This is an insult to the victims of true tyranny around the world. You have no business claiming to be subject to tyranny just because some political issues didn’t go according to your liking. Call us when your family is dragged from your house and beaten to death before your eyes. This is what gives gun fellators the reputation as wild-eyed paranoids.
Think you’ve been massively whooshed here.
So the *real world *answer would be No. Gotcha. :rolleyes:
No benefits? Who have you ever seen say that? You really need to quit the lies about what you’re being told. Unless it’s refusal to understand it, in which case you need to quit that.
Ibid.
Gonna tell us more about this “hoplophobia” stuff while you’re at it, or have you started to comprehend it?
Tell **Lumpy **- he’s the one pushing that view the hardest, as he daydreams of killing cops.
It’s all self-congratulatory bullshit, as you know - even the Cliven Bundy Brigade never attracted more than a few dozen of these assholes. The rest either never had the principled courage to act, or they put their thresholds of The Tyranny of the Democratic Majority higher (how much higher, we’ll never know, of course).
DO NOT put words in my mouth or I’ll take it to the moderators. You’re the one attacking a straw-man position. For the record, I have never claimed and explicitly deny that any tiny band of armed fanatics who decide to rebel against the government are justified in doing so. Claiming that that is my (or the Founding Fathers) position is like reducing all of Christian theology and doctrine to “if you play with your pee-pee you will burn in Hell”.
Woo-hoo! I’m going to go masturbate like a motherfuck!
You do know that all your posts are searchable and uneditable, don’t you? :dubious:
OK then, tell us what you *do *mean by all your “resisting tyranny” drivel. Tell us who you *do *mean you need to be able to shoot and kill. And tell us what it *would *take to justify you getting off your ass, shutting down the computer, and *doing *the thing you keep claiming you need a gun to be able to do.
:rolleyes: Just when I thought there was nothing more pathetic you could possibly post.
Having a bad day, ElvisL1ves?
I can’t do the topic justice in a few lines; I’ll have to muse awhile- possibly start another thread just for that topic.
What percentage of gun rights folks do you think begin and end their arguments with “because the second amendment says so” or “what does ‘shall not be infringed mean to you’?”
I suspect it is about as common as people whose pro-choice argument begins and ends with “Roe v. Wade gives us this right so end of story”
Sure there are some people like that but frankly its mostly just people who are sick and tired of dealing with others trying to limit their rights.
I can’t think of anyone on this board whose argument begins and ends with “second amendment!” /drops mike
They may end up there at some point but that is not their entire argument.
Are you saying that there will be no more riots going forwards where the police will not be capable of protecting the life and property of people in the affected areas?
OK, so why don’t you break down the benefits of legal private gun ownership for us?
WHOOOOOooooooossssshhhhhhh…
It’s really okay if you just haven’t thought this whole killing thing through yet, what it would actually mean in the real world, just who it is you claim the right to kill if you’re feeling tyrannized (or, like Damuri, feeling threatened by the idea of black people having guns, just like the Founding Fathers were).
Just don’t get upset about having it shown to you.
No, I’m saying your fears are your own.
Hunting for meat, protecting your farm animals from predators, and even getting your jollies from punching holes in paper targets are all good things, although ownership requires responsibilities that aren’t always met. That’s never been denied except in your binary imagination.
Other than that, what else can you claim as a net benefit? Truthfully, that is, since in your case that condition needs to be explicit.
Ho hum, this is happening so often these days, it hardly rises to the level of stupidity any more:
Man accidentally shot when customer’s gun falls to floor while at Sanford, Florida Cracker Barrel
We learned from a prior incident that modern guns just can’t fire when dropped. So, someone is lying.
OK, rather than post a 5000-word thesis on the history and theory of an armed public, I’m going to quote from a novel called “Unintended Consequences” by John Ross. It was written in 1995 at a time when the BATFE was pursuing a policy of harassing and entrapping NFA-item owners in an unofficial campaign of attempting to abolish ownership of NFA items. Ross is further toward the anarchist end of the spectrum than I am, and the novel is admittedly a wish-fulfillment fantasy. But in one chapter he addresses the question of when rebellion is justified better than I could. Spoilered for length.
[Spoiler]“Professor Arkes, I don’t disagree with the basic principle, but it’s not enough just to say, Totalitarian regimes are wrong, so don’t let the State enslave you’. That’s like saying, ‘Don’t get sick’. The important question is, when do you know it’s going to become enslavement? When is the proper time to resist with
force?”
“Please elaborate, Mr. Bowman.” Henry took a deep breath.
