Not really seeing where it says anything like “The purpose of the Second Amendment is to ensure citizens can protect themselves against a tyrannical government.” maybe you can provide a fucking quote instead of an essay?
A phrase I used to hear quite a bit (or at least quite a bit more often than I do now) is ‘liberal utopia’, used by conservatives when liberals would float ideas that they didn’t like. ie Universal Heath Care.
More and more I keep thinking that all these conservatives (MH included) should go live in their own conservative utopia. Maybe their use of guns and prayer will be enough to keep covid at bay in their maskless society.
Ask that of all the dead Taliban fighters. Along with their families, friends, and other collateral damage.
To be more precise, we left because we didn’t care enough about Afghanistan to justify the high cost imposed on us by the guerrillas. A citizen resistance army could, if properly equipped, impose similar costs against a tyrannical government. Obviously, a tyrannical American government couldn’t abandon its own soil, but the toll of waging a forever war against its own citizens would be deeply destabilising.
Sure. But since you lack empathy your trade offs involve people you don’t know. You’ll trade unlimited numbers of children you don’t know for a “right” that the rest of the civilized world does not recognize.
I’d ask you to go read Babale’s post again, as it sums it up well, but again, this is like asking a chicken to play chess; You simply lack the capacity of understanding. These dead children are simply theoretical for you. They are basically a number in a column. There is no understanding that they were real people, with parents who cared about them. You don’t have the circuits to understand why ANYone would care about these numbers in a column.
Doesn’t that rather demonstrate my point? Sure, we killed a lot of Taliban (and a lot of innocent people, which doubtless influenced people to join the Taliban), but we didn’t kill enough to win the war. Why assume a tyrannical American government would be any more successful combating a domestic militia?
And we could have murdered pretty much everyone living there and moved in people who were more amenable to being ruled by us.
Given my memory of folks saying that being asked to wear masks during a fucking pandemic was something only a tyrannical government would do, I think y’all done forfeited any right to have the arms to overthrow anything.
They had generations to build networks of underground bunkers and hideouts in nearly impassable mountainous terrain. Do you have that? Are you going to abandon your house and computer and everything else, in fact, destroy those very things in order to wage your war against the tyrannical govt?
It wasn’t that we couldn’t kill more of them, but that we lacked the political will to continue to do so. In your tyrannical vision, the government doesn’t have a reason to hold back.
For a better idea of how things would play out, I would suggest looking to how the Kurds were treated in Iraq prior to US involvement.
Now, to be fair, what many gun nuts call tyranny is being asked to wear a mask when they go to the store during a pandemic, and sure, waving an AR-15 around will probably get you past the employee at the door enforcing this tyranny.
And the insurgency in Afghanistan was largely built on things that AREN’T constitutionally protected. No one makes IEDs out of guns, they use chemicals that are regulated and tracked here in the US.
If the “we need guns to protect our freedoms” people were also arguing against government tracking of web traffic, and against regulations on the sales of large quantities of fertilizer, and all those other things that a successful insurgency against the US government would need, I would take them more seriously. As they don’t, I think they are simply being irrational.
‘How dare you infringe my Second Amendment right to keep and bear Anthrax spores!’?
Were it not the for the nonsense being spouted by @Martin_Hyde, I’d say that’s the most idiotic statement I’ve ever read on this board. It’s by far the stupidest of all the stupid arguments advanced by gun nuts.
That summary doesn’t say what you seem to think it does. And even if it did, it was decided in yet another typical closely divided ruling, exactly like the delusional Heller decision just before it, by exactly the same gang of extremist far-right wingnuts. The ones who, in deciding Heller, deemed that the preamble to 2A, the one that reads “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State …” is just meaningless decoration that can be ignored. This from the same gang of hypocrites that claim to be Constitutional literalists and originalists.
See,that’s the part that I can see is meant to thwart a tyrannical govt. If each of the states maintains a well regulated militia, then the federal govt is going to have a harder time in imposing its tyranny on them. Between the founder’s naive vision that involved a lack of a standing federal army, and states having militias, any tyranny would only be coming from your state (and tyranny there was from the states, in maintaining slavery) not from the fed.
