Puerto Rico is not taxed by the federal government. At least not income taxes.
This is kind of bad and misleading reporting. Federal agencies do NOT get to keep a portion of the stuff they confiscate. The majority of these asset seizures are for failure to pay taxes. Then there is all the money the financial sector paid for fucking up our economy.
I would agree that whites are over-represented in gun culture. I would agree that white nationalists are over-represented in gun culture. I would not agree that the far right is any more likely to undermine democracy than the far left.
I don’t think it would be the NRA. It would be Trumpsters egged on by assurances that Trump would back them. I think that Antifa could just as easily become a violent arm of the far left.
That is not tyranny. That’s dirty partisan politics.
Pretty much all voter suppression is dirty politics. Its not the breakdown of democracy.
In both cases you have a group willing up to take up arms for their cause; the difference is that I think that Trump is far more likely to want to make use of such a group than any group of politicians that could be called “the far left”.
Surely if ALL the votes were suppressed it would a breakdown of democracy, since that would be a cancellation of the election. Based on that it seems pretty obvious that suppression of any number of votes erodes at democracy, in that it makes the leaders less representative of the opinions of the populace.
Do you have a cite for that? I’ve never been able to find a detailed breakdown of the sources of civil forfeiture amounts - however, the wiki entry on it indicates cash is probably a big chunk, with the amount of cash seized topping $1B starting in 2006, and likely being considerably more now.
This 2014 Washington Post articles cites 80% of $2.5 billion in police spending coming from civil asset forfeiture of cash and property.
If most of it is indeed tax liens driven or otherwise more justifiable sources, I’d be quite interested in being educated on the topic.
Thank you. So calls to a second amendment solution against a government you disagree with is tantamount to treason.
In fact, Article I explicitly states that one of the militia’s functions is to *suppress *insurrections (such as Shay’s Rebellion, the insurrection that led to the Constitutional Convention being called in the first place). The Second was written to help ensure there would be an effective militia available when it was needed.
But we still have that ridiculous claim regularly presented as true, even on this very board.
Yes, unless said disagreement is because they are Democrats…
As long as the mechanisms of our system are working, even if they aren’t working optimally or the way you’d like, then I do think that trying to use ‘Second Amendment’ solutions would be wrong and I suppose you could call them treason.
Or at least a euphemism for “promoting insanely violent action”, as in the case of this leading antivaxer:
*“Do you think it’s a good idea to let the government own your baby’s body and right behind it your body? That is the end for me. Anyone who believes in the right to bear arms. To stand up against your government. I don’t know what you were saving that gun for then. I don’t know when you planned on using it if they were going to take control of your own body away.”
“It’s now. Now’s the time.”*
- Del Bigtree, co-producer of the movie “Vaxxed”.
Definitely provoking insanely poor grammar.
One comment : one thing missing in this thread is that authorities, even when they have vast military/police resources, have logistical limits.
What if they declared a million people is to be arrested and eventually put to death. Somewhere the populance is disarmed, all the victims can do is flee or hide, Ann Frank style.
Well, what if 50% of them have semi-automatic rifles that are capable of penetrating most body armor?
And the news gets out that surrendering when they come for you will result in your death anyways.
If 30% of the victims fight to the death, and there is a 2:1 kill ratio in favor of the authorities, then you lose 150,000 government goons to murder a million people.
That’s not nothing. That’s an enormous cost, one even a despotic regime would have trouble paying. So the authorities would have no real choice but to not murder so many people, to victimize a smaller part of the populance, etc.
Sort of like how in states where there is no more room in prisons they are forced to punish most convicts with lesser punishments, such as shorter sentences or probation.
This example is a little simplistic but the point is, the people being armed reduces the ability of a government to mass murder it’s citizens in a practical sense.
Oh, sure, it can still do it, but it’s expensive.
It’s not just expensive. I doubt that they could still do it, at least not given the parameters you set. The government does not have, at its beck and call, a 150,000-strong goon squad willing to die while being responsible for the murder of 1,000,000 of their countrymen. Furthermore, the other ~324 million of us (or at least a substantial fraction) wouldn’t stand idly by while the government did its best imitation of the Holocaust.
