Let’s see if my magic works again:
I predict a short stay for our new friend.
Acknowledged.
Hey, take it to PM, you two! You shouldn’t let the kids see Daddy and Daddy fighting.
What? This is a gay marriage debate, now? I can’t keep up. Who issues the score-cards?
Daddy does. That’s another reason they are fighting.
So, during the Second Battle of Bull Run, Union troops should have tried and convicted Confederate troops before shooting them?
We now have the nightmare scenario the OP has imagined. A natural disaster has struck several states, and overwhelmed officials have declared disaster areas. In some areas the National Guard is patrolling. The President has used those declarations to create federal disaster areas.
On top of that there is an election scheduled in just one week, and some of the states the President has declared federal disaster areas are governed by people who are actively opposed to the President’s re-election.
This is the ideal opportunity for the President to declare martial law, suspend elections, replace or neutralize his political opponents, federalize the National Guard and in general do everything the OP is concerned about – using Emergency Powers. Heck, while he’s at it, he could order mass immunizations of 12-year old girls for HPV in the name of safety.
In other words, it’s put up or shut up time for tyranny.
I invite Back to basics to come back in a week and tell us whether he feels the Constitution has been suspended and we’ve been transformed into a dictatorship.
If only there was a word for someone who does that.
Or, heck, just the guy in a convenience store holding the cashier and one customer hostage, who has already fired two shots at the police. First, we have to get a judge and impanel a jury, then a prosecutor and defender can present preliminary motions…
Good thing it wasn’t a hardware store; the people involved would starve to death!
The suspension of the constitution would probably be frowned upon by a nation of private gun owners. It would look like a city after they win a sporting event.
Well, that’s a bit different; that’s a private actor.
Meh. Iraq had widespread ownership of guns under Saddam; it didn’t impede him in the slightest. In some America-goes-to-dictatorship scenario, all those guns-for-freedom types won’t even be a speed bump. Despite all their fantasies to the contrary. And that assumes that they aren’t fighting for the dictatorship, which I find more likely.
Or Detroit after a normal event
True… But aren’t we talking the same principle? There are times when someone does not enjoy the full exercise of his constitutional rights? When someone shoots at a cop, and the cop shoots back (usually with more accuracy) the cop didn’t violate the suspect’s rights. The same for the Bull Run example.
I only meant to give a smaller-scale example of the same idea.
(Actually, I don’t know the term “private actor” in law, or how it differs from, say, a mob in full riot, or an army in full revolt. I’ll do some Googling!)
I find your cynicism depressing… Also horribly realistic. I think you’re entirely right.
He be daayed. hung by his own people. Of course we helped a bit
Moammar Gadhafi was shot by his own people.
The Soviet Union couldn’t stop the Berlin Wall from coming down or the breakup of it’s satellite states. It was the biggest baddest junkyard dog on the planet with a government willing to slaughter thousands of people.
Guns aren’t really necessary. Governments can’t shoot everybody.
Please; we invaded and set up a puppet government and show trial. It had nothing to do with citizens with guns. Or the opinion of the Iraqi people, one way or another.
With a lot of help from planes, drones, etc.
Which again, had nothing to do with gun ownership.
“Supreme Court” has been magic words of choice for government usurpers for quite some time now.
we invaded, they set up their own government. It’s hardly a puppet government or we’d be drowning in cheap oil.
with a little help from planes and drones. that was a boots on the ground venture and it was done by the people of Libya.
There is virtually no way a country could stop it’s own armed citizens in an uprising. It’s how this country was formed.
. . . Ermm, yes, they do. Judges who do that are known as “judges.”