Well, aside from your statement being unsubstantiated paranoid nonsense I have to agree with the last several posters.
I hate to break this to you but you already have to “shut up and do what you are told” WRT the government. Society cannot function unless the government has the ability to make and enforce laws. Otherwise, why would anyone pay taxes, or obey the law? What protects your freedom is that our government has a number of checks and balances that includes significant input from the people. I realize that it’s a bit more nuanced and not as sexy as everyone walking around strapped with an AK. But it has managed to work ok for the past 230+ years.
Owning a firearm only allows you to not have to depend on the government or local law enforcement for personal protection. I believe that is a valid reason to own one. But there is no reason to make it mandatory. And when you consider that most trained law enforcement officers rarely have to draw their weapon in the line of duty, it’s a bit excessive.
In fact, I find your entire OP a bit ironic and hypocritical. You say you are against the government telling you to “shut up and do what you are told” and yet your hypothetical government:
-requires people to own deadly weapons whether they want to or not
-forces total military conscription
-punishes its citizens with Draconian laws, including death
-enforces a national gun registry
I think such a society would be unnecessarily militaristic and potentially dangerous. It indulges in a particular right-wing fantasy where might makes right and the gun is your defense against an oppressive Government taking away your Freedom to hate minorities, impose your religeous beliefs on everyone else and generally be ignorant. Essentially it feeds into a cultural mindset of “I don’t need to engage in intelligent debate with you. I have a deadly weapon and can do whatever the heck I want.”
Der Trihs, wmfellows and msmith537, I’ve tried to explain myself and you’re obviously seeing what you want to see. If you don’t even comprehend the point I’m trying to make (and no, it is not “let’s become a fascist dictatorship”, then someone else will have to answer you.
Actually, you have not explained yourself. You made some rather peculiar, paranoid assertions with little in the way of logical support. Now, Der Trihs is fairly hard left, I am rather a centre right free market Tory sort, and I think mssmith is a centre right republican, free market, smallish government sort.
I would suggest that as all three of us are all seeing similar problems in your bizarre proposition, given our rather different perspectives, your problem isn’t that we are bloody seeing what we “want” to see, but your idea is got some real bleeding problems, eh?
The point you are trying to make seems to be that you’re unduly paranoid about the US lapsing into some kind of popular / populist military dictatorship backed by the army, a la Sulla (if you are citing Sulla that is what you should mean). Msmith rather correctly pointed out that your solution would actually be the bloody problem.
Er, no. Megacorps are constantly demanding federal regulatory preemption because it’s easier to buy one government than to buy fifty governments. They certainly don’t want government to shrink overall; the whole point is to have enough government red taps so that it kills new competition while representing a trivial rounding error in their own cost of doing business.
I would say it’s less a matter of wanting to control than wanting to not be interfered with while at the same time desiring the protections that government affords. If they are for states rights it is because they don’t want people from California or South Carolina telling them how they should do business in New Jersey.
More a matter of them not wanting the federal government to stop them from doing as they please, to whomever they please under the auspices of their pet state government.