Which, of course, total bullshit and the subject of countless other threads.
You then need to go on to explain why other societies that do not have armed populations have not had genocides - internally, against their own people. Like the UK, for example.
I’m willing to consider the possibility that an armed population may lessen the ease of government sponsored genocide. But it certainly doesn’t seem to be a necessary condition to be a genocide free country.
Look, maybe it was presumptuous of me to flatly state that the reason that genocide can’t happen in the United States is because it has a lot of armed people, as if I somehow knew that to be the definite answer. I’ll give you that. I probably should take that back and rephrase what I meant to say, which is that, I think it would be hard for a genocide to be perpetrated against a people with thousands upon thousands of gun owners, many of them military veterans with combat experience. I think an American resistance force would stand a better chance against an oppressive government than many other countries, because we are better armed.
I hope that is a clearer representation of the point that I’m trying to get across.
I would like to know the statistics on the gun ownership in Rwanda and other places where massacres took place. How do you know that the people who were killed were armed as well as their oppressors?
Personally I thank god, for the rednecks protecting me from genocide.
Actually no. Our guns won’t stop them. Our prosperity stops them. Guys who have a mortgage, kids in school and are saving up for a boat don’t go all Jihadi. American generals are worrying about how long to stay in for maximal retirement benefits, not how to section off forces under their personal control.
Prosperity is the key, not some ridiculously overconfident middle aged dude with a deer rifle thinking he’ll take out our evil overlords. If a truly draconian force were in charge you wouldn’t be able to fight it. They would have UAVs with infrared optics tracking people after curfew and they’d kill people’s families when they were caught. That would end resistance in days. Only a few nuts would be left to do terrorist bombings and the evil overlords don’t deal with terrorists.
Ah, the old redneck smear. Anyone who believes in the second amendment is a redneck. Really creative.
I don’t think it is just prosperity, Lobohan, though I do see that as important. I also think a stable political structure with a tradition of peaceful transfer of power between winners and losers is probably as, if not more, important. Losing power in the US, or the UK, doesn’t really change all that much - your social or political grouping will carry on much as before (hence the importance of your economic factors) and you will get another crack at power in a few years.
I didn’t say that. I did strongly suggest that a redneck would think he has a chance to stop the baddies if the government went all 1984 on us.
I actually like guns, within reason. I just don’t have a childish fantasy of going rambo/ninja on neonazi stormtroopers.
Well, if hope and courage make someone a redneck, then so be it.
Anyway, there probably are people out there who do fantasize about going rambo on government stormtroopers, but I’m not one of them. I hope against hope that it never comes to that. I would never wish for a scenario where our peace and livelihoods are threatened.
Besides what others have said, the whole “guns protect us from genocide” ignores the strong likelihood that the people committing the genocide will be the ones with the guns. It’s the xenophobic, violence-and-threats prone right wing that’s so gung-ho for guns.
What makes you think that it’s necessarily the government that would be most inclined to genocide ? And not, say, the KKK or a similar organization ?
No, I wouldn’t. A gun would just slow me down, and not protect me in the slightest.
Neither will a gun. Not against a mob, or a death squad, much less an army. Guns didn’t keep Saddam from killing anyone he felt like.
The only ones behaving like sheep are the ones who actually buy the right wing nonsense that guns will protect them. The point of such propaganda is that guns DON’T protect you; that’s why the Right loves the Second Amendment, and only the Second amendment; it’s the useless Amendment.
Look, if you and your M16 are dodging stormtroopers out in the forest, then the war is over. You’ve lost. Your family is already dead, your neighbors are already dead, everything you care about is already destroyed.
That’s why armed resistance to tyranny is a fantasy. Sure, no tyranny lasts forever, and sure, you might bag yourself an impressive number of stormtroopers out there in the wilderness. More likely you’ll get yourself killed first, but it could happen. But what for?
It seems to me that preventing the fascist takeover in the first place is a slightly better strategy than shooting at the fascists after they’ve won. So if you were going to allocate resources a good distribution might be spending 99% of your time preventing fascism, and 1% preparing for the aftermath of fascism.
There’s a good quote in the Wikipedia article on Genocide that sums up the common factors of genocides pretty well:
I think the last one is pretty critical. There won’t be a genocide in the US, because there is no motivation for one. There are social injustices, but there are already methods of resolving them.
This should be interesting.
I said two things.
- Hundred of thousands of people in the United States have been killed by guns.
- Claims of genocide are imaginary.
Which one do you claim is “total bullshit”? Are you disputing the number of people who have been killed by guns? Or are you claiming that genocide is not imaginary?
Maybe you’d like to strengthen the pro-gun argument by claiming that guns are what’s kept America from being overrun by zombies.
How about a little reading comprehension on your own quote, to wit:
“Because otherwise the logic of everybody owning guns is non-existent. How else can you counter the obvious fact that hundred of thousands of people in this country have been killed by guns except by making up an imaginary claim that millions would have been killed without guns.”
Try reading some of the countless other threads on this issue for proof that you are totally off-base here. Off-base? You were thrown out stepping out of the dugout. The logic of owning guns entails quite a bit more than just the notion that “Guns will keep the Gubbmint from killin’ me.” As for the second, you are the one positing that the claim of self-defense is an imaginary one. Statistics are rarely kept on the number of crimes that were prevented by private ownership of guns. A quick glance at the column in each issue of The American Rifleman can provide quite a few examples. How many went unreported?
Again, that isn’t the subject of this thread, nor should it be. The topic is genocide, and I never said anything about guns preventing such from happening, now did I? I stated that private ownership would make less-than-governmental attempts a bit ticklish. If the US Military Establishment wants you dead, your CMP Garand isn’t going to do you a bit of good. If Habib and friends from the next block want you dead, OTOH, you might just be able to contest the matter.
Except that it’s rather more likely to be Mr Guns n’ God and his KKK friends killing Mr Habib and friends than the other way around. Again, the assumption that the people with guns will be the defenders.
How on earth do you know that?
For one thing, they’ve got guns. Which make it rather easier for them to accomplish.
For another, the fact that consistently it’s the American Right that’s pro-gun and pro bigotry and violence. It’s the Right that tends to kill people they don’t like right now, with and without using guns, in the real world. It’s the Right that’s killing and terrorizing doctors that perform abortions and gays and so forth; it’s not the evil liberal ( hah ! ) government killing gun owners.
Self-defense against random crimes and self-defense against organized genocide are two different things. The latter is a society-wide movement, and, frankly, if anyone is going to become a genocidaire, it’s the kind of person who keeps guns at home to protect himself against the “bad element.”
Hmm… change M16 to AK-47 and forest to Baghdad and things look a little different, huh?
Mind stopping by my place this weekend? I need to paint, and with that broad a brush, I should be done in no time.
Why didn’t the government committ genocide during the Tokugawa shogunate, or during present day England?
I think you have to look a bit deeper than “guns”. No armed minority group is going to scare a government with a powerful military out of committing genocide.