Tanks exist for a very specific reason in modern militaries; they are effective in combatting deeply entrenched or armored enemies. When the modern tank was conceived in WWI, trench warfare brought the conflict to a grinding halt, and a tanks were the solution. WWI was a ground war fought by regular militaries. Many modern conflicts are guerilla wars fought against irregular militaries. Guerilla forces do not control battlefronts at strategic positions that require armor to penetrate. Guerilla forces do not have emplacements that cannot be defeated with small arms. Guerilla forces do not field any armor of their own.
Likewise, most features of modern militaries that were developed to fight other nation-states prove nearly useless against irregular combatants. Aircraft strike buildings and armor that guerrilas don't have, or combatants that are indistinguishable from the general populace. Navies fight ships that guerrillas don't sail. Modern EWAR disables communications and technologies that guerrillas don't use. Such capability is lost upon an insurgent force. This misunderstanding is (in some ways) a bizarre sort of American exceptionalism, where we seem to think that the more expensive military will always win, despite the overwhelming evidence to that not being true.
Sure, but if you think they were alive, do you think they would have looked back at what happened, they would have seen this as their failure or victory?
If Branch Dravidians didn't have guns, they would simply be arrested and forgotten in the history, whereas today they are folk heroes.
If anything, to all the gun rights supporters, Waco shows that fighting with guns works.
> Guns lose to tanks every time.
Then how do you explain US-Vietnam war, Second Iraq war, Afghanistan(first with USSR and then with US). The USSR's Afghanistan war is a great example, the only thing we supplied the Mujahiddins was guns.
Tanks only win centralized armies and we are very good with fighting centralized Armies (First Gulf war was a good example), however we SUCK at fighting decentralized forces. The only reason why we manage to defeat ISIS because ISIS got too centralized (and we got strong leadership), but keep in mind we have still not managed to win Iraq and a replacement of ISIS is in works.
The thing about firearms is they equalize power. You are almost certainly bigger and stronger than me, you could beat me up in a fight, if I had a knife you could probably take it from me. When I have a gun your power advantage is greatly diminished and your size becomes a detriment. If we're both armed with firearms the disparity in power is much closer than otherwise. If we played out a fight 10,000 times we'd expect the odds to be 50/50 on either side.
The same is true among groups of people: a pair of cops with a gun can control a dozen prisoners working in a chain gang until just one of those convicts has control over a gun. You only need to look at how expensive it is to clear a madman who's held up in their home or for soldiers to clear streets in the middle-east even when most people living there aren't armed (as they're just regular people caught in a conflict zone). Armed individuals mean it's no longer possible for 1 or 2 people with guns to overpower them, you need to outnumber 3, 5, 10 to one to tilt the odds in your favor again.
Look at how effective—or ineffective—powerful western armies were fighting comparatively poorly armed Afghan and Iraqi rebels. For the most part, these were people with relatively little training and practice, small arms, and loose organization and yet they've managed styme the west's greatest powers for nearly 2 decades. They're better armed than your typical dooms-day prepper, but not by much (and those same doomsday people argue they should be able to horde mortars and RPGs if they want to). If we took the most extreme 'weapons-rights' view I think it is reasonable to think a few million angry Americans could oppose a president like Trump ordering the US military to enforce some sort of tyranny. We've seen that kind of thing have great effect in recent history and all the way back to the first and second world wars where armed citizens were able to take bake their cities (Warsaw) and mobilize into effective resistance movements.
That's where the value of an armed population is found. The government can kick in my door with a half dozen thugs and take everything from me. What they can't do is take everything from a town where half the homes have people prepared to resist. An armed population makes it impossible for a government to effectively oppress the people. Can you imagine the Khmer Rouge making much progress in Texas or Arizona? That's the way a firearms owning population protects against tyranny. The government can get away with "picking on" small groups: klansmen, draft-dodgers, homosexuals, men's-rights activists, but it is much more difficult to impose a more totalitarian rule without popular support.
That's the system I think most people generally support: the government has a "right" to use violence against its enemies provided that use is targeted and narrow. It doesn't have a "right" to broadly disregard the will of the people or to try and enforce rules most people won't somewhat-willingly comply with.
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Some people don't think that's okay: they see the cost of policing in America, where police (rightly?) assume everyone is armed and angry and the police are quick to violence and say "there is nothing worth this!" There are people who will point at the rates of violent crime and say "even if a gun ban won't help, it certainly can't hurt." and they'll hear stories of children killing themselves or their parents 'accidentally' and say "even so-called responsible gun owners can't be trusted not to put themselves and others in danger through negligence."
I understand those positions, I'm even sympathetic to them. At the same time, I don't think it's too much to ask that those of us who think that maybe the American relationship with firearms could use some changes at least try to consider the arguments, rather than trotting out some "lone man with AR-15 destroys US Navy thereby defending freedom of everyone from Trump's goon army" fantasy to poke fun at.
