Your point being?
Obviously that hellholes tend to come and go. What you don’t like history?
No it doesn’t; gun ownership under Saddam in Iraq was common. It didn’t make him any less tyrannical or threaten his tyranny in any way. Rifles and handguns are simply not a threat to any halfway-functional modern government, whatever fantasies the gun fetishists cherish on the matter.
From what I understand, Saddam only handed out guns to those on his side.
"The large-scale distribution of weapons began during the war with Iran, when the government gave Iraqi-made AK-47s to decommissioned soldiers, members of the ruling Baath Party and tribal leaders. But it has dramatically escalated in recent months. Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said last month that officials had handed out “hundreds of thousands of weapons” since the Bush administration began deploying additional forces to the Persian Gulf.
One group largely left out of the gun distribution has been Shiite Muslims, who make up about 55 percent of the population but whose allegiance has been questioned by Hussein and other top leaders, who are predominantly Sunni Muslims. In 1991, after the Persian Gulf War, Shiites rebelled against government forces in several southern cities. Today, some Shiites still are quietly loyal to a large opposition group based in Iran, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose leader has vowed to send fighters into Iraq to oppose Hussein if U.S. forces invade."
I don’t think handing out the weapons worked as well as Saddam hoped, but I do think it worked a lot better than we would have hoped.
Irrelevant to the thread. At present Europe has (1) freedom and (2) minimal gun ownership (outside Switzerland, which is rather a special, and anachronistic, case). There has never been a time in its recent history when widespread gun ownership was any check or deterrent to tyranny or apparently could have been. Plenty of guns floating around Spain, for instance, during the Spanish Civil War, but Franco won anyway. The Republicans had militia, Franco had Army regulars.
Regarding your comment about disarming the people, my dearest friend (may she rest in peace) was a young lady during the Nazi occupation; she lived in Cologne and Marseilles during WWII. She told me that, at least where she lived, one of the first things that happened with the advent of the Nazis, was civilian disarmament. She often commented that, “when some authority is disinclined to grant you the ability to defend yourself, they may not have your best interests at heart.”
It’s already happened: see North v South.
The upshot is there’s no right to overthrow the government. Period.
That is utter bullshit. Some articles on Iraqi gun culture
Some countries have gun cultures. Other do not. There is little or no correlation between “liberty” and “gun ownership”.
Only Americans think (as illustrated on this thread) that their Glocks are simehow going to stop a government take over. Nobody else thinks that anywhere in the world. CItizens cannot hope to defeat the coersive power of the state in open battle. Period. Or at least sans help from wihout, defections amongst security forces etc.
No, not unless you’ve got an army, a navy and an air force too.
Man, the Coast Guard never gets any love.
DOL is bogus mostly in the sense that the US Military is more than capable of taking every single gun in this country if needed, and no gun owner could stop them. Hell the US Armed forces just took over two countries that have people more than happy to blow themselves up to kill others… and still, in a very short time governments and armies were overthrown.
No AR15 is stoping a tank rolling down your street to take a gun. The government isn’t not turning into a dictorship because Bubba has a stockpile of weapons. Its because they are Americans too and have no desire to see the country they love turn into a police state.
DOL is a joke, your defense of liberity is being lucky enough to live in the USA.
Historically speaking, how long have countries with freedom kept it?
What are your thoughts on the Bielski partisans?
How about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
How about the Army of the Republic of Bosnia…
…in the Siege of Sarajevo?
Unless you were an Japanese American in 1942…
…or black slave before that, or an indian before that.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/obama-paranoid-government-coming-for-his-guns,30638/
“The thing for damn sure is you can’t trust 'em,” Obama told reporters Thursday morning, cradling a .22-caliber bolt-action hunting rifle in his arms. “No matter how hard you work or how many taxes you pay, the goddamn government’s sure as shit gonna pass some law or officiate some warrant to try and take your guns. Because when the people don’t have any guns, that’s when they take control.”
:rolleyes: Oh, Godw–
How about a much more recent first world example, and dare I say, more of a relevant example:
What about the UK? Doesn’t seemed to have turned into a jack booted police state recently despite confiscating pretty much all firearms. In fact, I would have to look it up but IIRC England and Wales have 1/3 the firearm deaths per capita compared with the US.
Guns were less restrictive in the 1940’s than now. Why didn’t Japanese-Americans protect their liberty?
That would have been impolite.
Last thread we had about whether guns protect freedom, I actually ran a linear regression to see whether there was empirical evidence for privately-held guns helping to prevent tyranny. Details here, but the punchline is, there wasn’t.
The sole objection anyone raised about it (to which I neglected to respond in-thread), was that there could be a conditional variable — but that objection does not actually address the empirical evidence, since conditional variables don’t destroy a relationship.
There’s no cumulative evidence for the guns-help-freedom argument. I personally think that lack of evidence should be enough to trash it right there, but YMMV.
Do you think guns helped the Bielski partisans?