First off…this is not a debate about the legality of firearm possession. I accept an interpretation of the 2nd amendment as allowing private ownership of firearms.
What this is a debate about the private ownership of assault rifles as a means of opposing government should it become a tyranny or as a means of protecting personal liberty.
Again, I’m all for the private ownership of firearms. I don’t own any myself but cheerfully acknowledge others right to do so. What I’m challenging is what I perceive as a foolish rationale for doing so.
In short, I find the rationale that possession of an assault rifle is a means of protecting one’s liberty is well…foolish. Whatever practical uses one might have for owning such an item being able to defend oneself against a tyrannical government isn’t one of them.
My argument stems from the difference between some individual attempting to rebell against a tyrannical government (postulated that the federal government becomes so) with even a large collection of weapons and the response that comes from even a small, adequately trained group of military personnel. Or even local law enforcement.
I just don’t see an effective defense being raised. In the thread linked above I speculated that even should ALL owners of assault rifles decide to defend liberty at the same time the American military would bottle them up within a week. After that it’s a matter of defeat in detail.
So I’d be interested in hearing people both pro and con my argument.
To sum up: The ability to apply force by the United States government, whether tyrannical or not, sufficiently outweighs that similar ability possessed by private citizens with lawfully owned weapons that the ‘protecting one’s liberty’ rationale is null and void. Such persons will NOT be able to protect their liberty in any way other than the liberty to die early at the hands of government forces responding to their actions.
I might be inclined to agree with much of what you are saying if you replaced the term “assault rifles” with say “surface to air missles”. However, I certainly disagree that “assault rifles” should be banned if the term simply means “any weapon on some list a bunch of government officials types up”.
I’m not arguing for a ban on assault rifles. I’m arguing that one specific rationale for owning them (‘defending against tyranny’ or ‘protecting my liberty’) is unjustified.
Second, even though the US militay has immense capability, anything that makes the job tougher means that it lesslikely to be done. If its easy to do something, it’s more likely to get done.
Just making it more difficult for the US military is some sort of a deterrent, (though not a complete one).
What about protecting liberty in the future after the US has peaked and there’s a call for regime change from abroad?
It seems we have a Catch-22 style situation here - gun control advocates generally want to ban certain types of weapons because they dangerous, yet then when people say they want guns to protect themselves from a potentially hostile government, gun control advocates typically say you couldn’t use the guns you are allowed to own to fight effectivelly, to give them more reasons to ban certain types of guns.
My solution to this is to allow private citizens to own weapons powerful enough that they can effectively resist a modern military force. If military style semi-automatic rifles aren’t enough (and I agree, they probably wouldn’t be) then the laws should be changed to allow people to own weapons they can fight back with - machine guns, privately owned RPGs, surface-air missles, artillery pieces, tanks, ect. The right to bear arms should cover all arms, not just wimpy small arms.
Again, there needs to be a standred defination of “Assualt Rifle” for this thread because otherwise there can’t be an answer. The problem is that there’s “Assualt Rifles” and “Assualt Weapons” and people tend to use them interchangably, even though they have two seperate definations.
It is nearly impossible to assert all positive rights through a priori justification; even if one person could, five other would disagree with the assumptions and try to offer their own justification for the same rights. Thankfully, the ideals of American government are such that the rights, in general, exist without question, and it is up to the government to justify a reason for its exercise of power in restricting them. Often, appeals to pragmatism win the day. It was only 200-some years ago we needed to attack a government in order to form our own. Today, people are still fighting various governments, some just small guerilla groups, others entire paramilitary groups. (South America’s “problem,” for example: is it paramilitary groups or illegitimate government?) You are not willing to accept that this is a fact of human existence? You don’t feel America could ever come to that place? Perhaps it is neither and you feel there are better ways to topple a government that has overstepped its bounds?
I fear poverty much more than assault rifles. I fear the financial difficulty in maintaining or extending my education more than I fear assault rifles. I think America is facing problems that far overshadow David Koresh, and significantly, I don’t think a ban on such weapons will stop such people from perpetrating their crimes. In general, I am not very swayed by arguments for such a ban. On the other hand, I am not very familiar with them, either.
Isn’t it pointless to debate the rationale for owning an undefined thing? This thread is going to go nowhere fast without this being defined.
It usually is the case during threads like this that many dopers are arguing against owning “assault rifles” because they think it means fully automatic machine guns or rocket launchers. Other more gun knowledgeable dopers are correctly using the current definition of “assault rifles” which is a list of meaningless cosmetic features.
As long as the two sides are using different definitions, there will be lots of confusion. It would be great if we could define the term before this inevitable train wreck happens.
