematically disarmed their citizenry, leading to some of the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. It’s not a coincidence.
The ones that created the government had to actually fight for their freedom. People became complacent afterwards, and seem to think that freedom is a given.
It reminds me of some quote “freedom isn’t owned, it’s rented, and rent is due everyday.”
That’s still the purpose of the second amendment, for people to own guns to defend themselves and others against tyranny
You can’t expect everyone to agree with you ideologically, and obviously they won’t rise up against a government they agree with. Conservatives don’t see the current administration as tyrannical, so there is no conflict for them between the ideals of the second amendment and their actions.
However, you can absolutely choose to exercise your second amendment rights.
As a gun owning liberal, I’m tired of my peers acting like the second amendment is some conservative agenda. The right to firearm ownership is an eminently liberal ideal. More liberals and leftists should own guns— the second amendment is more important now than ever before.
If you think there is a pressing need for an armed liberal/leftist citizenry, go buy guns and arm yourselves.
This is honestly, the dumbest, most American take in the world.
It literally ignores the plainly obvious fact that not a single other developed country allows gun ownership, and yet, still have rights and democracy and freedom.
Guns did not get your rights, and they do not protect you from a government that has AI powered drones with anti tank mines on them. Hell a fucking APC with a sound cannon will make your AR look like a child’s toy.
Guess what happened when a pair of guys had enough guns and body armour to challenge the local LA government in the 90s? Oh would you look at that, every single local government’s police force across the country just militarized and bought tanks and SWAT teams in response. The idea that the government will let any random potentially mentally ill or terrorist citizen, buy enough firepower that they could legitimately challenge the government, is dumb on its face. No government anywhere allows that or would for obvious (see: terroristic) reasons.
Wide spread gun ownership just makes everyone less safe. Full stop.
This is honestly, the dumbest, most American take in the world.
Hell yeah brother 🦅🦅🦅
It literally ignores the plainly obvious fact that not a single other developed country allows gun ownership, and yet, still have rights and democracy and freedom.
Many other developed countries allow gun ownership. Educate yourself, my man.
But more importantly, I literally do not care if they do or not. The point was never that democracy cannot exist without firearms, but rather that in the worst case scenario an armed citizenry can act as a force against tyranny. It’s a rare thing that it might be needed, and a last resort. No sane person wants a civil war
Guns did not get your rights
Except they literally did. How do you think the revolutionary war was won, softly spoken words?
they do not protect you from a government that has AI powered drones with anti tank mines on them. Hell a fucking APC with a sound cannon will make your AR look like a child’s toy.
Guerrillas with small arms in developing countries have repelled the US military repeatedly over the past half century. More importantly, if you don’t think a combination of small arms and low cost homemade munitions are effective against a modern military you haven’t been paying attention to the war in Ukraine at all.
Many countries permit gun ownership, not like the USA does.
Do you know how many innocent people’s blood that has cost?
Encouraging people to arms themselves will get people killed. You’re racing to the bottom in a doom loop and yelling hell yeah nonsensically rather than actually trying to break out of that doom loop.
America is fucked because it’s convinced it’s population that it has to keep participating in its toxic behaviours to survive. That’s false. It’s literally just fear mongering.
it’s not fear mongering when we’re literally months away from being the next fascist state.
And another thing to consider, cars kill about as many people in the US as guns, so we should be talking about banning cars as well?
Oh do tell us the value of goods and services transported every day by gun.
Because I can give you a number for the approximate economic value provided by cars and vehicular transportation generally, can you tell us the economic value provided by guns and every random person being able to point and click murder whenever they want?
Gun crimes are largely committed by people who do not have the legal right to those guns. The vast majority of legal gun owners are responsible people. When you ban guns, they’ll just go to other means of killing. You won’t stop it, if they want to kill people they will.
Nope.
Just objectively and provably false, this is NRA talking point nonsense.
Guns increase the rates of suicide, they increase the rates of domestic violence murder, and they make everyone less safe around police by giving police an excuse to use deadly force.
Guns also are not manufactured clandestinely en masse, anywhere, because it takes a lot of precise industrial machining to do at scale. They are not like sex or weed that are impossible to ban, when you stop manufacturing them for nonsense reasons, they stop circulating and criminals stop being able to get their hands on them.
I do not understand why Americans think they are such unfathomably unique snowflakes that none of the evidence or lessons learned from every other developed country could apply to them.
You’re right. It’s a liberal idea to allow the (largely) unregulated possession of firearms. However, it takes a certain mindset to pickup that forearm and try to decide how the country is run with it through armed insurrection. One that’s more akin to authoritarian, or at least paternalism.
Personally I feel if the 2nd amendment is there for this reason, the ln the no kings marches should have had arms. That’s a powderkeg scenario and we’d probably be looking at hundreds dead at this point. However if there was ever a reason for the 2nd amendment, this is it and that’s the cost. Otherwise there’s no point in the right to bear arms and you should scrap it.
That’s a fair statement.