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?.. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! "
- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
It’s not like they didn’t put down rebellions. It was never supposed to be a way to fight back against the government. They already knew you didn’t need a law to do that.
That has never been the purpose of the Second Amendment, and assuming that it would help is ignoring the huge gulf between what a citizen and the military can do. If they’re despotic, then the solution is going to likely be bombs and drones. It is only our commitment to not commit war crimes that makes it where guns are a threat in other parts of the world. Despots don’t care about that.
I think the Assad regime is unquestionably despotic. He’s been fighting a war against his own people for years now, using everything from “barrel bombs” to chemical weapons. He certainly doesn’t have any “commitment to not commit war crimes”. And yet strangely, almost inexplicably, the people seeking to overthrow him are still carrying around AK-47s. Why do you think that is? Perhaps it’s because it goes with their designer rebel outfits so stylishly? Or maybe they just want the extra forearm workout they get by lugging around an extra 8 pounds all day? Or … and I know this is going to sound crazy to you … maybe personal firearms still have some utility on the battlefield today, even when the enemy has some very sophisticated weapon platforms (which might also explain why our own military continues to purchase, issue, and train our soldiers on the use of small arms).
I agree for the most part. However what if our leaders, duly elected without gerrymandering, eliminated free speech, free religion, rights of privacy, and rights to jury trial, etc.
Is tyranny better to live under because the majority approves of it?
You are making the assumption that they are coming for the people with the guns.
What is much more likely, is that they come for minorities. They come for the latinos, they come from the african americans, they come for first generation immigrants.
Are all these armed populace going to stand up for those minorities, or do you think that they will actually join in on helping to round them up?
Er, the assumption in this thread is that the ‘second-amendmenters’ are trying to overthrow the government, in a manner that has some prayer of succeeding (which is to say that they’re way more organized and synchronized than they’d ever be in real life).
Based on that I’m not assuming the government’s coming for anybody; more likely they just passed a law saying that it’s illegal to turn right on red and the entire country rises against them as one.
This post more illustrates the disconnect between the two sides than any I have every seen. Is your idea that only white, racist Ku Klux Klan membered rednecks are the militia described in the Second Amendment?
Of course not. Latinos, African Americans, first generation immigrants, everyone can keep and bear arms for a “Second Amendment solution.” If the specific tyranny that destroys the country is that the majority is rounding up these minorities and killing them, then these majorities may get those guns bullet first. And that majority will get them bullet first from a lot of white guys who own guns.
Who in this thread or any other said that gun ownership, resistance to tyranny, and the Second Amendment were only white guy things?
I don’t know. I’d encourage minorities to become gun owners too, just in case. And be sure to tell your Congresscritter about it.
True, I was simply responding to a single post, not about the entirety of the OP. I am talking about how things are likely to play out, unlike SamualLA’s idea that the government was going to send 150k storm troopers into the cities to fight millions of civilians.
Did you read the post I was responding to?
No. Did you make an assumption that my idea is that only white, racist Ku Klux Klan membered rednecks are the militia described in the Second Amendment?
You know what they all have in common? They are minorities. We are already using dehumanizing language to make people comfortable with rounding up “illegals”. It won’t be just, “Okay, today we are going to round up and kill all of minority X.” It will be, as is occuring right now, divisive and hateful rhetoric demonizing and dehumanizing specific “undesirables”, so that no one is willing to stand up for them against the majority.
Question, do you ever see how the right talks about Muslims? If they decided to start removing Muslims from our population, will you stand up against it?
I don’t know, you tell me, as it is you that has brought it up.
Muslims arming themselves? How’s that headline going to go down in your neck of the woods?
Can’t you see it now? Front page on Stormfront. A picture of several men in traditional Muslim garb shopping at the gun store, with the headline: “Muslim men preparing for War!”
Seriously, if Trump declared that he was going to start taking care of the “muslim problem”, would you actually defend them from violence with your own?