If the US government decided to go all tyrannical, I could see state national guard units being mobilized, and maybe even effectively to some extent. But they aren’t going to want civilians to show up with their assault rifle and join in.
So, @WalterBishop, are you part of your state’s national guard? If so, then you would understand that they will provide you with the weapons when you face down the federal troops. If not, then they are not going to want you to get in their way, and will send you packing if you show up with your 2A guaranteed armament.
God, this thread is a train wreck. Thankfully now WalterBishop, who IIRC actually does hold the idiotic and extremist views that people have been falsely attributing to Martin Hyde, has shown up to be insulted.
The thing that is delusional here is your dangerous and delusional belief that the nearly unregulated proliferation of guns represents a noble individual right with the same standing as the actual civil rights that are the foundation of every civilized society, instead of a curse that threatens to destroy it. The proof of this is the strict gun regulation that exists in every wealthy advanced democracy in the world, the evidence that you refuse to hear because it defeats your delusional thinking, so you just claim it’s somehow “irrelevant”. I know I’m repeating myself and that there’s no hope of logic penetrating your thick-skulled gun-loving ideology, but hopefully it makes your intransigent stupidity clearer to others.
Indeed it is, and indeed you do. For the reasons I just stated, this makes you a dangerous moron and an integral part of the uniquely American problem that the rest of the world has long since left behind.
But the actual effect is to give the most heavily armed portion of the electorate an effective veto over any election that doesn’t turn out how they like. In 250 years, the 2nd has never once been used to resist a tyrannical government, but it has ensured that private citizens have the tools necessary to enforce tyranny regardless of the state of the law.
Yes, that’s a valid interpretation that’s been made – that “free State” could be interpreted as the nascent US federation, to be secure from further attacks by British redcoats with muskets, or to individual states with their militias in the absence of a standing federal army. Either way, 2A has been a useless anachronism for hundreds of years, and either way, it does not, in any sane reading, confer individual rights, either for individual self-defense or anything else. This was a fiction laboriously invented by the usual gang of extremist activists in the Heller ruling, and vehemently and eloquently opposed by the other four jurists.
Since the ability of individual owners of either popguns or AR-15s to overturn either the federal government or a state government today is nil, and the widespread and virtually unregulated individual ownership of guns in the US exists to such an extreme that it’s manifestly a major societal problem and a major preventable cause of death, the gun nuts have no rational case whatsoever, which is why they tediously keep repeating the same nonsense over and over again (it’s a trade-off of an “important liberty” against human life, and don’t talk to us about other countries, we don’t want to hear it – we’d rather see children die, and mass murders committed nearly every day, all for the glory of guns).
All those people passing around fake quotes like “I also firmly want it understood—I am 100% willing to trade more deaths for gun rights" sure are jerks
Sure.
But it has other aspects, too.
On another gun thread, I remember declaring that I’d reached the point – at least with Martin_Hyde – where we were working from similar facts but that we each brought to the equation profoundly disparate values.
Which is something, not nothing.
Much of this exchange also puts into very sharp relief that there’s more truth in one of my pithy sayings than I’d hoped:
A Republican, all too often, is somebody to whom it hasn’t happened yet – to them or to somebody close to them.
And there are endless ‘epiphany’ stories like this on endless topics where liberals and conservatives are diametrically opposed.
[segue]
I’m working on my screenplay (not really). Latest entry:
I really dislike that “appeal from personal tragedy” argument in any context.
It’s like saying “Oh, you’re opposed to the death penalty? Well, what if your entire family were raped, tortured and murdered in front of you?” “You support freedom of religion? Well, what if your child was brainwashed into joining the Moonies?”
Like, everyone would like to THINK they would have the courage of their convictions even under extreme circumstances, but nobody really KNOWS how they would respond, so it’s not a real question. It just comes off as cheap emotional manipulation.