Ok firstly you need to stop looking at it through US tinted glasses. Most of the rest of the world does NOT see gun ownership as a fundamental right. This does NOT mean that foreigners have smaller or non existent gun cultures then the US, indeed many countries have far higher rates of gun ownership then the US. It is the culture of a country that decides whether it has a highly armed population not legislation. Some countries of whetever political persuasion have always had a far higher rate of private firearm ownership and other have not.
So you have seen that ownership of firearms is going to be independant of legislation, you can then see that it is also independent of political leadership to an extent.
So totalitarian regimes. They desire and often require a large military apparatus. The cheapest way to do that is conscription. Yet conscription might not always be popular or even then be very expensive (you try training millions of men each year). So one way to lesses it is to see that more and more people are familiarized with firearms so they can quickly be adapted and trained when the need be. One of the reasons that Russians were so quickly able to replace losses ion 1941-42 is that in the previous decade millions of young Soviet Citizens had qualified and indeed been encouraged to become experts in rifles and other types of firearms. Of course rural Russia especially had a much higher rate of private firearm ownership anyway. Same with Iraq a place where people have usually been armed.
To counter a possible objection that you might raise, no Totalitarian regimes are not fearful of armed citizenaries. The types of weapons which your average citizen group can get can never even begin to threaten the coercive elements of a nation state. That indeed has been the case for about 500 years since the dawn of the gunpowder age,
I wouldn’t go that far back. I’d say as recently as 100 to 150 years ago, a group of people armed with civilian firearms would be approximately equal to a professional military unit.
Well perhaps for a time in the late 18th century (and a lot of that depended on whether or not they could get cannons a big if) which I will note was about the time of the American Revolution and may explain a lot. The point is considered.
With many gun owners being military veterans, I wouldn’t write off the potential of a civilian militia.
Most times when I see militia guys, they’re all overweight lard-asses. But if there were a group, 50 or 60 strong, of Marine and Army veterans who didn’t let their bodies go to hell and kept up on their marksmanship skills, I’d put my money on them against any similarly-equipped infantry unit.
The equipment, of course, is an issue, and of course a force with artillery, air support, etc, will be at a disadvantage. But they can still chip away at the enemy and destroy morale. Explosives aren’t particularly hard to improvise. They’re a hell of a lot easier to make than guns. It’s not like a hypothetical armed-citizen army would be stuck only with firearms; they would have men among them with the know-how to create effective bombs and missiles.
For such an uprising to occur you need far more then just some guys with guns. You need food to sustain them and a place to call as a base as well as another to make their weapons. For all that you need a large amount of support in the local population. If you gave said support then these men would be a threat even sans any military training or easy access to weapons, both can be arranged if necessary.
Otherwise your hypothetical company will simply be hemmed in until they starve as they cannot eat RDX.
Equipment is no longer an issue - it’s the issue. No militia unit, no matter how skilled its members, can compare to even a third rate military unit. Equipment like artillery and armor and aircraft and missiles dominate a battlefield - a militia without these things will be destroyed. The only issue is whether the equipped army would take any casualties during the slaughter.
Now I’ll grant you that armed civilians can form guerilla units and harass a regime. But they can only do that from the fringe. If they try to stand and fight, they’ll be killed. The only way a guerilla group can win is if their opponent decides to quit (or if they get a source of outside supplies that turn them into a real army).
This is the only way anyone can ever win, unless they completely exterminate every trace of the enemy and pour salt on the ground like the Romans did to Carthage. And that hasn’t happened in a hell of a long time.
I don’t know why people accept the idea of insurgent forces in third world countries beating back powerful militaries but they can’t believe that Americans, with more and better weapons, could do the same thing.
Furthermore in the case of an opponent who is domestic based and unlike foreign occupiers cannot say “fuck this” and leave yeah the opponent will not tire of it. How many domestic insurgencies have succeed without outside interference?
That’s not true. There are numerous cases where one side defeats the other side in battle and then occupies their country - with the regular army defeated, the losing country can’t prevent this occupation. And once you occupy the country, you don’t have to exterminate the population to have effective control. Sure, there may be resistance and even guerilla activity that kills some of the occupiers. But an occupied country isn’t going to be able to form a military and without a military they can’t force the occupier out.
In terms of power, guerillas are the equivalent of gang members. Sure they can perform acts of violence and run around openly in some neighbourhoods and maybe even shoot some police. But they’re never going to be a serious threat to take over the city because they’ll always have to back down when the police focus their attention on them.
There’s a difference between harrassing a foreign occupier until they give up and go home, and harrassing a domestic authoritarian government. The homegrown dictatorship can’t give up and go home because they are home. The alternative is to either keep fighting the insurgents, or end up hanging from lamposts.
Take the example of Egypt. Egypt isn’t in revolt because armed insurgents ground down the regime. It’s on the brink of revolution because mostly unarmed people are marching in the streets. There wasn’t an armed insurgency to speak of in Egypt, despite the raids and massacres of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The way dictatorships crumble is when the people stand up and stop supporting the dictatorship. If an armed insurgency defeats the government on the battlefield, what happens next is that the leaders of the insurgency become the new dictatorship.
That does not follow. Most contemporary sources indicate that alcohol use actually rose during prohibition, for example.
