"The point is not that you can win pitched battles against a professional army with all its ordinance as a ragtag citizens’ militia with small arms. The point is that you can fight. You can bleed them. When they come patrolling through your neighborhood, you may be able to take a couple of the fuckers with you. You might even be able to run away and do it again. Theoretically, you wouldn’t be alone and they couldn’t engage in endless “manhunts” for everyone who resisted them. And they’d never feel safe; there could be a shooter behind any window. Of course, they could call in artillery and air support and level your neighborhood; sure. What would this get them? It would anger a lot of people when innocents died and play right into the hands of the rebels. It would also make a lot of the soldiers in that professional military seriously consider whether they were doing the right thing. Finally, it would simply kill people. No one wants to rule a nation of corpses.

The aim of a tyrant is to control, not to kill. What they want is to be able to have militarized police/gestapo point guns at people and cow them into submission to whatever dictates they might want to impose. If those people are instead waiting behind their doors and ready to shoot first when the jackbooted thugs come around, they’ve already failed. So the point is to fight. If you resist, you’re not being controlled, and you’re also undermining attempts to control others who can’t or won’t fight. You might die, of course. That’s why Patrick Henry said what he famously said, more or less. As long as people can resist, they can be free, and tyrants can never succeed. But when you’re talking about using swords and knives and clubs against modem military weapons, it actually becomes pointless, because you can’t bleed them at all. They’ll just shoot you with beanbags and rubber and water cannons and microwave guns. That’s why having guns is so important."

Not sure if this was your point, but your first paragraph is an accurate depiction of the War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan (and I'm sure plenty of other war-torn countries in the region). Despite the USA having military supremacy in nearly every way, there will probably be no end to the bloodshed for decades to come.

This is not how you win lasting change. This is how you turn your country into hell. One person should never have the power to do this; they should have to be able to win the hearts and minds of others to impose their will on the world. Movement in this direction is always preferable.

Edit: When you’re using insurgent violence to try to force the world around you to change into what you desire, in which sense are you not just as much of a tyrant?

The comment above is talking about a last resort defense against the country going full on brutal totalitarianism.

Not saying I agree with it, but it doesn't sound like you were responding to that.

There's an article with a similar issue to this that just hit the front page, and it mentions the "paradox of tolerance" or "Popper's Paradox". Namely, if you are tolerant of intolerance, the intolerance will win out and the tolerance will disappear. If you give excessive freedom to propagate tyranny, tyranny will take over, thereby destroying all freedom. For this reason, force is sometimes necessary to stop force. Or, to use the colloquialism, fight fire with fire. Fight firepower with firepower.

Tanks, missiles, and nuclear weapons are utterly useless in a guerilla war.

To be blunt: you don't know what you're talking about.

Edit: If, as you claim, rifles serve no function in modern warfare, please explain why every military organization in the world continues to issue them.

> The idea you could fight the government with privately owned weapons is completely laughable...

You could fight a single knucklehead who thinks a badge means he can get away with theft, rape, or murder.

Or you could fight for a system that never gives him that badge in the first place.

Guns solve short term problems. They don’t overturn tyranny. Arguments, beliefs, and convictions do that.

I think taking away the freedom of defense at the individual level is a long term problem.

I don't think we can prevent all violence beforehand. And I don't think we can prosecute all violence without creating some sort of police or surveillance state.

Given there will (should) be gaps in how violence is policed, we need to give upstanding citizens the ability to handle those gaps in justice in their own way. I'd rather people left the scene, handed over their wallet, recorded and published the incident, etc.

But as another commenter implied by bringing up Mexico, the "let the police handle it" is a bit of a privileged attitude. That isn't a trustworthy option for every American and it hasn't been a trustworthy option throughout American history.

> They don’t overturn tyranny. Arguments, beliefs, and convictions do that.

Try that against the Mexican drug cartels and see how that goes

The Mexican drug cartels wouldn’t exist if we’d have established a system that doesn’t give them financial incentives to. These problems are fundamentally always an issue of the underlying social systems that bring them into being. You cannot shoot them away.

