I’m a 51yo woman with no military or martial training and the general physical shape of a beanbag. I might be willing to open my home to people fleeing from the violence, but that’s it.
As a 44 year old man who isn’t in the best of health I would try avoid any sort of civil unrest at all cost. It’s doubtful the entire country would erupt into violence at once and it should be easy to avoid the areas where it is happening.
And god forbid if the unrest got worse enough I would take my own life before I took up arms and killed anyone else.
Nice try, CIA!.. like i’d say anything online about this…
Looks like the City Council and a Vague, Yet Menacing Government Agency need to do a better job of monitoring our thoughts, why don’t you go play in the Dog Park, or go bother The Shape in Grove Park that No One Talks About or Acknowledges…
I’d probably want more effective weapons than what are popularly available. The State is well-armed, you know.
Yeah, there are some issues that would cause me to take up arms against the government.
Some things I would consider(might as well stick with gun control) are;
How was the decision to do this arrived at? Government fiat? Actual Will Of The People as demonstrated by a direct vote? Something less brutal than government decree and less direct than popular vote?
How is it being enforced? Door to door home inspections and confiscation of whatever level of brutality? Buy back program? Perhaps a cessation of sales of firearms and ammo to private citizens with prior ownership grandfathered in with full documentation of who has what? What does the government consider to be a firearm? In ID the state classifies bows as a firearm. Do archers have to submit to the same rules as gun owners?
Supposing that civil unrest follows the government declaring by fiat of some sort that guns are forbidden and they’re gonna get them no matter what here are some other considerations. That percentage of gun owners who are vocal about fighting are probably not real super concentrated even if various regions may have more or fewer. Some percentage of the military or law enforcement will refuse to participate, and some will actively join the rebellion. Bith sides have some pretty big advantages and disadvantages.
I dunno, if I was the Chief Executive tasked with this, I’d probably order my commanders to sit tight and keep a tight rein on their troops. I would NOT want the military involved
Lazy and dishonest, but technically legal.
Is this your People Get Ready post?
Not even remotely.
I dismiss outright a hypothetical civil uprising about firearms confiscation. There’d be the occasional duck who makes it ugly, but there would be no predictable, coordinated, or large scale violent pushback. It just wouldn’t unfold that way if The Government were repealing The Second. But that’s it’s own thread I think.
NOW, if firearms confiscation took the form of other types of civil abuses, like door-to-door no-knock searches, mass arrests, significant and consistent property damage, and other personal abuses then all bets are off. But then it would no longer be about firearms, it would be about an abusive government that also is also forcibly disarming the people. At that point I think you’d see governors getting involved and using their national guard units as possible to defend their states. You’d also see secession movements for real, and alliances forming between states siding against the federal government.
Personally, I find the idea of shooting at local law enforcement and US military personnel or hardware distasteful (and suicidally futile) to the point where I can say I wouldn’t do it as part of a fight for something. If my neighbors are being hauled off without any doubt to death camps I might be inspired to play the vigilante and disrupt the incident with a bit of sniper fire–but things would already be pretty bad at that point. And of course if they harm my family as part of a larger ongoing campaign all bets are off, but even then I’d prefer to be part of a resistance movement than a lone operator.
As long as my wife and children are alive, my own willingness to actually take up arms against really anyone would be to protect against direct and immediate violence against me or the innocents around me, and even then would be focused exclusively on getting everyone out of the situation and de-escalating the violence.
What I would do, supposing the state of the nation deteriorated to a point where I felt it was no longer safe or ethical to be a part of it, is leave. I am fortunate enough to work in a field and have a skillset that is global; jobs for me, in particular, are probably more plentiful in Europe than they are in the United States.
I’m a Republican that owns multiple guns including one that would not survive an assault weapons ban. I honestly can’t think of any plausible scenario where I would take up arms against the US. I would use them in self defense or in defense of others. If a gun ban should happen (and be upheld as constitutional by the SCOTUS), I will turn them in willingly. There will be no need to pry them from my cold dead hands. We are a nation of laws and I will abide by those laws. I would also take active legal steps to have any gun ban reversed.
An increase in the tea tax.
This might not count as what the OP had in mind, but if the Federal or State government started using drones with facial recognition software in an inappropriate manner, I would start shooting them out of the sky.
What ARE their intentions? As soon as the 2nd Amendment is repealed, your “gun owners” are going to storm their state capital? March on DC with loaded weapons? Start shooting the police? What?
Their intentions are somewhat varied and diverse, but in a thread that I already feel is at risk of flying too close to the sun, so to speak, I don’t intend to answer those other questions with any specificity.
ETA: besides that, the thread topic is about what would motivate someone to take up arms against the US, not how they’d go about it.
Fair enough. So would you say “Not agreeing with Constitutional limits on private ownership of guns” would be their motivation then?
You never know when you’ll run across some toddlers next to a federal building.
If I thought rising up violently against my government would accomplish an increase in my rights and freedom, or even if I thought a hypothetical victory by “my side” would accomplish that on behalf of “our cause”, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
With rare exceptions, I don’t think it would. Violence concentrates authority in the hands of those with the best capacity to coerce, to destroy, to inflict death, fear, pain, etc. All the changes I want lie in the opposite direction of that, and in the opposite direction of concentrated authority.
It may be an old moldy hippie sentiment, but it’s still a valid one: Fighting for Peace is like Fucking for Virginity. To which I would add fighting for voluntary noncoercive cooperative ways of conducting human enterprise.
It’s not that we don’t have a coercive authoritarian government. It’s that we have a slick, modern, velvet-gloved coercive authoritarian government, one that uses communication (where access to the ears of others is not equally distributed) and advertising and the careful distribution of sufficient benefits and sufficient degrees of equality and sufficient guarantees of predictability and freedom within sufficient boundaries to keep most of us in a state of acceptance of the status quo as a system within which we will work for improvements rather than seeking to overthrow it.
- shrugs * They’ve done well. I don’t consider things fair and equitable but I consider the social environment to be better than what it would become in the face of violent revolutionary struggle, so the only arms I’m inclnied to take up are of the pen variety, not the sword variety.
I think the OP phrased it better:
But you’re certainly free to try to characterize gun confiscation as “Constitutional limits on private ownership of guns” if you want to. I don’t consider that an accurate description.
I’m a pretty non-violent, pacifistic (and cowardly) person so I doubt that I would engage in violent rebellion for anything short of genocidal atrocities.