But you're going to anyway, right?

Do you have any sources on your first claim?

I'm not your personal reference librarian, but you might start with a few of the more reader-friendly popular accounts and see where your interests take you. Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago is worthwhile; also Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free, and perhaps Ma Bo's Blood Red Sunset. The idea behind recommending these particular books is that they helped me move past the special pleading fallacy that is American exceptionalism ("It can't happen here.")

Hopefully others can point you toward some similar books on the Armenian, Cambodian, Rwandan, and other 20th century genocides, as I'm not as familiar with them.

All told, you'd have to cite about 100,000,000 civilian gun deaths to catch up with the records set by modern governments who weren't as afraid of their citizens as they should have been. It's going to take a lot of Columbines and Sandy Hooks to rack up that kind of score.

Would you have Hillary be against gun control, offering the majority of people that favour it no major candidate reflecting their beliefs?

Yes. It's not as if removing gun control from the Democratic platform would send those voters into the arms of the Republicans.

Yep, the thing that's going to scare the United States government out of killing its citizens is them armed with arsenals of M-16's against their… F-22s, B-52s, carrier groups, and tanks.

My goodness, this is an absolutely absurd argument, made more absurd by the lack of realization of how absurd it is. That it keeps being harped on by gun control opponents does their argument no favors. The government will not be afraid of guns should they come after their citizenry. The police literally have tanks. The only thing guns do is make one less afraid of one's government if one fails to comprehend the absolutely beastly military power that it can bring to bear against one were it to decide to do so.

In fact, the only thing protecting one from the government deciding to crush one with a single well-placed smart bomb is… Well, it turns out it's permeating the culture with “It can't happen here”, to the point where the military itself believes that such a thing happening here would be utterly unacceptable. Only when the system itself culturally considers it verboten is there any hope of the immense military might the government possesses not being turned against its citizens. Barring that, the guns will be a fun thing for the military to play with after a sniper takes a rebel's head off.

Your assertion (in this particular comment, not the original one) is, gun rights will deter the government from attacking its citizens. To support that, citing books that show the government attacking its citizens is insufficient. Present a book that shows that a government was prevented from attacking its citizens because they were armed. Then perhaps the posited argument can be considered more than a delectable fiction to make one feel in control.

(Gun control, by the way, is tangential to the question of how absurd this particular argument is. Maybe it's a good idea, maybe it's a bad idea, but it's certainly not a bad idea because the government is afraid of folks with guns.)

It's hard to fight a guerilla war with tanks, carriers and stealth bombers. Some of those folks will probably outlast the US government at the rate we're going.

Present a book that shows that a government was prevented from attacking its citizens because they were armed.

This is like claiming that the Y2K bug would have been no big deal if we hadn't spent millions of dollars preventing it from popping up, or that polio would have gone away on its own if Jonas Salk had slacked off. It's a bit of an unfair demand.

Well, it turns out it's permeating the culture with “It can't happen here”, to the point where the military itself believes that such a thing happening here would be utterly unacceptable

Before digging into Mayer and Solzhenitsyn, try some Zimbardo and Milgram. Their work was flawed but also very revealing. (Spoiler: if someone refuses to commit an atrocity for you, all you have to do is ask the next guy in line.)

As for the Y2K/polio analogy... I'm not really following, to be honest. You make an extraordinary assertion ("guns prevent governments from waging war on their people") that's arguably provably false (Colombia should be example enough that an armed and organized force is hardly sufficient to prevent the government's continued attack---at best it ensures a split nation and years of warfare and strife). You present readings that show governments have waged war on an unarmed citizenry as proof that they won't wage war on an armed citizenry, but that's not proof---it's just not disproof. You can say that it's impossible to prove it (because it's a negative), but then all you can do is disprove it (which I'd say the world has already done).

Even the American Revolution was basically a proxy war between England and the continental powers, for that matter. But when the dust settled, you didn't see the French moving in to claim their just rewards. As the apocryphal quote credited to Yamamoto goes, "There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass." We were then, as we are now, more trouble to mess with than we're worth.

That's the kind of relationship that many American citizens like to maintain with their own government. I don't see that as a bad thing.

We may hold different values but we can learn from their longevity and resistance.

"A January 2010 report published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime revealed that bribery consumed an amount equal to 23% of the GDP of the nation."

What's wrong indeed.

However, the Afghan example does effectively rebut shadowfiend's specific point about guerilla warfare being ineffective against a superpower. They call Afghanistan the "Grave of Empires" for a reason, and it's not because they have a really awesome regular army.

Now, in defense of shadowfiend, it's easy to show that he or she is wrong historically, but I suspect that technological development is beginning to favor state power. Guns or no guns, to be an effective guerilla you have to be able to blend in. But you can't really hide anymore... not in the jungles, not in caves, not in the streets and alleys and suburbs and slums, and not in cyberspace. I guess that's sorta our fault.

Do not underestimate guerrilla warfare. There are many examples in history when a small, armed group managed to resist huge regular armies for years, decades or even achieve victory. See Afghanistan for example: two biggest military powers on the entire planet (USSR, NATO) failed there. Bombers and tanks won't be very useful against small, mobile groups of fighters, especially in urban environment, unless you are going to raze everything to the ground (like Chechnya or Aleppo).

The large power needs to eradicate the guerilla (preferably without too much collateral damage in the population the guerilla is hiding in, as that would -in addition to be plain wrong - increase recruitment to said guerilla.).

The guerilla simply needs to not be eradicated. As long as it exists in any meaningful sense, it will tie up vast resources for the adversary.

Or, phrased simply - the large power needs to win to win. The guerilla needs to not lose to win.

That's a red-herring though because it doesn't describe an ethnic cleansing.

In an ethnic cleansing police move house to house, dragging the unwanted people into the street. In that scenario, small arms are effective in slowing or stopping the problem, at least long enough to receive foreign aid, etc.

> The only thing guns do is make one less afraid of one's government if one fails to comprehend the absolutely beastly military power that it can bring to bear against one were it to decide to do so.

They probably won't be bombing many cities because they see themselves as ruling that area. (Even in Syria, the dictator isn't using building-levelling bombs very much because he wants to take the city back.)

The situation for those in Aleppo is horrible but if they weren't fighting back they'd all be dead in a ditch already.

> Gun control, by the way, is tangential to the question of how absurd this particular argument is. Maybe it's a good idea, maybe it's a bad idea, but it's certainly not a bad idea because the government is afraid of folks with guns.

No, that's not what history shows. Gun control (a lack thereof) wouldn't have changed the course of our wars, but would have changed the genocides. Scapegoats are only valuable if they're weak.