I'm not concerned about what brought the cartels to existence, the question applies to any enemy force, replace "Mexican Cartels" with "Nazis" if you wish

Explain to me how you're supposed to deal with Nazis, or other invading armed force using "Arguments, beliefs, and convictions"

Or for that matter, explain how a 60 year, without the money to relocate, old in a suburb filled with crime and essentially abandoned by the police is going to defend himself against pickpockets and robbers.

"The police should ...."

Yeah, but the police hasn't, for decades. During those decades the government has constantly moved to further defund the police, not the opposite. So sorry, no.

And yeah, I get it, for the rich in central cities who can isolate themselves on a whim and move houses when they want to, guns are a serious nuisance.

For the poor in a weak position, the fact that 1/10 of the victims are armed with guns is the one thing that defends them. And you personally don't have to participate.

dunno, illiterate poppy farmers in Afghanistan are doing pretty good with old Kalishnakovs

Because it’s not the Kalishnakovs doing the work here; it’s the beliefs and convictions of the people holding them and the sway that those beliefs have on the people around them.

Wonder how long the drone thing will still be an advantage? Give it a few decades, and military type robots could become a common thing for hobbyists to own, especially in a place like the US where almost anything seems to go as far as private ownership is concerned. Or they could end up getting hacked.

You could theoretically build something like this pretty easily... ISIS is already building their own drones; only makes sense they will at some point arm those drones.

They already have

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43qbbw/russia-say...

Thankfully, not very effectively.

To me the most powerful balance of this era is represented by apps like http://buycott.com - consumer activism, being smart about where you spend your money. The potential is huge although awareness and probably cynicism mean it hasn't yet become mainstream.

I don't think we can robustly rely on the whims and trends of consumer groups to safeguard our societies.

This is what public policy, laws, and regulations are supposed to do.

Although I suppose the problem there is that politicians and government offices don't generally seem to be properly incentivized and empowered to solve these long term issues...

Heey that's what King George of England thought. It's actually a good description of much of the revolutionary war: "As the British retraced their 16-mile journey, their lines were constantly beset by Patriot marksmen firing at them Indian-style from behind trees, rocks, and stone walls. At Lexington, Captain Parker’s militia had its revenge, killing several British soldiers as the Red Coats hastily marched through his town. By the time the British finally reached the safety of Boston, nearly 300 British soldiers had been killed, wounded, or were missing in action. The Patriots suffered fewer than 100 casualties." "The American Revolution Begins", History.com, 19 April 2009. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-american-revo.... Another example is found in Morgan's Riflemen, who famously used guerrilla tactics to disrupt supply lines and pick off British targets. If you want a newer example, see the Vietnam War. With relatively little backing, a relatively small force of Viet Cong fought the US to a standstill. I would postulate that this is due to a relatively simple fact: the surface area for an enemy to assault is directly grows exponentially as a function of the size. Don't believe this? Hear me out. As a guerilla force, I would be fairly independent. I can replace leaders with minimal interruption, march on my stomach rather than dealing with complicated supply lines, have little bureaucratic infrastructure, and am not bound by the rules of a nation (those of warfare and others). As a country, however, I have many more difficulties. Not only do I have the above issues, but I also have to navigate complicated foreign policy. What if the guerrillas gain the support of a foreign power (e.g. the US during Revolutionary War from France; Viet Cong from China and Russia during Vietnam War)? How to I keep from indirectly attacking one of their allies? The Korean War is an example of this: fought to a standstill with an eventual "resolution" of splitting the territory. This is for a simple reason: US-Soviet tensions meant neither side wanted to use a nuclear option, literally or metaphorically, because they feared excessively provoking the other side.

In conclusion, guerrillas are bound by none of these rules. This means that yes, a small force with weapons can defeat that of a government, even if greatly outnumbered. Our country's founders, having just taken advantage of this fact, wanted to protect it just in case a tyrant took over. Jefferson tells us that "when a government becomes destructive of these ends [securing the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it". The second amendment prefaces the right to bear arms with the statement, "...being necessary to the security of a free State...". This is important: FREE state. A tyrant has no such need, and this is for good reason: a militia is composed of citizens, not enlisted military. This means it is under much less direct control of the government. This security is against a tyrant just as much as a foreign body. This security is to secure the "free" part of that statement, not just a nation's borders and foreign policy. This security is to secure our freedom.