So, you have a second amendment to defend against tyranny. How does it work in practice?

[bilby]

Why do you think the raids are at 3am?

To improve the odds, of course.

What an informative non-response. So vague, it's almost not there at all. Would you care to elaborate, or do you not want to give a clear answer?

How many cops can you shoot in your sleep? Even in the hugely implausible event that the regime is stupid enough to let you know that your chances of survival are zero, you can't stay awake 24x7. You won't even have time to think about your gun before you are cuffed and dragged away.

So according to you, the only way a person might be able to defend in a home invasion is if the invaders give advance notice. No wonder you think it won't work.

You can tell what is 'according to me' by the fact that I wrote it, and not you. I neither said nor implied anything about 'advance notice'.

I decline your invitation to change my position to one that you can more readily dismiss.

According to me, the authorities can (and already do) act to make armed resistance ineffective against them. There is no reason to think that their targets could significantly change this fact just because the police were taking orders from a tyrannical government.

Unless you are the star of an action movie (you do know that those are works of fiction, right?)

Yes, I realize your posts are works of fiction.

What are you, five years old? If you don't want to discuss this, then don't. But drop the schoolyard banter. It doesn't help your case.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

The real world has people waking up and defending themselves. Something you say is impossible.

 

[bilby]

The real world has people waking up and defending themselves. Something you say is impossible.

I most assuredly have not said and do not say that. Please stop trying to put words in my mouth.

If you wish to highlight something I have said, you can use the quote function.

 

[Elixir]

The real world has people waking up and defending themselves. Something you say is impossible.

I most assuredly have not said and do not say that. Please stop trying to put words in my mouth.

If you wish to highlight something I have said, you can use the quote function.

People with small dicks get bent out of shape when you question their gun ownership...

 

[Bronzeage]

The real world has people waking up and defending themselves. Something you say is impossible.

What are they waking up to, and what are they defending against?

That's the problem with the "death to tyrants" fantasy. It depends on a fantastic scenario for it to be anything more than a group assisted suicide.

What is a plausible scenario? Suppose a member of the Nation of Islam is elected President. This guy is married to Louis Farrakhan's grand daughter. Is that enough?

Maybe Donald Trump declares a "state of emergency, nationalizes every state National Guard, and announces martial law. This means writ of habeas corpus is suspended. Large numbers of people cannot be found and it's suspected they are in government custody, but no one knows for sure. What's the first thing you do?

If neither of these scenarios seem to serve, please share yours with us.

 

[Opoponax]

The real world has people waking up and defending themselves. Something you say is impossible.

I most assuredly have not said and do not say that. Please stop trying to put words in my mouth

But that's what a reasonable person could think you've implied. You've hand waved every scenario thrown at you despite history being replete with examples of effective if not very bloody armed resistance by civilians both in groups and as individuals. I know the point you're trying to make, and it's well taken, but you're giving history short shrift here.

 

[RVonse]

The real world has people waking up and defending themselves. Something you say is impossible.

What are they waking up to, and what are they defending against?

That's the problem with the "death to tyrants" fantasy. It depends on a fantastic scenario for it to be anything more than a group assisted suicide.

What is a plausible scenario? Suppose a member of the Nation of Islam is elected President. This guy is married to Louis Farrakhan's grand daughter. Is that enough?

Maybe Donald Trump declares a "state of emergency, nationalizes every state National Guard, and announces martial law. This means writ of habeas corpus is suspended. Large numbers of people cannot be found and it's suspected they are in government custody, but no one knows for sure. What's the first thing you do?

Band together locally. Neighbors looking out for each other. Union members looking out for each other. Meetings in the local city hall. Find out who has the guns, who is willing to use them, and who you can and can not trust to watch your back.

If neither of these scenarios seem to serve, please share yours with us.

How about the Getto massacre I brought earlier up as portrayed in the film Schlindlers List? When the Germans came, there was no question what was happening when neighbors were being shot down in their apartments. And after hearing a few people dying of gun shots, Im pretty sure everyone was aware and out of bed. Some of the Jews survived because they were smart enough to hide inside the walls or floors. But most weren't and no one had any means to defend themselves or their neighbors.

Schindlers List was a film but it was also portrayed within historical accuracy. If you stop and look how it played out in the film it is very believable to me. And it is obvious the Germans would have encountered serious difficulty if the Jews had been prepared with guns and weapons. But they had no 2nd amendment and they lost their lives.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

The real world has people waking up and defending themselves. Something you say is impossible.

I most assuredly have not said and do not say that. Please stop trying to put words in my mouth.

If you wish to highlight something I have said, you can use the quote function.

Right here.

You won't even have time to think about your gun before you are cuffed and dragged away.

People do wake up, grab their gun, and fight back even today. Your position is they will have you before you're finished waking up. That means you are saying that what does happen is impossible.

The real world has people waking up and defending themselves. Something you say is impossible.

I most assuredly have not said and do not say that. Please stop trying to put words in my mouth.

If you wish to highlight something I have said, you can use the quote function.

People with small dicks get bent out of shape when you question their gun ownership...

