(Modern day America has an entire manual to strip citizenship from people, don’t believe you’re like a native just because you got a piece of paper and a flag, the beast might turn against you)

And it works! That's because (in recent decades) the political reality in Western Europe has been basically in favour of democracy in freedom -- and so they limited basic rights only in corner cases like Holocaust denial. Constitutional texts can help people focus on what is needed for democracy and freedom (and US the Bill of Rights does a good job of this), but what really counts is how people live out the text, rather than the mechanics explicit in the text.

"All political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. The communist party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party." -- Mao Zedong

The current attitude stems from a desire for civility and public safety. Why would that scare you?

>The right to bear arms is a basic civil right, unambiguously encoded in the Bill of Rights alongside speech, assembly, religion, due process, etc.

It's not unambiguously encoded. If it were, there would not be entire debates over the meaning of the punctuation. People are unambiguous in their interpretations because of political ideology.

>Throughout history, taking away weapons has always been an early step down the slippery slope to totalitarianism and stripping the populous of their other rights.

Yes, but regulation is not confiscation, and the commonly held assumption on the part of many gun owners that the former inevitably leads to the latter (or is merely a knowing pretense towards the latter) is an uncharitable interpretation of the opposing point of view. Americans maintain the right to keep and bear arms even if that right doesn't extend to all possible arms under all possible circumstances.

"All political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. The communist party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party." -- Mao Zedong"

The anti gun-control argument is, ironically, also that all political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, but that power is liberty when the guns are pointed at the state and tyranny when the guns are pointed by the state. And yet anyone who simply doesn't want themselves or their children getting shot by psychopaths are considered unreasonable, because it's also liberty by proxy when those guns are pointed by the people at the people, and Americans are expected not only to tolerate and accept it, but be wary to question it.

Is it not possible that there is a reasonable middle ground between the NRA and Stalinist gulags?

Regardless of the specific topic, lots of terrible things have been done "with the best of intentions". It's hardly a reason not to be scared.

Are you referring to gun control or the 2nd Amendment, here?

It's a reason to be scared, if you're paranoid and believe the only thing keeping your government from killing you is the fear of your gun barrel against its heads. But I don't believe such a fear is reasonable, or worthy of the weight it seems to be given in American political discourse.

Now sure, there's the possibility that factions in the military would turn against this tyrannical government and save the day, but you don't need the 2nd Amendment for that to work out.

And us citizens have more weapons than the taliban; longer harder to protect borders than Afghanistan; and a population that would be sympathetic to the cause. I wouldn’t be so sure the us military would win.

According to current military doctrine[0], counterinsurgency requires a minimum of 1 counterinsurgent per 50 people in the population. If you assume ALL us military personnel can serve in combat simultaneously (ie: no troops required for supply lines, paperwork, management, etc), and you included all police forces in the US, you would only get to 1 per 100.

So you say they would "win so laughably easily".. but according to the military itself, it does not have enough troops to handle an insurgency in the US.

0. As written in the Army and Marine Corps field manual (and this doctrine was based on research of past (us and non-us) conflicts)

History shows us that typically, soldiers will fight for whoever guarantees their pay.

Combined with this;

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

it shows that money, orders and chain of command are powerful motivators.

These are normal, good people who signed up to protect us.

I wouldn't put that number anywhere near 99%. Probably closer to 50%. Maybe even lower.

I'm sure the people in any given totalitarian regime once thought the same way about their armed forces.

I think a complete government meltdown is often used as the defense for gun ownership, but given how our government is structured (more control given to states and local communities while trying to balance it with centralized power in the federal government), guns can help keep order when in the hands of citizens.

Of course, like the constant balance of local and centralized government, we will forever need to balance the rights of individuals vs. the safety of the collective.

It's true that a citizen or even a group of citizens is no match for the military. But the difference is between citizens being able to try defending themselves, and being completely defenseless.

It is the difference between soldiers being ordered to fire their own citizens, and the citizens being defenseless. It is the difference between individuals who swore to defend their countrymen having to reconcile killing them in battle. It is the difference between a confidence that you can do something and a feeling that you can be easily intimidated.

China, Russia, Iraq, Germany, in all of these places the general population was disarmed as one of the first steps towards totalitarianism. It is not a coincidence.

And yet the US has one of the highest homicide rates for developed countries in the world, while sporting the highest (by far) firearm per capita in the world.

So something with that nice argument you, and others, have is not working.

I doubt it. The US failed in Vietnam and has been struggling in Afghanistan since 2001. Tanks and planes do not win wars. Small arms do.

EDIT: Dystopian follow-on thought. I wonder if this paradigm changes as drones improve? Would civilians have any defense? Perhaps history just repeats itself.

this is why it's tough (for me) to listen to the courts say "that doesn't mean a right to carry any weapon at any time for any reason".

a decent resistance will need drones.

fortunately they're cheap

Here's the Oath of Enlistment with a few points of emphasis:

I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."

no. it's not about overthrow. it's about meaningful #resistance in the face of braindead authoritarian pepperspray cops without the spine to think for themselves.

gun owners aren't at the range practicing political science, and international business, and and learning to be lawyers (though some probably are)...

they're protecting their inalienable right to resist authoritarians

One thing I don't get is that those who are anti-gun don't seem to have much faith in the government to begin with, what makes them think that they won't continue to take away rights as soon as the public is disarmed, given that it has happened time and time again all over the world.

We should not need to rely on the morals of the military.

Only in retrospect: if you look at non-ephemeral totalitarian regimes, they don't typically allow dissenters to freely control effective weapons... but if you start from the other direction and examine states which do not allow their populace to freely control effective weapons, your examination pool is most of the states in the world, most of which are not (typically considered) totalitarian.

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

This tweet claims to describe the roots, early debate, and context of 2nd amendment's inclusion in the constitution. I found it interesting.

https://twitter.com/egavactip/status/967923256983420928

I wonder what bias author Mark Pitcavage brings to the discussion. According to twitter profile he is connected to https://www.adl.org/who-we-are which claims to be some kind of anti-semitism group. (Which I have never heard of before)

Perhaps you're thinking of some other organization with the same name?

Anyway, the core point of my comment was that I liked getting some background on the drivers that led to the 2nd amendment.

You realize that is describing the polar opposite of an anti-Semitism group, right?

If you are referring to people who are actually from European countries, then I haven't seen data on that, but Europeans in the US would be a very small non-representative sample of Europeans, so I fail to see the relevance.

Only in places/eras where having weapons mattered.

It's not like anybody's gonna take on the feds with their guns.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_People%27...

I don't know if there's a term for it, but if anyone knows or can coin something on the spot to describe the phenomenon where the Drug War and other aspects of American criminal law has invariably irritated smaller undressed wounds within the criminal justice system and caused them to open up as larger festering problems that probably wouldn't have seen as much widespread public attention otherwise-outside of specialized legal communities and advocacy circles.

Examples of what I mean are, as mentioned Drug War -> Civil Forfeiture, PATRIOT Act -> Due Process for War Detainees, Snowden -> Due process for surveillance investigations, etc.