I can’t imagine this working during Stalin’s reign. In both the Soviet Union example and the US civil rights example, after decades of brutal and effective repression the system reformed/decayed enough that popular protest could make a difference. You don’t overturn evil at the height of its power by trying to shame it.
rosa parks wouldn’t need a gun because rosa parks would be driving around town in an armored hum-v
It worked during Brezhnev’s regime, which is a surprise. If I was operating solely from my armchair I would figure that it wouldn’t work under any authoritarian system. But there are other examples: Amnesty International is credited as helping to overthrow the junta that had seized power in Brazil during the ~1970s.
My take is that authoritarian collapse occurs when the elite lose confidence in themselves. Civil disobedience of various sorts can advance that. But I also think that this political process isn’t well understood, at least by myself and probably the wider security profession.
Anyway yeah, I’m not claiming that it would have worked under Stalin. The odd part is that it works at all.
So when have gun nuts ever even gotten close to throwing human civilization into the abyss?
I can think of several times when irresponsible bankers (see the great depression and the great recession) and war mongers (see WWII and the cold war) have done so.
Yeah, thats what I said. My point is that the second amendment really only protects against tyrannies of the minority. Democracy will have to have failed for the second amendment to be of any use.
Well to be fair, some folks seem to think it is an appropriate response to losing an election.
That’s a fair question and I’m sorry I didn’t answer before.
There is a really strong tendency of of many white people on both sides if this issue to try and exploit tragedies against minorities and Jews, particularly those against black people.
Admmittedly, it’s vastly more common of those on the “Don’t you dare take our guns!” side.
For example, I want to throw up every time some right-winger Hitler’s supposed gun control measures and how this supposedly is why gun registration is evil.
The worst were all those billboards asking the question “Raise your hand if you support banning guns”(or words to that effect) and showing a buch of people doing the “Heil Hitler” salute.
The latest is to sqeal about MLK applying for a gun permit.
I’m genuinely shocked none of the gun fetishists have brought that up yet.
I feel the same about those who on the other side who try to exploit such tragedies.
Well on a relative risk basis, I’m inclined to agree. But since the industrialized world has yet to disintegrate into a Mad Max free for all (as opposed to the rather well organized brutality and genocide imposed during WWII) solid conclusions are premature.
I had historical examples of authoritarian irregulars in mind. They haven’t tended towards constructiveness, whether they be defenders of Serbian honor during the 1990s, certain brown-shirt clad mid 20th century central European practitioners of an ideology I can’t quite remember (Hilterism?), Central American death squads of the 1980s, the White League, the 19th century Southern Red Shirts and the perpetrators of the Tulsa race riot who invaded black neighborhoods and burnt them down in 1921.
The point being is that there’s no reason to believe that a bunch of disorganized, unsupervised yahoos armed with handguns or rifles would necessarily be on the side that defends human or civil rights. Quite the contrary in fact.
You listed a bunch of other people that may be, but here, who here is exploiting tragedy?
The Solidarity movement didn’t operate in the Soviet Union. It operated in Poland and was crushed. It’s also worth noting it was more successful than comparable movements elsewhere in Europe because the Polish government was less not more repressive than other Warsaw Pact countries.
…on the SDMB. Plenty of gun nuts, right wingers (including politicians) and “sovereign citizens” propose just that. I suspect it comes from disdain for democracy, except for when they are in charge.
I think you are conflating gun nuts with nazis and death squads. They’re not really the same thing.
A bunch of yahoos with guns also also fought the American Revolution. You wouldn’t conflate THEM with Nazis and death squads would you?
Anyway, my point is that a bunch of gun nuts are unlikely to be the force that drives our civilization over the cliff. It is far likelier to be warmongers in government and bankers on wall street.
I appreciate the response.
In general, I agree with you: it gets up my nose when people say something like, “If you swap ‘black people’ for ‘Christians’ in that sentence, you’ll see how offensive your stereotype is.” It’s a cheap ploy that trivializes our country’s history of racism by suggesting the centuries of suffering it causes is equivalent to a snarky comment on the Internet.
I think something different is going on here, though. In this case, rather than trivializing the harms of racism, the comparison emphasizes it. “Oh,” it says, “You’re worried about tyranny? We’ve had tyranny, bud. Pay attention to your own history and the tyranny therein. The way to solve it isn’t some second amendment solution bullshit.”
In other words, it’s not pulling the civil rights struggle in to make a shitty analogy. It’s honoring the civil rights struggle’s history of making wise choices that actually stand up to tyranny, and contrasting that against the stupidity of some Tea Partiers.
How I see it, anyway.
You mean that bunch of slavers and genocidal killers? Certainly I would. They just won, that’s the main difference. Give the victorious Nazis 200 years to whitewash everything and everyone would believe in the fight for freedom of the Founding Fathers of Greater Germany and consider the Holocaust a minor thing that should be ignored because after all, “standards were different back then and there weren’t that many Jews anyway”.
