I agree…they couldn’t succeed on on their own. But they never could, yet we still had the 2nd Amendment. It’s not that it did the job (assuming we say for a moment this is the only ‘job’ it was designed to do) in the past but doesn’t now, it’s that it was never intended to do that job in a vacuum anyway. Even during the Revolutionary War, it wasn’t citizen soldiers by themselves who defeated the British, it was a team effort. In any sort of plausible rebellion of a large percentage of civilians either in the past or today, it would be a similar team effort. And an armed US population would be a factor in such an event…probably on par with how they factored into the Revolution (which is to say mixed).
I think the 1st amendment does far more to combat tyranny than the second does.
Yet many people feel like it goes too far or isn’t needed. There are many countries that don’t have a 1st Amendment after all.
As to the OP, even if the FFs wanted to arm the populace to be a check on the government, the days when that was realistic for the population to do are long gone.
A modern tyrant just does not walk to the podium and declare himself god-ruler of everything and is done with it. He will slither his way in till it is a fait accompli. For a current example see Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey. If he fails along the way then no need for a popular uprising to overthrow him.
At that point yeah, the vast bulk of the military and police are in the tyrant’s control. We see it over and over again in the modern world. Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Tayyip Erdoğan to name a few. Evil Dictator 101 is to purge the military and police of those who are not loyal, then you go after everyone else. Stalin positively gutted his officer corps and no one stopped it.
Look at Iran where there was a popular revolution to toss out the evil king and his hated secret police. What do they have now? An evil cleric and his secret police.
You can posit hypotheticals all day. The OP is asking if the 2nd amendment’s purpose (or one of its purposes) is to allow the populace to stop a tyrant that has seized control. I submit that even if that was a purpose of it (and I am not saying it is) that it is a moot point today because the populace has no chance against a tyrant who has successfully seized the reins of power.
What about the other 240 million in the US? Which side are they on?
I don’t know, like I said earlier, I don’t think it’s an even remotely realistic scenario. FWIW, I’m pretty sure the “80 million gun owners” stat is out-dated as well, but I didn’t want to get into a big argument over that. From what I’ve seen in surveys recently, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of all American households have gun owners in them. How you assign people to respective teams, for example if a father owns a gun, but the mother doesn’t, and the oldest son also has a gun, but the younger children do not, strikes me as just as messy as trying to figure out how to divvy up soldiers that privately own firearms.
It’s actually pretty odd to assume that the gun owners would, as a block, be against the tyrant. The tyrant would, to be worthy of opposing, have to have gotten the military and the police under his control. Those folks, in addition to being gun owners, also share sentiments with many gun owners. Presumably the charismatic rhetoric our Dear Leader would be spewing would be tailored to appeal to that sort of mindset.
Not to say that all gun owners would be under his sway or anything, but honestly as soon as you get convicted of a crime it’s okay to take your guns away by anyone’s measure, right? It should be easy enough to deal with troublemakers.
Is there much of a movement out there wanting and/or ready to combat a right-wing tyrant?
Most of those countries, courtnies we consider to be “free” have laws protecting speech. Maybe not as enshrined as in the BoR like ours, but their gov’ts don’t really crack down on speech. Just because they have no 1st doesn’t mean that the have no freedom of expression.
Some of those countries do have laws prohibiting certain types of speech, germany makes it illegal to be pro-nazi, for instance.
Having the 1st as enshrined as we do does lead to some unintended consequences, like having to allow hate speakers to show up uninvited on your campus. While it does prevent the govt from making oppressive rules, it also prevents them from making some common sense rules that could actually prevent one group from oppressing another.
There may be some limits of expression on the fringes that some countries do not allow, but I can think of no western democracy that prohibits people from addressing their grievances with the government.
And, really, that’s what is important about the first. It is not that it protects my right to degrade you with racist and hateful comments (that’s the unintended side effect), it is that it protects my right to openly criticize the govt and any actions or policies it may be taking.
If we removed the ability for the 1st to protect hate speech directed at demographics and individuals, that would in no way remove our ability to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
There’s the John Brown Gun Club / Redneck Revolt, although honestly I don’t think I’d call them “ready to combat” much of anything.
