Hell, even Marx advocated widespread gun ownership as an implicit reminder for those in power that they had to be accountable for their actions.

How so?

So clearly, the rational thing is to fix the police first, come after the guns second, no?

The whole goal, if I would understand it correctly, would be to reduce the total amount of violence and death. In any case, recommending violence as a response to other violence only makes the situation worse.

Edit: This post was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I had no idea it was such a hot-button issue.

1. You only need guns good enough to take over an armory.

2. There are tens of millions of armed veterans in the U.S, and most (if not all) active solders would side with The People.

3. Every rebel group in history has had lesser weapons at first (see: Rome's Servile Wars, American revolution, Cuban revolution, Afghanistan, Iraq, ISIS, Syria, etc).

4. Some portion of the military would join the civilians, and bring their military toys along for the fight.

Anyway, I think a revolution is a separate topic, but I could be wrong. There are many steps between government overreach & the people starting a revolution.

Edit: The quote by Patton comes to mind: "Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory."

I don't understand why opponents of the 2nd Amendment never consider this a possibility, when in fact the military not splintering under those conditions is the fantasy.

I was just pointing out that opponents of the interpretation of the 2nd Amendment being a counterweight to an oppressive government almost always say, "you can't fight the army with rifles!"

That argument is coming up a lot in this thread.

Sure, going toe-to-toe with an attack helicopter with only a handgun is a losing proposition, but that's not the only way to do it.

You mean the ones that the US and Pakistan were arming, including with weapons optimized to counter the main heavy weapons used against them (particularly Stinger missiles to counter Russian attack helicopters)?

> and the North Vietnamese who kicked out the Americans.

The North Vietnamese were not only massively supplied by outside powers, but both China (before their falling out with the USSR) and the Soviet Union directly intervened in Vietnam -- as, to a lesser extent, did North Korea.

There are stories from American soldiers where they were confiscating WW2 bolt-action firearms from the NLF right up until the late 1960s.

Algeria is another great example where they kicked the French out of Algeria but had very little backing from a major superpower.

The point is that simple firearms can inflict a lot of damage on a highly sophisticated army.

No, North Vietnam received military assistance from China and the Soviet Union not just "later on in the war" -- in fact, that assistance began with direct aid to the Viet Minh in the First Indochina War against france, and continued through uninterrupted (except that, "later in the war" China withdrew both its aid and direct involvement, after its own falling out with the USSR and Hanoi's refusal to break with the USSR and align with China) through -- and beyond -- the end of the war with the US.

> but the NLF had access to very little of that weaponry.

Which would be relevant if the NLF, on its own, pushed the US out of Vietnam.

Which would be relevant if the NLF, on its own, pushed the US out of Vietnam.

Considering most of the fighting was in the South against NLF units, I'd say they played a big part in pushing the US out of Vietnam. Think about what happened during the Tet Offensive. It wasn't the NVA carry most of the brunt.

And you'll still be wrong. The Viet Minh and later North Vietnam received substantial military assistance, both in terms of materiel and direct support, from China from 1950 through 1968, and from the Soviet Union from 1950 through the end of the war.

> Considering most of the fighting was in the South against NLF units

Most of the fighting prior to Tet was in the South against NLF units; this failed to push the US out. After Tet (which was a major joint NLF / PAVN offensive), the NLF was no longer, as I understand, effective independently, and most fighting in the south was against PAVN or combined PAVN/NLF forces.

> Think about what happened during the Tet Offensive. It wasn't the NVA carry most of the brunt.

Tet was notable, in part, because it did involve major PAVN involvement, and, in part, because the NLF was rendered largely ineffective as a separate force because of the heavy toll it took in that offensive and the immediate aftermath.

It demonstrates rather the opposite of your point.

The fact NLF units were using antiquated weapons even until the late 60's would suggest the assistance they were getting wasn't widely available.

The fact that the NLF almost disappeared entirely would suggest they did most of the fighting during the Tet offensive. Was the NVA involved? Sure.

There was considerable concern over whether and where to those systems might travel / be traded / be sold.

But it marked a turning point in the conflict.

Yea, I guess we can keep lying to ourselves that we won the Vietnam 'conflict'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#Pro-Hanoi

A: "I have this gun I"ll sell for $400." B: "I will buy it from you." A: "Ok. Let's meet at the police station parking lot. What time is good for you?" B: "How about 5:30?" A: "Ok, see you there."

Most states require you to show firearms purchaser IDs, called FID in my home state as well as a drivers license.

