None of those are examples of anyone actually conquering and subduing the invading state, just being enough of a nuisance to make them leave.
I’d sure love to watch those neo-nazi bubbas try, though.
And I should add that this statement shows a glaring ignorance of the political thought at the time when the 2nd Amendment was conceived and penned. There is no shortage of writing on the subject which details the founding father’s intent that the 2nd Amendment is indeed meant to be a “check on the State”. This is undeniable fact. Whether you believe it will work is an entirely separate argument. The intent is that a well-armed citizenry is meant to be a threat threat to the tyrant - not to establish a citizen force that will be stronger than the standing army, thus making any insurrection a foregone conclusion.
Is the US military really going to use those weapons against insurgents located in the US? Those things are fantastic for open field battles and destroying infrastructure. Wiping out an entire neighborhood to nail a single insurgent doesn’t play well in Baghdad, how do you think it’ll play in Denver?
Thank you for making my point. Victory for an insurgent force is making them leave.
You got a cousin in the Army, you shoot him? Gonna be tough to explain to Aunt Esther. Make Thanksgiving pretty awkward.
I don’t care what the intent was. I wasn’t commenting on that. I was only saying it’s a meth pipe fantasy that citizens with deer rifles are any kind of threat to the US Government. What are the citizens going to do? Try to shoot Congress?
We aren’t talking about an invasion scenario. We’re talking about actually trying to overthrow the US Government. Ain’t gonna happen. Bugs on a windshield.
Why would they give a shit if they’re already a “tyrant?” What kind of namby pamby, publicity conscious tyrant do you guys think you’d be fighting? Stalin didn’t stop to ask how things would “play.” Have tyrants all gotten soft now?
Wait, I saw that movie! The American Patriot lifts up his .30-.30 and yells “Smithereens!”
No,wait, that’s not it, its an animal…
“Badgers!” No, definitely not, we don’t need no stinking badgers…
“Armadillos!” Well, that’s right out, isn’t it…
They’re a far greater threat than citizens without deer rifles are. What they’re going to do is make it a lot more dangerous for the government to send agents, police, troops, whatever, to drag you out of you bed in the dead of night because you exercised your right to free speech on your blog.
But of course that would never happen right? I can’t think of a modern industrialized nation (China) where an unarmed citizenry isn’t free to express dissent on a blog, print a pamphlet, etc…
Can’t happen here are some famous last words. Just ask a Jew.
If it did happen, some Jethros with deer rifles wouldn’t slow them down any.
Which is why it should be legal for citizens to own select-fire assault rifles.
That wouldn’t do them any good against Predator drones.
Someone who’s served in the military, or has an even modest knowledge of military history, knows this not to be true.
One man with a bolt-action deer rifle can disrupt or render combat-ineffective, a much larger, and much better equipped force. In the VietNam war, single snipers pinned-down NVA regular units as large as company and battalion size. A good marksmen, who knows the area he’s operating in, and has a modicum of fieldcraft (say for instance, one of your “Jethros” who’s spent his entire life hunting and walking the land he’s now fighting on) can have an effect far out of proportion to his number. He may be unsophisticated by your standards, but the last time I checked, an MA in Philosophy wasn’t listed among the requisite qualifications for becoming an insurgent sniper.
Alvin York and Carlos Hathcock were unsophisticated Southern “Jethros” who, with nothing more than a bolt-action rifle had a staggering impact, out of all proportion, on the well-armed regulars they engaged.
You’re assertion that you need tanks and helicopters to fight tanks and helicopters. This isn’t so. Asymmetrical warfare is being successfully waged in several areas of the world, as I write this post.
You ignore military history if you think that any sort of wide-spread popular insurrection would be forced to rely solely on WalMart dear rifles for any length of time. Heavier weaponry would be seized by the guerillas on the battlefield, and interested foreign actors would, more likely than not, supply heavy arms to the insurgency (interference strategy and war profiteering aren’t strictly right-wing American concepts). This happened during the Revolution, the ACW, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Balkans, OIF, OEF, and just about every other conflict of this nature in recent history.
But getting back to the source of “our little side debate”. I asserted that the 2nd Amendment was the teeth that secures our other rights. You asserted it was not. If it is not, then what does secure our rights? In an extreme situation, where your rights are violently stripped away from you by an oppressive and tyranical government, how would you reassert your rights and take back control of your own freedom, sans the use of arms?
I’m not being snarky here. Would you hunker down and wait for, say the UN, to come and intervene? Are you suggesting a passive response versus an active one? If you have no right to free speech, no right to assembly, no right to a fair trial, how do you resist? Or, do you resist at all?
There is no difference between a modern “deer rifle” and a sniper rifle. A scope-sighted high powered rifle is a scope sighted high powered rifle. Not that it really matters. A properly conducted insurgency isn’t “militia” members trying to defeat the standing army in the field, anyway. That’s stupid and virtually always results in dead irregular forces.
No, a properly run insurgency involves things like assassination of the local and state officials who carry out the will of the tyrant. It involves kidnappping. It involves sabotage. In short, it doesn’t have much at all to do with trying to face down a mechanized army with a “deer rifle.”
But you knew that before you posted.
A well-placed shot to the head of the pilot who flies the drone would be very disheartening to his comrades.
In an insurgency in the US, there will be no front lines. A guerilla force’s opportunities to disrupt military operations would be near limitless. Even if they were piloted from bases outside the US, they still have to be deployed, maintained, fueled, and armed, right here “in theater”. The guerillas may not be able to shoot one down with their deer rifle, but they certainly could plant an IED on the base where the UAV’s are operating from.
I say again, asymmetric warfare.
If that’s the case, then we agree that the weapons are useless. They would have no combat utility at all.
Can you cite an example of a superpower ever being overthrown by an insurgency. Has sneaking around, murdering a few local officials ever resulted in the fall of a superpower? I don’t think so.
Nothing. Your rights are only as secure as your government allows them to be.
You don’t know much about the military, do you?
For one thing, drones don’t have pilots, they are unmanned aircraft. For another thing, fallen commrades don’t dishearten US military personel. It just pisses them off and brings down ten times the shitstorm.
Actually they would be pretty much non-existent since all the military installations are already fully secured.
That’s not the argument. The argument is a tyrant government being driven from power by an armed insurgency, and that has happened plenty of times. British citizens threw out their tyrannical colonial government via armed insurgency in North America a few hundred years ago.
When the “tyrant government” is a superpower, it isn’t going anywhere. They aren’t messing around tring to fight off villagers with pitchforks. They push a button and the town disappears.