And who will keep the well-armed population in check? Good intentions?
So…as an armed member of the population, how do I know when to start fighting the government? It’s easy to point out extreme examples like third world dictators or foreign invasions, but how do I know when I have the moral authority to rise up violently?
People generally don’t rise up against the government because no one wants to be the lone psycho out there shooting at cops.
Could anyone provide a cite describing a historical incident where an armed population overthrew their head of state and replaced him with a more democratic rule? I would like to know what historical precident the “an armed population keeps the government in check” argument is based on.
akennett, you left out Miller (1937). Rehnquist’s opinion is dicta, not law.
Point of Clarification:
The government is composed of three branches:
- Executive
- Legislative
- Judicial
Don’t you mean a fourth separate branch:
- Executive
- Legislative
- Judicial
- The People
and not a fourth branch of the Executive?
Thought so.
p.s. The fourth branch already exists. Getting motivated to do something, anything, is a different but related issue.
Cruise Missles and Napalm > Hunting Rifles
Sorry
I think the ongoing war in Iraq showed once and for all that an armed population doesn’t mean diddly squat in terms of securing freedom.
The real advantage of a modern military isn’t their superior weapons. It’s their superior knowledge of the battlefield and their superior ability to coordinate action.
Arming the population, even giving them night vision and full-auto heavy weapons won’t offset the information advantage of the military. They went through the republican guard who had frigging tanks like they were unorganized rabble. Because, by comparison, they were.
On the other hand, the military in the USA is just regular folks. So long as it stays that way, there is no need for an armed population to insure freedom. But if the military ever starts to see themselves as a people apart, and they want to take your freedom. Then your guns don’t mean shit.
I was always under the impression that a “militia” is meant as a second line of defense, beyond the actual military, not a means for armed revolt. We have plenty of options in place to deal with rogue leaders in the U.S. without resorting to storming the White House. I suppose if the President decided he’d rather be a dictator than a democratic leader, blew up Congress and the Supremes, and could convince the all-volunteer military to support him, then the civilian populace might need to rise up against him in armed revolt.
But such a scenario seems awfully unlikely; I can’t say I’ve ever heard of such being used as an actual defense for the 2nd amendment…
I assume you are refering to U.S. v. Miller (1939), yes? Do you think this disproves the notion that the Second Amendment protects and individual right? This is a common fallacy among the anti-gun crowd.
In Miller, the court remanded the case back to the District level because they were not presented with evidence that a shotgun with a barrel of less than 18 inches had a commong use in the militia. The Court in no way rejected an individual rights interpretation, nor did they assert a colective rights stance.
In fact, SCOTUS did take notice that the militia refers to the citizenry, who can be called to take part in the defence of the nation and are expected to provide their own arms. This would surely indicate that there is an expectation of private, individual, firearm ownership.
The following is a link to the decision:
** hawthorne**'s link cited the movie “Red Dawn” as vivid example of what happens when ordinary citizens go up against highly trained, organized and well equipted military. They cited the ironic scene of that students bumper NRA bumpersticker “They can take my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers”. I found that kind of amusing because that was just in the first half of movie. This movie was about how a group of high school students were able to fend off and harass this very same military until help arrived. It ended with the Cuban officer thinking twice about his role in taking over the town.
Superior firepower my tight ass. Theres a wanted fugitive out in the woods somewhere and a whole military unit cant find him and its been going on for years now. How many years did it take the FBI to find the Uni-bomber? When you occupy a town or city, you do so to use their resources or factories. Deny them that and all they will be doing is guarding an unproductive mob. Civilian guns are not meant for a full on assault. The Iraqis showed everyone the futility of that. RPGs vs M-1 tanks equals dead Iraqis.
