Let me say that I’d pay money to see the movie versions of yours, Shodan’s & Una’s scenarios. I hate to say I think the last one is the most realistic.
We must have the worst military training in the whole world if some of you think that a large percentage of our troops would revolt in unison if gun laws were changed.
We must have the worst military in the world if you think our troops, enlisted, NCO, and officer, lack the courage and resolve to act upon deeply held beliefs in the very Constitution they swear to uphold and defend.
Perhaps you should re-read the OP, in which the premise is that the Constitution had been changed.
Or are you stating that our well-trained troops should revolt if the Constitution isn’t to their liking?
Nice attempt at moving the goal posts, but the OP said repealed, w/o regard to mechanism. Just keep in mind that some folks are attempting to come up with a reasonable rationale for how the situation DCnDC posits in the OP.
LHOD in post 20 and Lemur866 in post 29 pretty much “nail it,” IMO. Either the change is a popular grass-root movement, in which case not much of anything happens except for some gun owners burying/hiding guns, or, as Lemur says, it’s such a total breakdown of our current system (however unlikely) that the gun issue is a fart in a hurricane.
My take on the thread drift is that for the OP’s scenario to come about, a Constitutional repeal isn’t likely; it’ll be dictated by fiat by self-proclaimed President-For-Life <Insert Political Boogeyman>.
In which case I fully expect a hefty chunk of our armed forces to react in the manner I describe. Which means that the civil/domestic situation is truly as bad as Lemur posits in #29. I also expect some (much) smaller percentage of the military cozy up to the “new regime” and gleefully behave like jackals. All in the interest of “peace and stability,” of course.
If your take on the thread drift is different, well, then, like, that’s just your opinion, man.
Honestly I didn’t really think it through as deeply as I suppose I may have needed to. There have been a lot of excellent points and I could see almost all of it come to pass under certain circumstances.
If I were to redo it I suppose I would have to posit the scenario as something more like, “There’s a revolution and the new government is exactly the same except there’s no 2nd Amendment and all firearms are banned. The Feds start rounding up all weapons blah blah blah… the penalty for unauthorized possession or use of firearms is death blah blah blah…” but the same problems remain no matter how the scenario is rewritten: how did this revolution come about, a new Constitution banning guns could not exist without the popular support of the people, etc.
It’s been an interesting discussion though.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your OP, DC it’s just that for some of us, the answer is somewhat dependent upon how it came to be.
It is times like this that I wish I had a time machine that would whisk me back to 1789 and let me bring James Madison to our present day, and let him see what those 27 words have made possible.
I would hope he would be as appalled as I am.
Considering that our troops in Iraq have been rounding up the personal weapons of the general population in Iraq without revolting, I think the gun lovers here grossly overestimate what the troops are willing to do to protect their sacred chunks of metal.
This thread does certainly support my contention that Second Amendment supporters in general have no principles or loyalties whatsoever beyond their love of the gun.
:rolleyes: It exists in the minds of anyone who actually looks at that stupid Amendment honestly. Interpreting “well regulated militia” as “any fool who wants a gun” is even more an obvious attempt to get around the meaning of the Second Amendment as “ceremonial deism” is an obvious attempt to get around the Separation of Church and State.
I didn’t move any goalposts-I just took the OP as is, without adding “President-For-Life” dictators and the complete subjugation of Congress scenarios after the fact. The OP merely asked what would happen if the Constitution was changed in regard to the 2nd Amendment, and some here seem to be simultaneously saying that loyal American troops would both defend the Constitution and fight against it.
It makes perfect sense once you realize that to many or even most Second Amendment supporters, the Second Amendment is the only part of the Constitution that matters or deserves any loyalty. Therefore, destroying the rest of the Constitution in order to protect the Second Amendment is an act of loyalty to the Constitution in their eyes.
That is absurd. Most Second Amendment Supporters see it as the key or safeguard to the rest of the Constitution.
I agree with Czarcasm. If the Second Amendment was repealed (which is the premise of this thread) then it would no longer be part of the Constitution. I don’t believe that the members of the armed forces would stage a mutiny and refuse to obey lawful orders over this regardless of what their personal beliefs about that repeal are.
Not as far as I can see; they seem to be perfectly willing to ignore or scrap the rest of it as long as they can keep the Second.
That is certainly absurd.
When you say “repealed” you mean repealed by Constitutional process. That’s not a given of the OP, becuase you fundamentally don’t think like we do.
The OP’s stated “nightmare come true” is not, for me, the Constitutional repeal of the 2nd. amendment.
MY nightmare is the continued death-by-a-thousand-cuts scheme that has been practiced since 1933, until it gets to a point that chunks of our Constitution can be declared null-and-void by Executive Order or somesuch.
Cite?
This thread comes to mind. Considering that several posters here feel that treason and civil war are justifiable if the Second Amendment were repealed.
That is how we define “repeal” when it comes to the Constitution, so any other definition would be the secondary one when it comes to the OP.
If I say that I had a nice flight from Chicago to Portland last week, it is allowable to assume that I was transported by plane, although I never formally stated what mode of transportation I took, and that assumptions that I rode by hot air balloon or on the back of a giant eagle can generally be dismissed. If you believe that the first assumption one should make when it is said that a Constitutional Amendment was repealed was that it was done in some way other that constitutionally, then yes, I don’t think like you.
You know, if you didn’t spend so much time guessing at what other people were thinking, you might not have to be so paranoid.