I don’t think we are there yet. It will be far better for our country if our problems can be solved by diplomatic and political means, and we are far from running out of levers to pull.
You have proven the second amendment is just so you can shoot your neighbour. None of you rose up against his first term, none of you will now. All the child sacrifices you have been doing were just so you can feel cool with your gun and dream of shooting someone one day.
Its time to admit it.
If you need to exercise your right to bear arms, you have already lost. The battle is won in education, critical skills, and mobilising together (unions, etc).
You aren’t wrong… but leaving guns off the table feels short sighted.
If we ever need to raise arms against the government, it will be a dark day indeed. No reasonable person wants that. We have many methods of recourse before that even enters the conversation IMO.
However, there can eventually come a time where resistance is appropriate. Hitler never would have taken complete control of the country, exterminated so many Jews, and started Europe on the path to a world war if the Germans were armed and actively resisting his rule.
It seems self evident that the German people would been better off resisting Nazi rule than allowing the death camps and WW2 to come to fruition.
However, there can eventually come a time where resistance is appropriate. Hitler never would have taken complete control of the country, exterminated so many Jews, and started Europe on the path to a world war if the Germans were armed and actively resisting his rule.
Bruh, come the fuck on. Jews were 1% of the population, meanwhile like 30% of the population actively supported the Nazis, and far more would have continued to turn a blind eye as long as violence wasn’t being perpetrated against people like them.
This is nonsense alt history that ignores the fact that Nazis steamrolled and enacted death camps in far more countries than just Germany, and personal ownership of firearms didn’t make a dent in stopping them.
What makes you think they didn’t have guns?
Never suggested they didn’t. I’m suggesting that the country would have been better off if they both had weapons and chose to resist.
We aren’t Germany. The founding fathers made sure we could arm ourselves. The choices we make are our own.
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Good luck with whatever the fuck you’re smoking.
History shows time and time again that collapsing cities/societies/empires cannot be stopped nor redirected with violence. The endemic causes are there, violence may provide a respite but it just accelerates the overall disintegration of the society.
May what is happening to the USA be a wake up call for the rest of the western world.
Is it worth the amount of problems that guns brings to a country in exchange for a chance of a shooting competition against an M1 Abrams?
I believe it’s fundamentally important that we keep that right to an equalizing force.
Acting like we are going to directly fight a tank with an AR-15 is either a straw man or just frankly ignorant. The US military has repeatedly been repelled by guerrilla forces with small arms, and if you have been paying any attention at all in Ukraine you will see what can be done with very little technology in terms of drones etc.
You don’t understand what happened in Vietnam or Afghanistan. At all.
If you think those guys truly defeated the US and that you with your rifle are going to do the same… I don’t even know if there’s is a point explaining it.
That’s still the purpose of the second amendment, for people to own guns to defend themselves and others against tyranny
It isn’t, and has never been. The language of the constitution is plain as day:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”
The mythos of the 2nd amendment being this poison pill for a tyrannical state government is only so pervasive because institutions like the NRA perpetuated it for decades in service of arms manufacturers and their bottom line. No sane government anywhere in the world would bake such a clause into their constitution, it’s antithetical to government itself.
The 2nd amendment is absolutely an artifact of a bygone era of American history where, as a fledgling nation, we did not have a powerful standing army to rely on for defense against foreign adversaries. A people’s militia was the final defense against such a threat.
However, all that being said, I agree with your sentiment that leftists should be arming themselves. Just because the 2nd amendment has almost completely lost it’s original intent or meaning, doesn’t mean we can’t take advantage of the fact that it exists with tons of legal precedent to strap up in preparation for what might come next. Things are unlikely to get better from here, and if things get worse you will be glad you have a firearm for protection.
The founding fathers have written at length on their reasoning for including the right to bear arms in the constitution. It is very clear that they believed in the people’s ability to resist and overthrow the government if needed.
After all, this was a group who escaped the grip of the monarchy through force of arms. It’s odd to think that they didn’t see value in the ability of the people to do the same, especially when they repeatedly wrote about it in period.
However, all that being said, I agree with your sentiment that leftists should be arming themselves. Just because the 2nd amendment has almost completely lost it’s original intent or meaning, doesn’t mean we can’t take advantage of the fact that it exists with tons of legal precedent to strap up in preparation for what might come next. Things are unlikely to get better from here, and if things get worse you will be glad you have a firearm for protection.
Also this here is kind of the point. The original intent is not important; many people believe in the modern era that an armed citizenry is important as a last ditch balancing force to government overreach. We are all better off if left leaning people arm themselves instead of using pro-gun arguments as some sort of self-righteous gotcha against the right.
Wait til you hear what happened when the Black Panthers tried to exercise their 2nd amendment rights.
Look at the results of that 90s LA bank robbery. It was the first time that two guys had enough body armour and firepower to challenge the local police. What was the end result? Every police officer across the country getting assigned body armour and high powered rifles, and every police agency militarizing and buying APCS, tactical units, etc.