But take a close look at the present situation. You have military units on standby, manning checkpoints and doin patrols. All around them are armed iraqi civilians. Most are happy, some just pretend to be. The soldiers do not know when the next car bomb is coming from, where the next sniper shot while hit, if that barefoot guy is Fedayeen or farmer. Remember that Iraq is about the size of California, think of how many troops you’ll need to secure the United States of America. If even half think the govt is corrupt enuf to take arms about, thats more than a 100 million people.
Take note of the emotional aspect as well. American soldiers will be shooting at Americans. Some may do it but most will hesitate. Some will question their roles and others will rethink theirs. If you think the US soldiers are all stressed out about killing innocent civilians in Iraq, how stressed will they be if they shoot at americans possibly from their home state, not knowing from day to day whether a passer by will say hello or shoot their face off with a 45.
Civilian locals know the terrain better than any outsuide miliatry. I could possibly disappear in my city where no soldier can find me. In the movie, the teenagers were barely one step of the communists in the beginning until a fighter pilot found them. He trained them on assymetrical fighting tactics and they got the upper hand. All it takes to beat the military if to be better disciplined, sufficiently trained and hungier to win. That too is the american way.
I’m picking on this particular reply, not out of some sort of desire to pick on Sua or to only get his feedback, but because it is a particularly good example of applying “the way things are now in the US” to other times/places/cultures.
The first presumption falls a bit flat because, as others have noted, people don’t take up arms unless the situation becomes drastic. Starving the population, raping and killing on behalf of the government, taxes so high that they can’t get food, etc. In the hierarchy of human interpersonal relations it typically goes
Nuclear Family
Extended Family
Neighborhood
Tribe(if applicable)
City
State
Nation
If a government screws up something on the lower rungs of the ladder, say they make decisions that will affect the perception of the nation in the international community, but it won’t translate directly into hardship for the upper rungs odds are no one, or at least not a large group, will take up arms to check the decision. As government decisions impact higher rungs the odds of people taking up arms to contest the decision skyrockets. The perspective of a citizen of the US(and to a certain extent other democracies) is a bit different than citizens of authoritarian states. Citizens of democracies feel more responsible for decisions made which affect the bottom rungs because they consider themselves(rightly or wrongly) part of the governmental decision-making process. This shifts the responsibility up a notch. They still probably wouldn’t take up arms to oppose a decision which affects only the national level(without direct costs to lower levels, or even very much indirect), but they may take notice enough of it to vote those jerks out of office next elections. In juxtaposition with this are people who live with very little control over the lower rungs of this hierarchy. Citizens who do NOT identify with their government, they simply abide them. This is more common in authoritarian frameworks.
Why did I bother saying all that? Well, it is background for my next bit.**
And here is that bit. Various societies feel various amounts of connection/responsibility with their government. The population won’t be split between only two extremes, taking up arms in support of the government, or taking up arms in opposition to the government. A good portion of the population will simply keep their heads down and if they take up arms at all it will be against anyone, on either of the above-mentioned “sides”, who escalates a threat to the point it would harm one of the upper tiers of the hierarchy.
What does all that mean? That the silent majority will still remain the silent majority even in times of civil war. Less so in democracies or places where the population in general identifies with the government(and thereby feels more responsible to toss the bastards and correct their mistakes or to defend them).
I’m not sure that any civil war/revolution/rebellion/insurrection has ever had the side of the true majority. Two vocal minorities(usually one of which is the incumbent government) go at it and the majority just keep their head down and wait for the dust to settle.**
This is the part of the post that seemed the most “Americanized” to me. The fact is that it is entirely possible, and in fact was the case in Iraq, to have a army which does NOT identify with the average citizen. To set up the army as a brotherhood, a tribe of its own. Saddam’s Republican Guard were not at all analogous to the US army. The majority of the US military is actually reservists. At the end of Fiscal Year 2000 the US had 1.15 million active, enlisted personnel across the branches of the military. There are approximately 202,000 active officers across the brances. Contrast this with the 1.3 million(sounds small, but that means 150,000 more than the standing force) enlisted. Approximately 157,000 officers in the reserves.*
You can find lots of other interesting statistics about the US military, mainly Air Force, but it does have some demographics for all the services here. An interesting factiod.
