As if ICE would refrain from shooting people who threaten them with guns? The protester who pulls out a gun would be gunned down, along with any other protesters nearby, and even the progressives would blame the protester for endangering the peaceful people around them by starting a gunfight.
The reason this doesn’t work is that it needs organization. The police, ICE, military, they are organized. They have a plan, of sorts, and can execute coordinated operations. Protesters can’t. Not if they’re planning to use guns and shoot federal or local officers. You can’t do it secretly enough to avoid getting raided before your plan comes together, it’s a crime all the various types of officers would be happy to shut down hard.
ICE (and any other law enforcement group) will not be forced to comply by the populace. If you ever have enough guns coalesced to force them to comply, they will bring in enough guns to make sure it never happens again.
And… this is where we disagree. I really don’t think that this ICE action would even have happened with such an armed populous. IMHO what they are doing is illegal and the only reason they get away with it is because they are armed because …
Have you actually see that happen yet. I know it was called for, but I have not seen any results. Yes it would be interesting to see if that improves ICE’s civility.
To try to tie this into the topic, are there examples of ICE (a governmental agency) backing off from places because they are more heavily armed, or is this more theoretical?
You were the one who decided to delve into hypotheticals. We have not seen ICE “surrounded by legally armed protestors” either. Did you want to talk about a hypothetical situation, or do you want to talk about what has already happened?
I’m interested too, though the funny thing about the National Guard is that it can be run by the state or the federal government.
If run by the state, it would most likely be to keep the two sides apart and try to maintain civility. That’s what Walz was talking about potentially doing.
If run by the federal government, it would (or at least should) be because there is a state of emergency. And as reluctant as I am to say it, ICE folks being held hostage by an armed group seems like a legitimate emergency rather than one that was invented as an excuse (as has been the case this past year when the administration has tried to federalize NG troops as an intimidation tactic).
Tying back into the OP here, I think that ICE being surrounded by legally armed protestors would be a perfect example of:
Well as the Declaration of Independence phrased it:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed
In other words, things have to get pretty drastic before fomenting armed revolution against the government becomes the lesser of two evils. Or perhaps as Claire Wolfe, author of “101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution” put it:
“America is at that awkward stage; it’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards”.
And finally of course to whatever extent gun ownership skews right on the political spectrum, conservative gun owners are going to view the administration’s actions less unfavorably.
In the 18th-19th century sense of the word, the USA no longer has any state militia forces. The reorganization of state forces into the National Guard beginning with the 1903 Militia Act was explicitly to bring such forces under the federal wing, and to remove the limitations on the federal government’s authority over them as originally given in Article One, Section Eight clause 15. The National Guard is now more or less a branch of the Army Reserve, and they can be yanked out from state control at any time; the Supreme Court case of Perpich v. Department of Defense ruled that a state governor could not prevent their state’s National Guard forces from serving overseas.
The Bundy incident was something that I like to call “armed civil disobedience”. It’s the absolute last step before plunging off the cliff of open rebellion.
Can you name a single time in the last century when the Federal Government “complied” with the wishes of a well armed group of agitators?
I will not accept times when the government laid siege rather than storming in, because the agitators wanted the Feds to go away, not wait for reinforcements.
You are missing my point, which is that the federal government would typically not pursue such a path and would chose to work within other means in areas with higher firearm ownership and bearing arms. But yes it does happen:
Bundy Ranch Bundy standoff - Wikipedia.
Not that I can tell except insofar as mentioned earlier, objecting to things that directly counter Second Amendment rights like asking for organization membership lists or disarming trans people. But repelling mass intimidation campaigns or at least marching along with the opposition? Crickets.
IMO, even if there were stuff to go down that would meet some kind of a “tyranny threshold” I’d think the leadership of major advocacy organizations, as such, wouldn’t ever risk being accused of inciting armed rebellion. They know that being declared a terrorist group just takes a signature on a piece of paper and that a dozen current and former members of a board of directors can be arrested and made an example of quickly. At most I’d expect to see some “2A influencers” stoking the fires of a stochastic resistance.
A few states have their own militias not part of the national guard. But they seem to be mostly ceremonial.
Correct. The National Guard is no longer a true state militia.
Correct.
They learned from Waco and Weaver, that just escalating to shooting first can be a really bad idea.
The Bundy stand off was a good example- what was the use of getting into a firefight over something rather trivial, that could be solved by other means.
Some do use them as auxiliaries for emergencies when the mainline NG formations may be deployed elsewhere or be busy in locations more severely impacted by a disaster. Not fighting units.
If you’re thinking of the State Defense Forces, they’re not quite exactly militia either. To go back to the Constitution, Article One Section Ten spells out which sovereign powers the state governments agreed to cede to the federal government. The third clause of A1S10 is the so-called Compact Clause, which reads
No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.
In other words, the states were forbidden to possess their own independent professional state armies. This is in line with multiple other provisions of Article One, which gave sole authority to the federal government to maintain an army and navy, declare war and negotiate treaties of peace. The states were forbidden to maintain the means by which they might pursue independent foreign policies.
The exception being by “the Consent of Congress”. And in the case of the State Defense Forces, that was granted by federal statute, 32 U.S.C. § 109. Legally then, the State Defense Forces are “troops” under the Compact Clause’s meaning. They therefore exist at the federal government’s sufferance, and they could be abolished at any time by appropriate federal legislation.