No it wouldn’t. US military personel are not going to abandon their duty in droves to join the cause of a few extremist nutcases. If there was an armed resistance, it would get squashed like a bug and that would be the end of it.
Yeah, good luck with that. For the record, I would happily take up arms with the US military and help them destroy any little homegrown “revolutuon” that might occur.
Gun control is a good litmus test of a person’s feelings on liberty and personal responsibility. Shooting people is already illegal, how is placing more restrictions on gun ownership going to help curb illegal acts? The criminals aren’t worried about breaking the law to shoot someone, so why would they care about weapon restrictions?
BTW Diogenes the Cynic, nice way to start a thread by insulting all conservatives. Asshole.
SHOCK POLL: CLINTON TAKES 20-POINT LEAD IN PA
Dare I say it? Stick a fork in him, he’s done.
Gee, it can’t possibly be for historical reasons, right? No, these people must surely be supporting the Nazi party. There is no other possible interpretation, right?
You do realize that the PA is irrelevant to the nomination, do you not? Obama has already won it. He’s going to be your next President. You are very fortunate to be alive to witness it.
Good luck to you, too. You seem to think that any homegrown insurgency will ignore the lessons learned from all the 20th and 21st century insurgencies and attempt to best the “loyal” fragments of the US military in a conventional battlefield confrontation. The lessons of IED’s, ambush, assassination, etc. have been well learned, I think, and it is only a few fools_like you apparently_who believe insurgencies are crushed with tanks and bombers.
Maybe you’d have better luck in this thread if you just stopped flapping your mouth about gun owners and gun culture, two subjects on which you aren’t knowledgeable enough to comment much less lie convincingly.
No, not “these people” in general, but the people who get those tables at the gun shows must think they’re going to find a market or they wouldn’t be there. Why do they think they can sell this stuff at gun shows as opposed to say, comic book cnventions.
Go ahead. Stage your insurgency. Prove me wrong. Nothing would delight me more than seeing you assholes actually try it.
What have I lied about? What have I showed a lack of knowledge about?
How is it “dangerous” to believe that the people should be able to defend their liberty?
In any case, I find it odd that anyone can believe that our established systems of government can safeguard our liberty forever, given how easily the George W. Bush has subverted them. I really can’t understand why there are so many people who in one breath decry the authoritarian excesses of the Bush administration, and in the next proclaim that only the government should be allowed to have firearms…
The concept of an armed society is not that any individual or small group will have the capacity to take on the government; the idea is simply that an armed populace is more difficult to tyrannize than an unarmed one, either by raising the cost of raiding or “disappearing” dissidents, or by enabling a popular revolution as a last resort. It’s not about John Q. Hick and his white supremacist militia overthrowing the government, it’s about an angry, disenfranchised, and armed populace being impossible to govern through force.
If it ever came down to it, I certainly hope that I wouldn’t be standing against the entire armed forces, and I don’t think that I would be, either, if American liberty were genuinely threatened by a tyrannical government. But whatever happens, we can’t give up the fight for liberty just because it seems hopeless.
Anti-American? How? The founding fathers themselves were insurgents, and hostile to the concept of a standing army. I speak only of the people having the capacity to resist a tyrannical government. Do you really think of that as “anti-American?”
It’s a little hard to draw your message from the angry rhetoric, but are you really saying that loyalty to the government is more important than preserving liberty? If you would take up arms with the authoritarians if the time ever came, that’s your decision I suppose, but don’t expect it to be a popular one. :dubious:
“Absurd?” It’s meaningful. Is this thread about the absolute Truth, or is it about what effect on the vote Obama’s words will have?
Listen, the fact that Howard Dean yelled a bit was stupid shit. But… look what happened to his presidential campaign.
I can get an 8 foot table for $90 ($80 if I pay far enough in advance). I don’t have to sell too many copies of the Turner Diaries and other racist paraphenalia to cover that cost. Assuming I am truly acting as a recruiter for the Klan (the one time I saw a table with a focused racist intent), I am probably willing to eat that cost if I can sign up a few people to my cause.
That is quite different from the people who are there to make money. The racists only need to feel good about themselves, the others are there to make cash. The show operators will try to eliminate the Klan types, because it hurts business at surrounding booth space.
From the very mouth of the guy who declared, definitively, that there was no way Hillary would run for President this year? You’ll forgive me if I chuckle a bit at your prognostication ability.
I’m not sure if you have a point, and if so, what it might be. Are you saying that Obama does now wear lapel pins?