If you think guns are dicks, what does that say about your desire to confiscate them?

 

[Bronzeage]

Band together locally. Neighbors looking out for each other. Union members looking out for each other. Meetings in the local city hall. Find out who has the guns, who is willing to use them, and who you can and can not trust to watch your back.

If neither of these scenarios seem to serve, please share yours with us.

How about the Getto massacre I brought earlier up as portrayed in the film Schlindlers List? When the Germans came, there was no question what was happening when neighbors were being shot down in their apartments. And after hearing a few people dying of gun shots, Im pretty sure everyone was aware and out of bed. Some of the Jews survived because they were smart enough to hide inside the walls or floors. But most weren't and no one had any means to defend themselves or their neighbors.

Schindlers List was a film but it was also portrayed within historical accuracy. If you stop and look how way it played out in the film it is very believable to me. And it is obvious the Germans would have encountered serious difficulty if the Jews had been prepared with guns and weapons. But they had no 2nd amendment and they lost their lives.

What I asked about the Ghetto was, how did it end?

All I see here is more LARPing with live ammo. What does "band together locally" mean?

The question on the table is, "How to defend against tyranny, since you have a personal firearm?"

So far, all I see is a fantasy that becomes a delusion when examined.

 

[RavenSky]

The government can't oppress the people, because the people are armed. Apparently.

So, how does it work - in detail?

When do you start shooting at representatives of the government, and who do you shoot? How does doing this lead to the removal of the tyrannical conditions against which you have taken up arms? How do you coordinate your activities?

And why haven't you started yet? If none of the events of the recent (or even the distant) past justified such a popular uprising to redress the grievances of the people against tyranny, what are the criteria by which you will recognize that it is time to act?

When the uprising begins, how do you imagine that the police, the military, and the other (armed and un-armed) members of the public people will respond, and why?

Well, sir, you are about to find out tomorrow! Alex Jones got the inside intel that liberals plan to start another civil war on the fourth of July.

I haven't received my marching orders from Soros yet, so I will most likely just go to the science museum as planned, but we can all follow the fight against RedCap aggression on Twitter! #secondcivilwarletters

or, what she said:

Well, when in the course of human events....


I think the framers of the Constitution had a very simple idea about these conditions, considering most of them had been involved in an armed rebellion to various degrees in their younger days. This is echoed throughout the document, in fact. I don't think they were actually thinking ahead to a point two centuries in the future, where the US had become a giant behemoth impossible to unseat from power by force of peasant arms. The inertia of a very old political regime, the sheer size and scale of our permanent military (which did not exist at all in 1791, the vast difference in armament between military and civilian, the shortening of the perceptive distance between people and government due to expansion of transportation technology, and the similar imbalance of economic welfare have made a good old fashioned people's rebellion seem a lot less plausible than it did at the time. Not impossible, just less plausible.

As with their rebellion, it does matter whether the major banks get on board or not, and the presence or absence of international allies. Hope and grit by themselves do not a sustainable revolution make, as our many colonial copycats over the centuries have often demonstrated.

 

[ZiprHead]

The founding fathers were pretty young and idealistic. I don't think they put a lot of thought into the future. It didn't take long before the Bill of Rights became needed. Who could have thought, in that time period, of the industrial revolution, let alone the technological revolution. Maybe it's time for a re-write.

 

[bilby]

The real world has people waking up and defending themselves. Something you say is impossible.

I most assuredly have not said and do not say that. Please stop trying to put words in my mouth

But that's what a reasonable person could think you've implied. You've hand waved every scenario thrown at you despite history being replete with examples of effective if not very bloody armed resistance by civilians both in groups and as individuals. I know the point you're trying to make, and it's well taken, but you're giving history short shrift here.

Not at all. History is full of tyrannical regimes. None has ever been defeated by armed civilians.

And many have been awash with weapons. Dissidents may not have been lawfully armed, but guns don't work any better when they are permitted. It doesn't make any difference to tbe regime; Keeping power is more about psychology than it is about confrontation.

Indeed tyrannical regimes avoid direct confrontation except on their own terms.

 

[bilby]

Band together locally. Neighbors looking out for each other. Union members looking out for each other. Meetings in the local city hall. Find out who has the guns, who is willing to use them, and who you can and can not trust to watch your back.

If neither of these scenarios seem to serve, please share yours with us.

How about the Getto massacre I brought earlier up as portrayed in the film Schlindlers List? When the Germans came, there was no question what was happening when neighbors were being shot down in their apartments. And after hearing a few people dying of gun shots, Im pretty sure everyone was aware and out of bed. Some of the Jews survived because they were smart enough to hide inside the walls or floors. But most weren't and no one had any means to defend themselves or their neighbors.

Schindlers List was a film but it was also portrayed within historical accuracy. If you stop and look how it played out in the film it is very believable to me. And it is obvious the Germans would have encountered serious difficulty if the Jews had been prepared with guns and weapons. But they had no 2nd amendment and they lost their lives.

Do you seriously think that the number and effectiveness of the weapons available in the Warsaw ghetto would have been greater if pre-War Poland had had a right to bear arms?

