Yup. Learned to shoot 50 years ago. My Wife has shot (twice that I know of) but is really, really bad. I talked to her the other night about getting more familiarity with firearms.
It really isn’t her thing though. The mechanics and physics of any firearm confound her. Well, confound is not the right word. She has never really thought about such things.
Once, way before I knew my Wife she was camping with a bunch of friends. One had a .44mag. She was invited to shoot it. While my Wife is small, she is strong. But has WAY too small of a hand for such a revolver.
They set her up. Warned her repeatedly how much it would kick and how loud it was.
My Wife was of course intimidated by it. They gave it to her, said it was all ready and she pulled the trigger.
Click.
It was not loaded. Scared the fuck out of my Wife and turned her off of guns forever. They can’t be trusted.
Yep. Watch for Republican controlled states making bullshit claims of fraud, and giving electoral votes to the Republican candidate, rather than the person who got the most votes.
This time, there won’t be anyone with morals or ethics to stop them - they’ve now been eliminated from positions of power.
Watch for more incidents of violence by the right -wingers to overturn elections - more effective, better organized violence this time.
I honestly don’t see how being able to shoot, or having a lot of guns in your home, is going to help. Do you think that if the Warsaw ghetto had been better armed, it would have held out long enough to matter? They would just have been starved out.
I do not disagree in principle with what you’re saying puzzlegal, but will repeat something that my wife brought up recently when our CCW permits came up for renewal. She (unlike myself) never bothered to carry, but it was inexpensive enough that she felt ‘might as well’ since we had taken the safety class together. But even I haven’t carried in the last 7 years. So I was at the ‘should I bother stage’ myself.
She put it plainly, she sees no point in trying to use personal arms against the government, they have more, better, and the logistics to grind us all down. What she’s much more worried about is if we continue our steady saunter into fascism, where you travel to visit, say, friends and family out of state, or (in a deeply red area of a purplish state) your neighbors WHO STILL HAVE TRUMP 2020 signs up, remember you had a Biden sign in your yard until the election.
So sadly, it’s a fear of your neighbors beings emboldened by the ongoing events that are driving her concerns. And since political/racial domestic terrorism seems to be on the rise… seems to be a fair concern.
If the entirety of Europe had what the Warsaw ghetto had, the holocaust would’ve been unfeasible. People who think that a widely armed population makes no difference in enforcing an unwanted occupation are naive towards the nature of asymmetrical resistance.
Yes, the government has tanks and nukes, but it’s absurdly reductionist to simply say “well nukes beats rifles, government wins” - if a government is pretending to be a functioning free country, they can’t just nuclear strike their cities or drive through the streets with tanks when citizens begin to resist. That risks all sorts of consequences, including widening any resistance movements. Oppression will be done using police forces, and a motivated and armed populace can certainly inflict an unsustainable cost on them.
I see zero evidence that there will be any of this in the not so distant future. It will be fundamentally a one party system which someone is always getting the vast majority of all ‘counted’ votes.
And since I see plenty of fascist / authoritarian trends going on worldwide, I don’t think there will be many other liberal states who will say anything about it either.
But otherwise yes, nukes are a poor weapon to use against your own population, but there’s a huge middle ground between civilian rifles and nukes. You could just pretty much tear gas an entire area, and then victim blame the resulting injuries (and very possible deaths) on those who rebel.
Talking about the '50s now, the French cops certainly murdered people and tried to pin the blame on protesters, if they even bothered with any excuses.
Oppression will be done with “police forces” that are actually just groups of regular people who may even have gotten along fine with the oppressed people prior to the conflict. If you read about any of the ethnic cleansing that happened during World War II, you’re going to constantly see the word “auxiliaries”, regarding every country that was occupied by the Nazis. Who were these people? Basically just civilians that helped the Nazis round up and kill their political opponents, not just the local Jews but anyone who the Nazis wanted gone.
Genocide isn’t as simple as “roll in with the army and massacre everyone/send them to a concentration camp.” It involves people being encouraged to snitch on their neighbors and friends; exploiting ongoing local religious or ethnic feuds that may have been laying dormant for decades or centuries; bribing certain people with money or the promise of elevated status; in short, not merely killing people but also manipulating them into killing each other.
Governments lose credibility with their own citizens and breed resentment and non-compliance once they start cracking down on the population through military means, so they try to suppress the population by police means first. Now, if the armed population is putting up enough resistance that they require the military to crack down on people, that’s a win for the resistance, because it makes the oppressive government have to pay the mind share cost of such an action.
In comparison, just letting people get disappeared quietly in the middle of the night, or protests broken up easily by riot police is a lot easier when the population isn’t armed, is exactly the sort of quiet oppression governments would prefer to do.
An armed populace massively increases the cost of oppression, both in terms of death, civil disruption, but also discrediting that government and increasing resistance against them. To suggest that an armed population isn’t a problem to an oppressive government is naive.
I agree. And I said so upthread. But I also think, as I also stated upthread that the issue won’t be with the military or government - it’ll be with your former neighbors, or other ‘interested groups’ that will be more than happy to take care of people who are non-compliant with the government merely having to look the other way / refuse to prosecute / provide minimal support. They’ll provide their own weapons, own tactics, and the like pro bono as it were.
See for example @Lamoral’s excellent post on auxiliaries, or historical examples of the Roman arena factions, or various Latin American quasi-militias that are used as disposable muscle.
Again, I am not saying an armed population is not a disincentive to forcible efforts to create compliance, but that it is, at best, a delaying action, which will do no good if there’s not going to be a third party intervention or a general uprising to support it. And most of the people in the thread do not think there is sufficient will in the US or overseas to support such an insurrection. We could be wrong, but that’s how I see it falling out as well.
I’m more worried about my neighbors who might remember the one time we talked politics and I expressed in no uncertain terms that I was not a Trump supporter.
You are of course, assuming that the populace that the government is pandering to isn’t watching the military roll into the blue cities busting heads with glee and delight.
Yes, this is a scenario that is very worrying. In the Rwandan genocide, "Most of the victims were killed in their own villages or towns, many by their neighbors and fellow villagers.
Isn’t that EXACTLY what they’re doing today with the militarization of the police departments? You saw it in Missouri; you saw it with the BLM protests.
Sure, but it’s often a desperation move that seals their downfall.
Imagine you were an oppressive regime that tried to make a pretense of being a free country. Would you 1) like to disappear an unarmed populace in the middle of the night, and break up protests at will with heavy handed riot police, or 2) face an insurgency against your police forces that kills police regularly, creates gun battles out of cracking down on protests, and puts Tiananmen Square type footage on the news regularly?
Regimes that can take down people without resistance have a much easier time than ones that have to brutally crack down on their own population and incur losses in the process. It is likely that a state would try a less heavy handed approach if they knew the cost of that heavy handed approach would be high, and if they felt like they had to take that approach anyway, it would cost them more in public opinion and actual policing assets.
Eh, easiest method is to just let all the right wing self proclaimed militias operate with impunity.
I think that many will welcome their new bigotted regime. And the populace will be more than happy to devour itself. Bigots are easy to manipulate, just give them someone to hate, and they will be at the ready.
What if you are continuing to register as a Republican in primaries in order to vote for whichever candidates that support preserving our democratic republic that can be found?
I don’t think I’m complicit in some sort of fascist takeover for doing that. I’m trying to do my part from the inside.