This practice of limited time as a soldier re-inforces each individuals feelings of being part of the civilian population. It is fairly easy to see that a soldier who will stop being a soldier and have to live among civilians in less than a decade, or who lives among them full-time now(as a reservist), would be much less likely to be alienated from their fellow, non-military, citizens to the point where they would bear arms against them. If service in the military were lifelong, the ties with civilian life(and therefore the feeling of duty to protect it) tend to fade. Dictators have to play up to the military. They have to keep their loyalty and make the part of the “ruling elite” if at all possible. This keeps them from staring down the barrel of a trained soldier’s gun if the soldier decides to support a rebellion.
The high turnover and volunteer nature of the US military tends to ensure that in the US there is a large amount of crossover between the average guy on the street and the average soldier. This is emphatically NOT true of all armies. It IS possible for a dictator or wayward government to keep the support of the military(especially if that wayward government is a military rule as was the case with Saddam in his early days) even if the average citizen no longer supports the government.
Tank, always a pleasure. My comment on “subterfuge” was intended to cover alternate tactics, such as luring military forces into traps in urban warfare or even terrorist tactics. After posting it I thought “You know, I really should have been more explicit on the fact that popular uprisings would have to employ non-traditional tactics to keep from being absolutely slaughtered(and I’m not sure these tactics would make the effective, just keep them from being outright slaughtered).” The point, and we share this, is that without stripping the current government of standing army support(through propaganda or massively creative, and devestating, tactics and even then it’d take a miracle for civilians to defeat a modern army) there is virtually no way for an uprising, even if they can somehow motivate the silent majority to take part, to topple a government. Thus the “check” mentioned in the OP is pretty ineffectual. It is even less effective in governments where the average citizen and the average soldier live seperate lives and there is a minimum of empathy between them.
A government has to screw up BIG TIME to offend such a large portion of the population that they’ll take up arms in the quantities needed to topple a modern nation’s government. Military Coup is the largest threat to modern governments.
Enjoy,
Steven
- Numbers taken from Chapter 3(active enlisted), Chapter 4(active officer), Chapter 5(reserve enlisted), Chapter 6(reserve officers), of the Population Representation in the Military Services for 2000.
There were 6 million jews who were rounded up and put into the gas chambers in ww2. Just think if they had the right to bear arms, if they had owned guns, and if each jew had killed just one german before he himself died. Hitler would have lost 6 million of his troops just for rounding up the jews. The american army did not even kill 6 million german troops in ww2!!!
Americans will never be rounded up by anybody, there isnt a large enough army in the world that can put 100 million armed americans in cattle cars.
One shot from your .22 (or your hunting rifle), and you now have whatever arms( m-16, grenades, etc )that the now dead occupying soldier used to have.
I believe Susanann is refering to the white, rednecked, gun totin, NRA loving, overly armed and second ammendment protecting group of Americans.
April 19, 1775 when the British colony of America, overthrew British rule and King Geroge, beginning when the british subjects in the Boston suburbs of Lexington and Concord Massachusetts started shooting(and killing) at General Gage and his army(the largest and most powerful army in the history of the world at the time). See the document: The Neccessities and Causes of Taking Up Arms against our government, written in April or May of 1775.
After shooting at our own government’s soldiers, and our own leaders, for well over a year, in July of 1776, we finally gave up trying to get our King George and our parliment, to change the things we did not like, and we then decided to revolt, start a new country, and totally replace our existing government with a new more democratly ruled one(see the Declaration of Independence) .
(By the way, we won)
It has been my position that a big reason, if not the primary reason, for this wide gulf between military-grade and consumer-grade weaponry is due to the laws controlling civilian firearms ownership.