I was wondering about that, myself. If Trump were to suspend elections and take over as dictator, are we going to be able to rely on all the second amendment militias out there that voted for him in the first place?
Depends on the crime. Currently felons, drug offenders, and domestic abusers generally lose their “right” to own / purchase a firearm.
The Constitution doesn’t say that at all. It doesn’t say anything remotely like that, actually.
Also, rebellion shares exactly zero similarities with voting. They are not the same thing, they do not accomplish the same thing, and they essentially have nothing to do with each other.
I’d say our system of government and voting by the people is a means for orderly switching of power rather than the historical (till that time) violent switches of revolution.
So, are you saying that the constitution doesn’t talk about voting?
Does voting have the ability to change the people in power?
If you are trying to be pedantic, then yes, the constitution does not say “Vote to rebel”, but it does spell out exactly how to change the government without blood shed through voting.
If actions taken to replace the government are not rebellion, then I’m not sure what is.
If fighting tyranny is a purpose of the Second Amendment, then logically, the Second Amendment protects the right to own military weapons. (We want our freedom fighters as well armed as possible, don’t we?) If the thought of your neighbor putting down his beer and saying, “Watch this!” while he reaches for his bazooka makes you queasy, perhaps you don’t want to argue for that purpose.
Sure, but then, we also don’t currently have an American public that would allow a tyrant to take over control of the government. That particular scenario requires a sea-change in American attitudes towards rule-by-strength and the acceptable application of political violence. In other words, we wouldn’t be a liberal democracy who cares (to at least some degree) about not being perceived as monsters - we’d be an entirely different society, and by the nature of the scenario, necessarily a crueler, more violent one.
More like, one civilian shoots a soldier. So, you shoot that civilian. And his wife. And his kids. And his parents. And any siblings he might have. And you keep doing that until nobody is willing to risk their entire families to fight you anymore.
Obviously I disagree with this assertion. They are as much of a check on the government as they ever were, which is to say they are A check on the government, not the exclusive or only check.
If the population goes along with it then whether they are armed or not is moot. If they choose to resist then whether they are armed or not is going to be a factor.
Well, that could very well be the outcome in the US as well. We could toss out a Trump, say, and bring in someone just as bad or worse in other ways. The outcome is kind of beside the point of the thread, however, or at least it’s a different debate. The key to the debate seems to be whether one believes that an armed population would or wouldn’t be a factor, and I think that debate hinges on whether someone takes a realistic look at what such a rebellion would mean wrt the actual US or wants to look at it in isolation to ‘prove’ it wouldn’t be a factor.
I think the discussion about whether it’s more a factor today than in the past is also interesting, and is another point of disconnect. Me, I don’t think that at any time in the past were armed civilians any more of a check than they are today, or vice versa. They were never going to be the exclusive check on the government…and they were never going to be the sole check. Our system simply isn’t built that way. If there was a popular uprising today or in the past that would mean across the board, not a Government verse Civilians type movie/video game.
And I submit that it is as effective today as it was in the past, meaning that you are overplaying how effective it was in the past and underplaying how effective it is today, and you are doing so based on a very contrived view of both. JMHO, and as with most of these threads I’m sure my opinion is in the minority. C’est la vie. 
And if the population is not a homogenous unit, then those among them who choose to support the tyrant who are going to be a factor as well. Not a factor that helps the would-be rebels, mind you.
While it’s convenient for the ‘guns are for revolting’ side to imagine that all the gun owners armed by the second amendment would be heroic freedom fighters, I on the “guns are revolting” side have noticed that the folks who have marched for nationalism and tyranny against (non-white) american citizens have tended to be armed too. And honestly I’d expect the crazy pro-tyranny side to start shooting before the rational objector side does.
Which is pretty much what I said earlier. But yes, there won’t be some sort of movie like civilians on one side and Da Gubbermint on the other, and that goes both ways. Just as in the Revolution.
Well, since that’s not my argument I’ll just let others who might be saying that respond.