(I’m not such a big guy that I won’t say I told you so. ;))
Just for the heck of it let me try to debate it. I found the OP premise to be sufficiently vague as to allow for an interpretation other than “ragtag gun collectors ganging up together.” It is certainly possible to interpret it as “The Armed Forces has what it has and everybody else has assault weapons.” Under that scenario I am not at all convinced that 100 million citizens with assault weapons would be overmatched by a few hundred thousand trained soldiers armed to the teeth.
Well I’d say that it would be possible to engage the US military with assault weapons. Just use the tactics that are being employed by the freedom fighters in Iraq and the separatists in Chechnya.
That way with a population that is sufficiently well armed and sufficiently pissed off(why does Texas come to mind?) the steady stream of casualties is bound to force the govement to at least make some effort to do the “by the people for the people” thing. If they are unwilling to do that they will have to use the “Stalin Technique” but that is such a drain on resources it almost always leads to eventual collapse.
This would not be possible with small arms as modern defences provide well equiped soldiers with a damn near complete immunity to them.
Ignoring the whole “what is an assault rifle” or whatever debate, I’ll skip on to the premise, which is, "a civilian revolution against a hypothetical overthrow of the American government would be a futile gesture, based on the inability of civilian arms to compete with the supreme might and firepower of the United States military
There are a few things wrong with this premise.
It assumes that the 100% volunteer US military, made up mostly of civilians trying to get a ride through college, would instantly turn around and support an American dictator, instead of looking at him cockeyed and shooting him in the face. In the unlikely event that some charismatic leader does manage to do this, he wouldn’t be able to convert the ENTIRE military, and the result would be a civil war.
It assumes that the 100% volunteer US military, once it somehow turns around and is used against their mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters, will be willing to shoot them, bombard their homes, and otherwise wage war against themselves. For some reason, I just can’t see US Army soldiers opening fire at a crowd of rebel citizens barricaded in a high school.
It assumes that no foreign countries would say “HOLY FLYING FARK ON A STICK” and immediately come flying to the rescue. Note, that the most powerful army in the world, the leader of freedom and democracy, suddenly falling into the hands of a (we assume) cruel dictator would, no doubt, shock and alarm our confederates overseas and to the north and south (especially given that we retain the capability to turn them into glass parking lots).
It assumes that a civilian militia would be incapable of competing against the US military. While the casualty rate may indeed favor the trained US military, as 1010011010 pointed out, it is hardly unheard of for an untrained militia to resist occupation by the supreme of supremes, the US military. Given that America is one of the larger countries in the planet, and given that we barely have the manpower and machinery to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, much less control them, I hardly see a massive influx of sodliers marching down every Mainstreet, USA. Rather, I see a lot of really, really pissed off civilians doing so.
In conclusion, your argument that any rebellion is futile is rather silly. It is an argument that has been used hundreds of times in history before, notably, in the American Revolution, where the vastly, vastly superior British were pretty much routed by a bunch of pissant illiterate farmers with hunting muskets. Similar deal in France and, well, most of Europe, between the 1780s and 1860s. It turns out that impressive military firepower usually does not correlate with holding down revolutions. Rather, it takes good leadership.
A curious sidenote is the US Civil War, but that largely invovled the military itself dividing. The way in which the North brought the South back under control is especially of note in cases like this.
Though assault weapons, in and of themselves, would not enable a citizen militia to overthrow the organized federal government, they would make quelling a rebellious militia a more difficult proposition, as someone else has already stated. Additionally, the judicious application of these weapons in the hands of a small, determined militia, could enable said militia to increase its firepower over time.
If we are talking about another civil war or another revolution, we simply have to look at what happened in both of those instances. Neither the revolutionaries nor the Southern army owned nor maintained military-grade weapons, at least not in any significant quantities. What they did have was determined individuals, trained and familiar with their own firearms, who, when banded together, defeated and took military installations and the weapons held within them. Later, other countries did indeed add to this arsenal, effectively helping to level the playing field.
Given enough time, organization, incentive and justification, I do not see why either of these scenarios could not happen again.
As to the federal military being reluctant to fire on US civilians - let’s not forget that the Civil War was just such an engagement. Once the threat was perceived as dangerous and organized, the participants from the South were no longer regarded as civilians.
Personally, I do see personal possession (sp?) of assault weapons, particularly those with common ammunition and interchangeable parts that are readily available from household to household, as being an effective deterrent from both foreign and domestic aggressors.
I would like to add one following note to my above post:
The real power of the individual civilian, as has been demonstrated in the past half century, is not the threat of armed uprising, but the threat of civil disobedience.
Given that a dictatorship take over America, the first, and by far the most powerful, weapon taken up by the “rebels” would not be assault rifles, rocket launchers, or $300 million fighter jets - they would be the strike, the protest, the march. As the base of society refuses to function, the top will crumble. Docks will sit backlogged. Fields unharvested. The very blood of our market economy will leak out of a million small cuts.By banding together and using their sheer individual importance, the people can make the system choke on itself. The dictator may have more military power, but what will he rule without the people?