I dunno, the Czech government during the Prague Spring was less repressive as well. The major point I had in mind is that the Soviet Union fell because a) a largely peaceful collapse of power is Eastern Europe (triggered when the Berlin wall fell, but there were largely spontaneous movements across the region) and a failure of self-confidence in Moscow. (In particular I opine that Chernobyl and Armenian earthquake did them in, as it demonstrated to the elite just how incompetent they were.) At any rate force of arms played a rather marginal role.
Well I agree, for reasons of timing. Miscreants and sickos emerge from the woodwork after civil society has taken a big hit. They don’t get away with stuff during times of political stability, be it propped by prosperity or police state.
I’m conflating gun nuts with violent irregulars. George Washington led a conventional army: he didn’t lead guerrillas, never mind terrorists. I have a pretty bright line in mind actually: I don’t have a problem with a well regulated militia. But a bunch of middle aged bozos with popguns are not the National Guard. In a time of crisis I assume most would keep their head down but those few with delusions of grandeur but no formal organization are more likely to play a non-constructive role, judging from history.
I have no illusions about what sort of men the founding fathers were but they didn’t commit genocide (the small pox ridden blankets were not distributed by the founding fathers but if your point is that this is all stolen land then I guess I would say all land is stolen). And I don’t mean to defend slavery but slavery had been a part of every civilization I can think of up to that point. Every other nation that you hold up as an example for us to follow has followed our example to get where they are.
IOW, they might if they could but they can’t so they don’t.
Just my experience but most of the law abiding gun owners I know are comfortable with hierarchy and many of them were in the military or law enforcement. Maybe we have different definitions of gun nut but most gun nuts I know are not unusually violent.
Sorta glad the discussion took this turn, because it gives me opportunity to clarify. IMHO, most gun owners are normal: for example, most are not members of the NRA. Furthermore I doubt whether most NRA members would in reality participate in vigilantism, hooliganism or attacks on our military. For better or worse and mostly for the better.
More generally, I think you give the nutsos too much credit. They are opportunists. I doubt whether many of them actively fantasized about genocide or mass rape when Tito led Yugoslavia: they merely had ethnic resentments that were kept under wraps. Similarly in Rwanda. So no, the great majority of them are more likely to make bad situations worse than to actually initiate the death spiral itself. Systemic collapse is far more likely to be prompted by economic mismanagement or an all-too-common failure of diplomacy.
ETA: Oh yeah: h/t Der Trihs of all people who provided the conceptual underpinnings for my empirically substantiated point.
To me, the point is not that gun nuts with a dozen rifles and 10s of thousands of rounds of ammunition are really dangerous, it’s that experience shows that actual cases of the abrogation of civil rights in this country were solved without resorting to 2nd amendment remedies and that there doesn’t seem to be any case in post revolutionary America where private citizens with guns used them to advance the cause of freedom.
We can have meaningful debate on guns when we talk about hunting, recreation, and self defense, but the absolutism involved in the need to have unfettered access to guns to prevent tyranny stops us from having a rational discussion.
Ibn Warraq, if you’re still around, do you think that fumster’s point here is one worth discussing? If so, is it possible to discuss the point without discussing the struggle for rights for black people? It’d seem totally weird to me to leave them out of the picture.
My wife pointed out something important, though: that white fear of armed black people in the 1950s? There’s some good evidence that that fear opened a seat at the negotiation table for King et al. A lot of black guys came back from World War II and Korea angry at injustice and familiar with weapons and military tactics, and that fact wasn’t lost on the white power structure.
So there’s a case to be made that the threat of second amendment remedies DID help solve the civil rights issue for African Americans.
Even taking what you say as truth, so what? Monsters are monsters regardless of how many of them there were.
I dunno, most of the battles were up North and conducted by men of modest means. True George Washington was a slaver but he also freed his slaves upon his death FWIW.
The soldiers weren’t particularly effective until they received formal training after which they were no longer yahoos. Similarly to Northern soldiers during the Civil War: George B. McClellan was a lousy strategist but legendary at transforming men into real soldiers.
You want to create a credible citizen’s militia? Teach them camp hygiene. Bullets kill troops: dysentery levels battalions.
The revolutionary war is a pretty big qualifier.
I could point to things like the arab spring (unless you consider those military coup d’etats, which is certainly not the way is has been talked about around here). Perhaps your point is that once you have “real” democracy, you will never never need it because it will never devolve into tyranny of the minority. Well, I hear people bitching about the outsized influence of money in politics on a daily basis around here. The next tyrant may not look like past tyrants.
I think its pretty well accepted that hunting and recreation are not the basis for the second amendment. Or are we just assuming the second amendment doesn’t exist for purposes of this discussion?
I personally don’t feel the need for guns for self defense or to overthrow tyranny but I don’t feel the need to get an abortion or get married to another man either and I support those rights even though those rights are not explicitly mentioned in the bill of rights the way the right to bear arms is.
You are applying today’s standards to society 250 years ago. Beating your wife was once considered acceptable (still is in many places), beating your child was a parental duty.
Our notions of human rights is fairly recent isn’t it?
Many of them have law enforcement or military experience. I wouldn’t call them yahoos or hooligans.
Doesn’t that make you want to think things through again?
Like I said, a lot of the gun nuts have military or law enforcement experience.