The idea that the government would allow you to own weaponry that would legitimately challenge them is asinine.
Something bad. Is it something bad? I bet it was something bad.
Funnily enough it resulted in more gun control, so it was something good.
It was of course always the plan to radicalize these people and then utilize them
I wish I had enough faith in people’s planning abilities to believe this
Guns are naught but tools. They have no moral nor political ambition. All they can do is provide an amplifier of force, no matter your ideology.
Only you don’t accidentally beat someone to death with a hammer.
You don’t accidentally shoot anyone either, it’s negligence.
Let’s not get tied up in semantics but the idea that you can’t “accidentally” shoot someone is nonsense. Whether you call it negligence or not, if it’s not on purpose, then it’s an accident.
Accident isn’t a harsh enough word.
In the US a gun is more likely to kill the owner or their family than anyone else.
I’m fairly sure the vast majority of those are accidental.
Well you’d be wrong, overwhelmingly the majority of those are suicides, followed by intentional homicides, and lastly negligence (you can try and remove the negligent party’s guilt by calling them accidents all you want, but the “accident” occurs through blatant negligence every time.)
It’s a lot faster to do it with a car
Speak for yourself.
Sure but I don’t see how people can think certain bans should exist and not others. Sawn off shotguns have been banned for as long as I’ve ever known, yet people don’t question it. The reasoning is they could be dangerous to others on accident. Yet if you take any round .223 with a fmj (cheapest format to buy) it’s going straight through your wall, and through the entire apartment across the hall. So when you fire 3 shots towards the door they are trying to go through, most people with adrenaline or freaking out enough to think a gun is necessary at that point in time, 2 of those rounds are going into the next residence. Even the 1 that hits the person very well might go straight through.
Guy stacked sheet rock up in a row and they went through
.223 - 17 sheets, .308 - 20 sheets, 30-06 - 23 sheets
Granted with gaps between them the wobble will make it more like 3-4… so anyone in the living room/dining room or if the bedroom is towards the wall facing the hall… Is possibly getting a hunk of lead in them.
Hollow points almost make more sense there, as hopefully they’d split on the first sheet rock and the smaller shards may get stuck in the second, if not hopefully not have enough momentum to penetrate a person after if their lucky.
Should they ban those rifles, in my opinion no, but I think if you use one for home defense and fire a round that penetrates into another person’s residence, you should get an attempted murder charge for being irresponsible. It isn’t a moose coming in the front door. For people who believe they need home defense a 9mm hollow point will save money, be easier to navigate in close quarters and dump all the energy into stopping the person instead of going out their back. (Unfortunately for them, much more organ damage, and high chances of death). (Personally I think most should use revolvers anyways if they aren’t using it often, because 20 years from now even if it hasn’t been cleaned, it’s more than likely going to do exactly what you want it to do… while a semi automatic spring loaded contraption, may jam)
Lots of FUDD here.
Over pen is going to happen on pretty much any round period. Slower rounds with larger mass will go through more usually in real life situations. The drywall videos are ok, but the issue with them is that they don’t show the other shit in the walls. Wires/firestops/insulation/studs. Exterior walls might have brick or stucco with tile. Doesn’t matter the round, you’re going to have over pen. Shoot a deer slug at a 2x4 stud and drywall, vs a 223/556 round…deer slug is winning every time.
Second, a AR pattern rifle is much, much easier to get on target and shoot for pretty much anyone compared to a shotgun or handgun.
Secondly people do call out the absolute bullshit rules of from the ATF and NFA. A shorter barrel doesn’t magically make a firearm more deadly, just like a suppressor doesn’t magically make a firearm silent. FUDD shit.
Lastly, a revolver is trash for defense, there is a reason pretty much every branch of LE or military has swapped to semi-auto mag fed handguns. They are easier to shoot, more accurate, hold more rounds, easier to reload, etc. On top of all this, you shouldn’t be loading something and tossing it in a drawer until you need it. You should be practicing with it at minimum monthly.
I encourage people to educate themselves on guns and what type and size gun is appropriate for what they want to do.
I feel like it makes more sense if the guns were always there to protect stolen land.
Well one party told gun owners that they’re awful people. Of course a chunk of them are gonna be okay with what’s going on. The people who hated on them are being “owned”. Can you blame them for not rising up to fight the party that pretends to give them lip service?
can you blame them
Yes.
“A Republic, if you can keep it”
They can’t do the work because their feelings were hurt? I will absolutely blame them
People don’t understand the game.
How?
Gee, maybe if you shouldn’t expect others to pick up arms for you. Maybe you have to diy your own revolution.
Like honestly, what did you actually expect?
Your post history is a mess.
I have him tagged as ‘misguided soul’
Holy shit - he’s one of those lunatics that thinks Bernie Sanders is a corrupt politician committing crimes!
If I see one more mouthbreather rant about a guy with multiple published books owning more than one house as if that’s a smoking gun, I’m going to go postal!
