Chefelf.com Night Life: JW Wells - Viewing Profile

Off the top of my head:

-The Swiss/Burgundian wars of the 15th century (they had some money slipped to them by the King of France, but no military support)
-The Hussite Wars
-The French Revolution

Oh, c'mon. Find anywhere I argued that anybody should be allowed to own crew-served or heavy individual (anti-tank, anti-air) weapons.



Look, I don't think I'm getting my point across here, since I keep repeating myself. Assuming that 100% of the US military came down on the side of a theoretical tyranny, even then they wouldn't have enough troops to pacify everywhere at once. Military doctrine says you concentrate your forces to attack, pool your air support and armor assets to overwhelm an adversary, etc. If there's an outbreak in Hoboken, NJ, and you mass troops, ship tanks by rail, coordinate your air wings in New England, etc. a properly organized partisan force will split up and lie low, leaving you nothing to smash with all of your overwhelming force. Meanwhile, you don't have those troops, tanks, planes in San Diego, where a national resistance could take advantage to strike at undefended locations. I'm not Mao Zedong here, I'm not going to be able to explain guerilla war from a standing start. Suffice it to say that the partisan doesn't have to win big, stand-up battles to prevail.

A lot of people on this board do not trust the public with weapons. And it looks like they have a lot of contempt for the intelligence and judgement of the public. We'll have to agree to disagree on that. I do, however, want to point out that trust of the average citizen's judgement is one of the underlying philosophical principles behind modern democratic self-government. Take that away and we're back to Hobbes arguing for Leviathan.

Well, I'm not trying to write up a "Guerilla War 101" manual or anything here, but the point is that if you're a partisan, you don't stay to shoot it out with the 82nd Airborne. If overwhelming force comes by, head for the hills or melt into the civilian population and wait for them to go away. Forcing a tyranny to repeatedly shift their troops across a very large country to deal with repeated local outbreaks of resistance is what you're after.

Again, if you don't trust people to resist tyranny, you accept that eventually it'll happen. Do I expect to see a tyrannical government in my lifetime? No. Do I think an armed revolt will be necessary? Of course not. Do I support the right of the people to bear arms as a reasonable step to make tyranny less likely? Yes.

Well, that's your opinion. It's true that if the population won't resist tyranny, the issue of whether they're armed is moot. But your argument is boiling down to "People don't take freedom seriously enough", which could just as well be used as an argument against the First or Fourth Amendments as the Second.

There's nothing wrong, per se, with suggesting that freedom is wasted on the masses, but you should note that the entire concept of representative democracy is based on the argument that the common people *can* be trusted with freedom. If they can, and are willing to fight to defend it, the issue of whether or not they are armed will become of paramount importance should tyranny arise.

Even the US military as a body is not big enough to enforce martial law across a country the size of the United States, with 300 million people. A despotic state would need to use paramilitaries or police forces to enforce an unpopular order, and they would be very vulnerable to an armed populace in a state of revolt.

Any government stays in power because of the consent of the populace, whether secured through elections, or through fear. If through being armed, the populace stays unafraid, even a despotic government will collapse.

Don, you should reflect that members of unpopular minority groups often have the most to lose from being disarmed. If you're really worried about your safety, you may want to look into the Pink Pistols or a related organization.