“The end result, which we want to avoid, is the concentration camp. The gulag. The gas chamber. The Spanish Inquisition. All of those things. If you are in a death camp, no one would fault you for resisting. But when you’re being herded towards the gas chamber, naked and seventy pounds below your healthy weight, it’s too late. You have no chance. On the other hand, no one would support you if you started an armed rebellion because the government posts speed limits on open roads and arrests people for speeding. So when was it not too late, but also not too early?”
“Tell us, Mr. Bowman.”
“Professor Arkes, I teach a Personal Protection class off-campus, where most of the students who sign up are women. I’m seeing some strong parallels here, so please indulge me in an analogy.”
“Go ahead.”
"A woman’s confronted by a big, strong, stranger. She doesn’t know what he’s planning, and she’s cautious. Getting away from him’s not possible. They’re in a room and he’s standing in front of the only way out, or she’s in a wheelchair—whatever. Leaving the area’s not an option.
"So now he starts to do things she doesn’t like. He asks her for money. She can try to talk him out of it, just like we argue for lower taxes, and maybe it will work. If it doesn’t, and she gets outvoted, she’ll probably choose to give it to him instead of getting into a fight to the death over ten dollars. You would probably choose to pay your taxes rather than have police arrive to throw you in jail.
“Maybe this big man demands some other things, other minor assaults on this woman’s dignity. When should she claw at his eyes or shove her ballpoint pen in his throat? When he tries to force her to kiss him? Tries to force her to let him touch her? Tries to force her to have sex with him?”
Henry took a deep breath and shrugged. "Those are questions that each woman has to answer for herself. There is one situation, though, where I tell the women to fight to the death. That’s when the man pulls out a pair of handcuffs and says, ‘Come on, I promise I won’t hurt you, this is just so you won’t flail around and hurt either of us by accident. Come on, I just want to talk, get in the van and let me handcuff you to this eyebolt here, and I promise I won’t touch you. I’m not asking you to put on a gag or anything, and since you can still scream for help, you know you’ll be safe. Come on, I got a full bar in here, and color TV, and air conditioning, great stereo, come on, just put on the cuffs.’
“I tell women that if that ever happens, maybe the man is telling the truth, and maybe after talking to her for a while he’ll let her go and she will have had a good time drinking champagne and listening to music. But if she gets in the van and puts her wrists in the handcuffs, she has just given up her future ability to fight, and now it is too late.” Henry realized he had been making eye contact with all the other people in the lecture hall, just as he did when he taught a course. Now he looked directly at the professor.
“How do you spot the precise point where a society is standing at the back of the van and the State has the handcuffs out? That’s the question I’d like to see addressed by one of these philosophers we’ve been studying, Professor.”
“Mr. Bowman, that’s a very good point, and I wish now that you had brought it up six weeks ago. I might have given it for the semester’s final paper assignment.” Most of the class laughed at this comment, and Henry smiled.
For the rest of his life, Henry Bowman would ruminate over the issue he had raised in class that day.[/Spoiler]
So the best answer I can give you is “when I’m convinced we’re standing at the back of the van and the handcuffs are out”.
Congrats to **Lumpy **who attempted to answer a difficult question (though I find his answer too imprecise to offer useful prescription). Will others take a try? I’ll take a stab myself…
The power of the State is normally exercised via armed soldiers and armed police. As long as there is a perception that our soldiers and police are in community with citizens, the citizens may feel confident that private armed rebellion won’t be necessary. States that become too authoritarian typically have thuggish security forces, or, like America in 1776, foreign soldiers.
Are America’s soldiers or police becoming thuggish and isolated from the community enough to present worry? Certainly police act like thuggish foreigners in some communities. Ironically, the ubiquity of privatley owned guns is a major cause of police misbehavior. Even more ironically, if you accept my argument that private guns serve as a counterweight to police and military that become divorced from the community, is that the right-wing rednecks who favor gun rights are typically the very same people that adulate the military and thuggish cops.
TL;DR: Obama isn’t coming to take your guns personally. He’ll send American citizens to do his bidding. The assumption that those citizens would be “evil” and would confiscate arms from the “good” seems to derive mainly from irrational and inchoate hatred of government.
Good point, septimus. On the one hand, you have some really, really terrible fiction equating the threat from some kind of serial killer to a young woman to the insidious usurpation of civil rights by a state (where taxation is somehow part of the process of luring her into his van?).
On the other hand, you have actual reality, in which certain types of people threaten 2nd amendment solutions to circumvent due process, engage in armed standoffs to prevent the enforcement of the law, and who attempt to intimidate others through displays of weapons.
If one is honestly concerned about a threat to due process and democracy, there is really only one clear threat at this point.
Maybe you guys should start a GD thread about gun control, this is supposed to be about stupid gun news.