Yes, the military has tanks and strikefighters. But those are next-to-useless for securing an area from armed rebels. To secure an urban area, you have to go house-to-house fighting each individual with small arms. The primary small arms technology in use today, the assault rifle, is surprisingly cheap to manufacture. I believe at one point in the 1940s-50s, the cost to manufacture grease guns was as low as $5 a pop. If the U.S. gun control laws against military-grade firearms were lifted, we could easily see a sizeable fraction of the civilians throughout the U.S. equip themselves with an M-16 or similar selective/burst-fire rifle.
**They came first for the Communists…but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews…but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Unionists …but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Unionist.
Then they came for the Catholic …but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Catholic.
Then they came for me…and by that time…there was no-one left to speak up for me. **
Rev. Martin Niemoller, commenting on events in Germany 1933-1939
They didn’t?
Mtgman
I think I get the gist of what you’re saying, even though I think you’re missing some words. But how do you reconcile such situations as Vietnam?
SuaSponte
Why?
ElvisL1ves
Have seen anyone claiming that a well-organized militia is not necessary to the security of a free state?
Something else to consider is that if the government is biased towards one group (eg, whites in the past), they will probably give dispensations from anti-gun laws to that group, allowing them to oppress other groups, while the government remains technically uninvolved.
Finally, it’s simply human nature to act more agrresively when one knows that people can’t fight back. There’s no need for there to be a systematic policy of oppression.
Please dont try to hijack this thread and turn it into a “japanese relocation thread”. Forgive me for responding this one time to your comment about the Japanese in America during ww2. What Sgt Striker says below, can be checked on its own merits. Furthermore, I dont see the relevency of temporarily relocating the Japanese in America during wartime to this topic of an armed citizenry keeping its own government in check. But just for funzees, here is what he said about your comment:
I got this information from Sgt Striker of the Free Republic a long time ago. The web address is no longer functional. so I cant list the http. as a source. These words are his, not mine, but what he says, seems true :
"The terms “internment” and “relocation” are often confused and used interchangeably.
By law (an over 100-year-old Federal statute), no U.S. citizen could be “interned.” That term applies only to detention of enemy aliens. When interned, enemy aliens were placed in Department of Justice camps under Army control. The people who were interned were considered threats to national security, subject to judicial review, and were allowed to have their families accompany them on a voluntary basis. Only some 11,229 Japanese (plus 5,620 Nisei who renounced their U.S. citizenship) were interned, along with 14,426 Germans, Italians, and other enemy aliens.
Evacuees were altogether different: those that were relocated were allowed, at least initially, to go anywhere they wanted in the interior. Note, also, that those of Japanese heritage who lived outside the Military exclusion area (California, the western half of Washington and Oregon, and southern Arizona) were not sent to relocation centers, although many of Japanese heritage living outside the exclusion area did request to be allowed to move into a center.
Why did Japanese evacuees usually choose the relocation centers run by the War Relocation Authority? More often than not, a Japanese immigrant didn’t have relatives in NY like one of the 10,000 Italian evacuees might.
The WRA made every effort to make the camps as comfortable as possible given wartime shortages of materials of every sort. The centers had a post office, schools, banks, stores, medical facilities, and churches all provided at government expense.
Most of those evacuated, of course, were Japanese, of whom about 60% of the adults were Japanese nationals (enemy aliens); and most of the remaining 40% of the adults were dual-citizens (U.S. & Japanese). The remaining evacuees were children, U.S. citizens by birth. What you have to understand is that by law (U.S., and international convention) enemy aliens had no right whatsoever to even be in the United States after December 7th 1941. Also understand that Japan considered ALL persons of Japanese heritage living outside the Empire to be subjects of the Emperor. "
I don’t want to hijack this thread either, but when you post uninformed statements, I must respond. I reject your supporting evidence as spurious evasions of the truth that many thousands on innocent American citizens were rounded up and held in concentration camps.
I stand by my statement.