The Poles were armed to the teeth in 1939, and the Polish resistance were supplied with weapons and ammunition by the British after the Germans occupied the country. It made no difference at all.

 

[bilby]

People do wake up, grab their gun, and fight back even today.

They do. But not with a frequency that makes the authorities hesitant to raid their homes and arrest them.

Indeed, police tactics are to go in hard and fast. People wake up and sefend themselves against house-breakers who are trying for stealth. Not against police raids.

Your position is they will have you before you're finished waking up.

Yes, because that's how the VAST majority of police raids play out.

That means you are saying that what does happen is impossible.

No, it doesn't. It's very unlikely and unusual, and you are pretending it's the norm.

A pice raid bears as little resemblance to a burglary as an army bears to a bunch of gun nuts with delusions of adequacy.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But the political dissident, he goes down fighting and dies. You think he just lost because the neighborhood didn't instantly become a militia and defend him. He didn't lose. He make the cops work for their catch. He was going to die anyway. You think that if he didn't take on the entire government and win that therefore he lost. He didn't lose. He maybe even took one or two of the cops down with him. The next night they do a different 3AM raid, with one or two less cops. The cops know they are vastly outnumbered and the only reason they are safe is that in current time the general population is NOT at war with the cops and is generally law abiding.

Militaries are for fighting wars. They don't work against insurgencies.

Not only that, but if said dissident has others who feel like he does who are in the area they very well might gang up on those cops.

For an example of this in action, observe the antics of Ted Bundy here in Nevada. He's got enough fellow believers that the cops haven't been willing to really take him on for 20 years now.

 

[Max Rockatansky]

The founding fathers were pretty young and idealistic. I don't think they put a lot of thought into the future. It didn't take long before the Bill of Rights became needed. Who could have thought, in that time period, of the industrial revolution, let alone the technological revolution. Maybe it's time for a re-write.

Disagreed. It's not like they all got drunk and decided to fight the Redcoats and make a new country. Look at the time like. It took decades and a shitload of compromises. Most historians know the seeds of the Civil War were written into the Constitution, but if it wasn't, there's be no US Constitution. Just an updated Articles of Confederation which had its own flaws too.

 

[Patooka]

Disagreed. It's not like they all got drunk and decided to fight the Redcoats and make a new country.

In some cases that was precisely how battalions of the continental army were formed.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHLHT-nbqHQ[/youtube]

All these arguments that a heavily armed civilian populace is necessary to overthrow tyanny are suspiciously profligate in their usage of the word "if". How well informed a civilian population is infinately more important and necessary to counter a tyrannical regime than the amount of shooters one has in their backyard shed. There was no Battle of the Bastards that ended apartheid. No Avengers Assemble moment for the suffragette movement. Armed uprisings don't usually end like it did in Return of the Jedi. They generally end like Waco, Texas. If you want a less dramatic example, Cliven Bundys standoff was successful because of Tea Party endorsement and right wing media support. Guns did fuck all to facilitate the outcome.

 

[barbos]

They do. But not with a frequency that makes the authorities hesitant to raid their homes and arrest them.

Indeed, police tactics are to go in hard and fast. People wake up and sefend themselves against house-breakers who are trying for stealth. Not against police raids.Yes, because that's how the VAST majority of police raids play out.

It does not prevent resistance from resorting to terror tactics, where they kill police when they go to the bar to have a beer.

 

[bilby]

They do. But not with a frequency that makes the authorities hesitant to raid their homes and arrest them.

Indeed, police tactics are to go in hard and fast. People wake up and sefend themselves against house-breakers who are trying for stealth. Not against police raids.Yes, because that's how the VAST majority of police raids play out.

It does not prevent resistance from resorting to terror tactics, where they kill police when they go to the bar to have a beer.

That's true. And takes us back to the OP; When do the gun owners start taking such actions? What inspires them to do it, in such numbers and in such a coordinated way as to have an effect, and what effect does it have?

If it's just a handful of people, they will get stamped on pretty quickly - just like any other murderer does today.

Even a fairly large resistance movement cannot overthrow a tyranny. The French resistance in WWII were very well armed, and were a big nuisance to the occupying forces. But they were never going to last long without outside help in organisation and resupply; And they were never going to overthrow the occupying Germans, despite very widespread support amongst the people, and a language barrier that made it very difficult for tbe Germans to infiltrate.

A home-grown tyranny vs a resistance witout the logistical and intelligence support of the government in exile and the British government would have been even less effective.

 

[Politesse]

The founding fathers were pretty young and idealistic. I don't think they put a lot of thought into the future. It didn't take long before the Bill of Rights became needed. Who could have thought, in that time period, of the industrial revolution, let alone the technological revolution. Maybe it's time for a re-write.

I'm not sure I agree with this line of reasoning; by the time the Constitution was being ratified, most of the original revolutionaries were getting well into middle age by the standards of the day, many with adult children. Idealistic, though, they definitely were, and had an (in my opinion) undue belief in the power of human nature to incline us toward a balanced and fair society.