To acquire a FID, you need to go through a background check. This is how you are meant to know if the person is "safe to sell to".

If people in state X have a problem with that, then they should get together and find a solution to it.

Until then I don't think I can justify to myself censoring an otherwise completely legal discussion, especially when such a discussion can be used as a record of a sale that would otherwise not be present.

That's just my two cents.

Minor point, but there aren't that many states that have firearm purchaser IDs. NY, NJ, MA, IL are a few, but most states don't require anything more than a driver's license.

Facebook complies with request by US Government to ban certain types of perfectly legal speech

Doesn't sound quite so nice.

selling is not speaking.

"Advertising is indeed protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution."[1]

[1]http://www.lawpublish.com/amend1.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_show_loophole

I understand owning guns. I don't understand taking libertarian ideals go the length of owning untraceable guns that can be sold to a random person with no oversight.

On the other side, there have been several attempts to open up access to the national background check system to private sellers, but every time it gets blocked by the left, as voluntary background checks are largely seen as an ineffective half measure.

As noted in the other response, the historical reason is that private gun-ownership (usually in relation to a local militia of some sort) is the only protection against a tyrannical government. In the era of the Revolutionary War, that was certainly true.

I don't happen to believe that is true any more, and that the 2nd amendment is an anachronism. But, I'm in a minority (where the majority in the US seems to prefer limited gun ownership - more so than what we have now, but not complete bans and confiscations, as Australia saw recently).

I found yesterday that full automatic assault rifles are not legal in the US but that's the first shit any idiot brings up here when they want to paint Americans as "crazy".

Don't get more wrong, as things progress in Europe, we're eventually going to need those "crazy" American weapons.

That's incorrect, they are legal federally, but some states have made them illegal.

In order to purchase an automatic weapon, you need to submit a form to the FBI, provide fingerprints, have your local police chief sign-off (or create an LLC) and pay a $200 tax.

It's a very thorough background check.

Not many people buy them since the cheapest weapons cost $10,000 and go up to $50,000. This is due to the limited supply since civilians can only buy automatic weapons that were built before 1986.

It is about $500-$1000 USD per year. You need a secure place to hold your arms, keep extremely well maintained records of anything you buy, and if you stop paying your SOT any post-86 things you have manufactured must be destroyed.

If think you might also have to file a form 1 for everything you manufacture and that takes 1-5 months even stretching out to a year in some cases.

This also comes with a round of your prints being sent to the FBI, ATF, and I'm assuming a bunch of other three letter acronyms that you don't ever want to meet.

But, if you can do that, get a drill press, and make friends at your local PD you can make some good money on the side by building post-86 dealer samples and handling transfers for your local PD.

Believe it or not, but by my current understanding factories cannot ship guns directly to police offices, they must still be handled through an FFL.

I happen to disagree that owning an handgun (or even a semi-automatic rifle) will actually be very influential in the event of a dictatorial takeover, but I can understand the logic.

So not even having guns there, a gun culture would have likely saved lives.

(this is based on an account of an elderly man who was in the concentration camps and later came to learn about guns as part of his vow of "never again". There is an organization based on this principle called "Jews for the preservation of firearms ownership.")

It can't hurt.

Facebook already suppresses anything firearm related. They suppress the visibility of gun-related pages (such as how many followers of a hunting page see what was shared on it in their newsfeed) and at the same time bans the paid promotion of posts.

You might not care, or in fact be pleased by this knowledge, but as com2kid pointed out above, what else are they suppressing we don't already know about?

Regardless of your gun politics, one web site operated by a self-interested third party is never completely trustworthy as a public forum. I wish more non-tech people would understand this.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinker...

People just expect that since they don't see it happen, that it does not.

Imagine that someone wanted to share information which was detrimental to a social media corporation, and he/she published it on that same corporation's social media platform. (This could be an investigative report exposing some unsavory practice, or merely promotion of a competitor's product.) Completely suppressing the story would be counterproductive for the corporation (Streisand Effect), but they would certainly pull various levers to limit the story's exposure on their site, insofar as they expected such intervention to go unnoticed.

This problem is solved by things like federated social networking, where everyone's updates are published by independently controlled sites. You (as a content consumer) would subscribe directly to these sources, and you'd directly control the algorithms that determine which stories float to the top of your news feed, or some user-friendlier version of same.

Otherwise if they got it wrong and broke some local firearms laws they might end up sued.

Instagram is another big services that hosts an extremely large gun culture.