What I’m saying is that the mindless wearing of a symbol because one feels socially pressured to wear it is the opposite of patriotism. I’m suggesting that pussies who point to the wearing of or not wearing of a lapel pin as a demonstration of patriotism have no understanding of the word, the symbol or the sentiment. That is the message that I took from Obama’s position, perhaps because that is how I feel about it.
I’ve never once decried the wearing of a lapel pin or a symbol of patriotism, as you falsely assert. I’ve decried the false patriotism that drives the criticism of others’ patriotism. My father was a quiet man. He raised me right.
WTF does “preserving liberty” mean? I think you guys are deluded if you think that the poulace is going to rise up with you to help you overthrow the government because you don’t want trigger locks on your guns.
The Supreme Court is currently poised to make a landmark decision about what the 2nd Amendment really means. While the expectations are that it will come down 5-4 in favor of private ownership, it might yet come down on the “well-reglated militia” side of the coin. If the Supreme Court rules that gun ownership is not a Constitutionally guranteed right, will it become necessary for you guys to “preserve liberty?” Just curious.
Diogenes, I used to think the notion of the American people “resisting” their own government through privately owned firearms was absurd. “They’d call in the Marines and the cavalry and it’d be over like that! These fools think they can make a dent in the U.S. Military with a bunch of hunting rifles and old SKS carbines? How deluded can they get?”
But then I looked at the situation in Iraq. We’re dying by the thousands over there, from improvised weapons, old surplus rifles, and guerrilla tactics. Hell, just go back as far as Vietnam - we got our asses kicked by a bunch of barefoot farmers. “Well, they’ll just bomb the hell out of everyone if they tried that here” - I can see your point, but it’s easy to bomb a foreign country filled with people of a different culture. It’s not so easy to bomb our own citizens. You think they’re really going to have airstrikes in Kansas and Colorado? Kill thousands of civilians (because if there was a domestic insurgency, they would be hiding out with the civilians in suburban houses, just like the guys in Iraq and Vietnam hid out in civilian villages.)
I think an armed populace could make a difference against the military. I hope it never comes to that, and it’s unlikely that it will, but who knows? Better to be safe, I say.
My great great grandfather was a poor Jewish blacksmith in a village in the Ukraine as a young man. When the local Tsarist goons came around to the village to loot houses and bully the population, he picked up his rifle and shot the drunken Russian “policeman” who was trying to invade his house and probably would have raped his daughters and killed him if he hadn’t done something. He hid out and eventually was able to get to America with his family. If he hadn’t had that gun, he probably would have been killed, and I would never have been born.
Those “police” were supposed to, officially, be “protecting” the Jewish villagers. Instead, all they ever did was rape and pillage them. Fuck the notion that only the government should be armed. You never know when the government might turn against you. I’m anti-Bush so I’m on your side, Diogenes. Just look how we’ve been losing our freedoms with that bastard. The point about criticizing the government for having too much power, and then in the same breath being against gun rights, is a good point.
Obama’s comments were, as he admitted, poorly stated. However, there are many “single issue” voters out there, and there are people who also use a single issue as a litmus test to project how the candidate might feel about other issues.
Gun control - do you trust the people? How intrusive do you think the government should be?
Abortion - do you believe in women’s rights / do you follow certain Biblical beliefs?
Those are the biggest “single issues” that I think of, but I am sure that there are others.
I bet. I am thinking we need to send the survivalists and pre-insurgents right here in the USA to Iraq. They’d clearly know how to deal with the insurgency there better than our professional soldiers can.
Perhaps you’re right, but Obama’s nomination, at least is (barring something truly catastrophic) already a virtual fait accompli. It’s silly to say that he’s “toast” if he loses in PA. He has never been expected to win PA.
It’s his lack of experience, not with issues or legislation or getting things done, but lack of experience in an election. That’s where Hillary is simply outstanding, in running an election, pandering to people, lying to get elected, and personal attacks. Obama, however, is, in my estimation, inexperienced in having every single word he says ripped apart, taken out of context, or changed and broadcast to the masses. I think he naively thought it would be possible to talk HONESTLY about racial issues/gun control/religion/etc with America. But he’s learning now that it isn’t. The election is about pandering, not offending, and telling people what they want to hear. It’s an absolutely pathetic state of affairs and the hope I had a year ago that things had changed and that my country was ready for a new kind of election, has been seriously crippled.
Actually that speech he made a month or so ago about racial issues almost made me an Obama supporter. It was very honest and insightful. But these last comments, combined with his preacher and dour-looking wife, would make me pretty worried about electing the guy.