If you wish to test your hypothesis that most people will grumble and obey regardless of their opinion of the law, just drive 55 down the right lane of a major highway.
A Glock 9mm is (I presume) much better than the sort of guns these guys are making IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS! Ergo, people are willing to pay more for the former, much as they are willing to pay more for a Ferrari than for a Yugo.
(The “mass production”, etc only affects costs, hence profit margin, not selling price. If someone has such-and-such a thing to sell, the price I’m willing to pay is unaffected by whether he produced it on an assembly line and sent it via the postal service or whether he made it by hand and had it transported by a team of eight cats.)
Gun bans wouldn’t eliminate guns but if they eliminated the lawful uses of guns, it would remove much of the utility of owning them, for anyone but career criminals. A gun you keep hidden under the floorboards is at best a gun you might someday use if and when risking prosecution for possessing it would beat the alternative. It would certainly eliminate owning firearms as a fun hobby.
I’ll acknowledge in advance that Australia does not have the same gun culture as America.
Initially in 1996, Australia insituted new laws which were (very roughly) similiar to repealing the 2nd amendment. IE virtually all semi-automatic long arms were rendered illegal, unless you could demonstrate a need for them (Self Defence does not count as a ‘need’). In 2003 further restrictons were placed on handguns.
Rather than sending Police around to each home to confiscate the weapons, a gun buyback scheme was initiated, firearm owners could turn in their (now illegal) weapons and be paid cash based upon an ‘independent experts’ valuation of the weapon.
Having said that, it was widely reported in the media, that people were burying their guns ‘in the back paddock’ to prevent them being seized. However I am not aware that there was ever any sort of organised search of properties for illegal firearms, as I think any reasonalbe person would realise it woudl be child’s play to hide weapons until the heat was off.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I suspect the avenue of approach in the US in the OP’s scenario, would probably be some form of buyback rather than an automatic jackboot approach.
In that scenario obviously those committed to gun ownership would not turn their’s in. So where the government would go from there?
Shrug and ignore it, since they’ve basically gotten what they wanted? As I said earlier, for most purposes a gun hidden away is as harmless as a gun that’s been melted down.
I expect that the future consequence will be that in 20+ years, after the original gun buriers start dying off, there’ll be the occasional incident where people find forgotten gun stashes and turn them in for cash.
The Australian government places firearms into a few different categories, and what constitutes a ‘need’ depedns upon the category. You need a firearms license for any weapon regardless of the category.
Category A: Rimfire rifles (not semi-automatic), shotguns (not pump-action or semi-automatic), air rifles, and paintball markers can be obtained if you show a ‘genuine reason’. (And yes you read it correctly, in Australia you need a firearms license to own a paintball gun)
Category B: Centrefire rifles (not semi-automatic), muzzleloading firearms made after 1 January 1901. A “Genuine Need” must be demonstrated, including why a Category A firearm would not be suitable. I believe that these type of firearms cover some category of sporting and/or target shooters.
Category C: Semi-automatic rimfire rifles holding 10 or fewer rounds and pump-action or semi-automatic shotguns holding 5 or fewer rounds. Category C firearms are strongly restricted: only primary producers, occupational shooters, collectors and some clay target shooters can own functional Category C firearms.
Category D: Semi-automatic centrefire rifles, pump-action or semi-automatic shotguns holding more than 5 rounds. Functional Category D firearms are restricted to government agencies and a few occupational shooters.
I guess the short answer to your question for anything beyond a Category A firearm, a normal civilian would have to be a primary producer, or actively involved in the sporting side of shooting to obtain a license for one of those firearms.
Essentially. There are two groups of occupational shooters I’m aware of, with preusmably some crossover between the two groups. There are professional Roo Shooters and government contractors who cull feral species.
Roos Shooters
No one actually ‘farms’ kangaroo in Australia, all the kangaroo meat sold here and overseas and the skins for the soccer boots are all wild caught/shot.
There is a very limited number of shooters who have licenses allowing for certain quota’s of kangaroo’s.
Government contract Shooters
There are also some occupational shooters who are essentially government contractors and carry out culls of certain animals. Feral Buffalo and Camels in the Northern Territory, and I recall a cull of Brumbies (feral horses) in Queensland a while ago. Australia has an ongoing problem with non-native species that in sufficent numbers do significant damage to the land. If the numbers get large enough they’ll send in some occuaptional shooters (often shooting from helicopters) to cull the problem.
Tanks, artillery, helicopters, etc. are expensive to produce and to keep in the field. They are not in unlimited supply, even for the US military. It is a favorite trope that any insurgency in the US would be crushed by the sheer high tech firepower the government could bring to bear. Except, of course, that that idea posits that said government is willing to carpet bomb its own territory, to level its own cities, and so on with the unavoidable collateral damage. As I’ve noted many times before in threads just like this one, an insurgency_unless it is made up entirely of fools_won’t be engaging the US military on a battlefield. Insurgency, properly done, is a campaign of infrastructure destruction, murder of selected government officials, and subversion. Guns are not the only tool in the box, but guns are part of the tool set.
YMMV, but I believe any government willing to carpet bomb Wheeling, West Virginia because they believe insurgents are present deserves to fall.