In a sort of civil war insurgency type situation, the point isn’t really a military win.
A lotta damage one could do with a .22 LR, if you can shoot. Just sayin.
Ask Assad.
Everyone makes the silly assumption that each member of each branch is 100% loyal to the tyrannical government. In that situation an armed citizenry is another hedge against tyranny. A critical mass matters of course.
If there were ever an event that got lots (thinking thousands or tens of thousands) of our countrymen to the point where they were ready to point guns at agents of the government and pull the trigger, I’d wager that a good number of those trigger-pullers would be members of the military. As others have said, the military isn’t monolithic. If there were a significant divide among the population, to the point of armed confrontation, it would likely also show up within the military.
I see an attitude among liberals in these sort of conversations, a sort of sneering “you can’t fight an F-16 with your rifle”, that I find humorous. The military votes overwhelmingly Republican. If there’s a fight between conservatives and liberals, what in the world makes the liberals think the military would be on their side or do their bidding?
I’m personally always confused that there seems to be an underlying assumption that in the case of a bad, evil, dangerous government rising to power, the noble and honest citizenry would be banding together to thwart it.
An armed citizenry is an armed citizenry, and some of the worst governments in history have had popular support. In a situation where enough of the government, armed forces, and logistical support persons for the same have been swayed by the lure of some evil politics, why not the average citizen, too? There’s no guarantee at all which side they’ll be on.
Right. Just as it seems to be assumed that the regular forces will blindly obey orders regardless of morality or legality.
There is nothing to guarantee that a large part of the armed citizenry will not happily join as enforcer paramilitaries on the side of the regime, if the regime is clever enough to send the message “back us up and not only will you keep your guns we’ll give you even more”. The history shows that a lot of people tend to go along with whoever’s the “legitimate” authority just out of conditioning that this is what you do, and that rebels must be put down because that’s what you do.
The South was armed against the Union. How did that turn out?
What happened in Oregon? A few people who did more than just post brave-sounding stuff on the Internet went there to help fight the tyranny, but most of us just laughed and sent them bags of dicks.
The whole problem with this "rising up against tyrrany’ stuff is that you’ve got to get all the different groups to agree that your definition of “tyranny” matches their various definitions of “tyranny”, then if that miracle is accomplished, you have the herculian task of getting all these paranoid groups to trust each other enough to work together to defeat a common enemy without throwing each other under various buses in various power grabs, and finally they have to agree on an end result…and, sorry-they can’t all be in charge when it’s all over.
Comparing the various loud-mouth militias that now exist in this country to Afghan Freedom Fighters is an insult to Afghanis, freedom and fighting.
^^QFT.
The “tyranny” most of these nutballs seem to be protesting against is:
a. Obama is black.
b. Not everybody is as closeted as they are.
c. Slavery is illegal.
d. Their great, great, great granddaddy’s side in the question of “c” got curb-stomped.
e. There are too many of “them” and not enough of “us.”
or some combination of the above. If it ever does get to a “fight against tyranny,” it will be a 20-sided cluster-fuck that will make the Balkans look like a kindergarten spat.
You’re absolutely right. 5 people weren’t able to overthrow the USA therefore no revolt against tyranny could ever succeed.
But the people who took over Malheur, and the many more who support them, post encouraging messages about them, organize protests, litter FaceBook, etc., genuinely EXPECTED mass support and a mass uprising of the American people.
It’s like Operation American Spring in 2014; Col. Riley and his cohorts genuinely expected ten million or more patriots to flood DC and overthrow Obama. They got, what, a hundred at their protest?
The sort of sneering “you can’t fight an F-16 with your rifle” to which HurricaneDitka alluded has nothing to do with conservative-vs-liberal. Rather, it reflects the idea that if the military has escaped from civilian control, the war is already over and lost. Meanwhile, if the military is still under the control of the rest of the government, the rest of the government will reflect the politics of the majority of the population, and the ones fighting armed only with a rifle are going to be isolated on the fringe. The “tyranny” the Malheur and OAS crowd see and plan to fight is governmental action approved by a majority of the populace, and with majority support the F-16s will have no problems.
Already covered in my post #29. “Tyranny” is just a word that means different things to different people at different times, and short of massive mind control a vague “Revolt Against Tyranny!” is going to be nothing but a tragic joke.
Well, for starters, it’s their home turf, so they’ve got much more stake in it. Does anyone actually really care if the Taliban takes over Afghanistan? That may sound callous (indeed, it is pretty callous), but in all honesty, regime change over there has a fairly minimal effect on our lives over here. But would we care if the government was put under siege here? I think a whole lot of people would care a whole awful lot. A whole lot more than in Afghanistan or Vietnam.
Also, to anyone saying the army would defect… Congratulations, you’ve completely defeated the point of your argument. If the army would defect… Well, there’s your guns. It doesn’t matter if JimBob McBumfuck doesn’t have the right to own a Baretta .50 cal, if his cousin BobJim in the army defects and takes the entire McBumFuck division with him, they’re going to be quite well-armed. Given that that’s literally the only way such an uprising could ever happen… Why do we need the 2nd, again?
That’s true, which is why the USA won in Vietnam, the Soviets won in Afghanistan, the British and Protestants in North Ireland and we have crushed the Taliban and ISIL so easily.:rolleyes:
a 22 lr has MAYBE an effective range of 100 yards. A .308 might have ten times that range.
With all the guns we have in this country, in what way are we subject to cruel, unreasonable and arbitrary use of power?
I’d say the NRA’s stranglehold on Congress qualifies.
But those are foreign invasions, not tyranny as a lot of gun rights activists imagine it. Now to be sure, foreign invasion by Britain was definitely on the minds of the Founding Fathers and was probably on the minds of those who inserted the 2nd Amendment into the Constitution. But there’s not much chance of that happening today.
If republicans are paranoid about ‘communist, fascist, dictator Obama and gun-banning libruls’ taking over the country, a better analogy might be Assad in Syria or a state in which militias or factions are fighting over control of the government. Our own civil war in the 1800s might be a fitting example as well.
If the military is divided over which faction to support, then armed factions could fight each other indefinitely. But once the superior military establishes command and control, an armed public will be starved into submission, disarmed, and brutally vanquished.
Let’s be fair: if they genuinely expected millions of insurgents* that *was just utterly delusional detachment from reality.
So that at the start of the War of Seccession members of the small professional army split up between the sides, the state-based regiments stuck with whatever side their state took, and a prolonged bloody grind ensued among initially well-matched forces. The Confederacy fought and lost using an army and *organized *militia, not a “people’s insurgency”.