The old Wild West adage, "God Created Men and Sam Colt Made Them Equal!"
> rather than trotting out some "lone man with AR-15 destroys US Navy thereby defending freedom of everyone from Trump's goon army" fantasy to poke fun at.
Of course that's impossible, but look at what small groups of insurgents have done to the US military in various parts of the world. But yea, even if every person in a city owned an AR-15, they would only be an annoyance if the government really became a tyranny.
> Look at how effective—or ineffective—powerful western armies were fighting comparatively poorly armed Afghan and Iraqi rebels. For the most part, these were people with relatively little training and practice, small arms, and loose organization and yet they've managed styme the west's greatest powers for nearly 2 decades. They're better armed than your typical dooms-day prepper, but not by much (and those same doomsday people argue they should be able to horde mortars and RPGs if they want to). If we took the most extreme 'weapons-rights' view I think it is reasonable to think a few million angry Americans could oppose a president like Trump ordering the US military to enforce some sort of tyranny. We've seen that kind of thing have great effect in recent history and all the way back to the first and second world wars where armed citizens were able to take bake their cities (Warsaw) and mobilize into effective resistance movements.
A few things about this:
1. It's worth noting that every single one of the guns being used by the resistance in Iraq is illegal. If anything, this isn't an argument that gun rights are important, it's an argument that gun laws are irrelevant.
2. It's also worth noting that your best examples here had fairly limited success. The "tyrants" in Iraq have control of the economic resources of the country, which is arguably their goal.
3. I'd argue that the limited successes of using guns to resist tyrants were due to a group united around a shared cause, not guns. Each of the successes of guns you mentioned could be attributed to this. The most effective resistance during WW2 wasn't even gun-related: it was the vast underground that smuggled soldiers and Jews.
> Can you imagine the Khmer Rouge making much progress in Texas or Arizona?
I get your general point, but this is a bad example: the Khmer Rouge was a fairly populist movement. Pol Pot's army was mostly uneducated monarchist peasants who didn't understand communism. A populist leader leading a bunch of people in Texas or Arizona to commit genocide is totally imaginable. But in that case the people with the guns doing the tyranny so I get that this isn't your intent. :)
> Some people don't think that's okay: they see the cost of policing in America, where police (rightly?) assume everyone is armed and angry and the police are quick to violence and say "there is nothing worth this!" There are people who will point at the rates of violent crime and say "even if a gun ban won't help, it certainly can't hurt." and they'll hear stories of children killing themselves or their parents 'accidentally' and say "even so-called responsible gun owners can't be trusted not to put themselves and others in danger through negligence."
> I understand those positions, I'm even sympathetic to them. At the same time, I don't think it's too much to ask that those of us who think that maybe the American relationship with firearms could use some changes at least try to consider the arguments, rather than trotting out some "lone man with AR-15 destroys US Navy thereby defending freedom of everyone from Trump's goon army" fantasy to poke fun at.
In fairness, that fantasy isn't a straw man: there are plenty of people who totally believe that.
That said, I do have a nuanced opinion on this. My ultimate position is that taking someone's gun and jailing them when they have never killed anyone with it is equivalent to convicting them of a crime because they might commit it--government needs very good reason to restrict the rights of individuals, in my opinion. But I also don't think that infringing the right to gun ownership is as damaging to society as infringing the right to, say, free speech, or privacy: plenty of people worldwide live quite happily without gun rights. I am sympathetic to the gun nuts, it's just not an important enough issue to me to affect how I'd vote in most cases.
Okay, I don't support the restrictions YouTube and Reddit are putting on free speech, but I think we need to keep things rational here:
> We need guns. Legally, in the U.S. it's our right - one of the first and most protected rights. The ability to defend yourself and country in the face of tyrany. Look at what happened in Ukraine, Syria, etc. A government doesn't fuck with a populace that has guns, so it increases stability. When you don't have the ability to defend your rights, you don't have rights anymore.
Guns as they are allowed now don't allow you to protect yourself from tyranny. Look at the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. Whether or not you believe they had illegal guns, they had guns, and they died. Guns lose to tanks every time. When the second amendment was drafted, guns made sense as a way to defend your rights from the government, but in the modern day, it's been probably half a century since civilians lost the arms race. Civilian gun ownership has lost its relevance as a means of defending our rights in the face of increasingly militarized law enforcement.
> Further, violence isn't associated with guns - it's associated with people being suppressed or by mental issues. The weather is more associated with murder than guns...
There's a case to be made that the culture around guns increases violence, but that's ambiguous. What isn't ambiguous, is that a mentally ill person with a gun is more dangerous than a mentally ill person without a gun.
> I even understand trying to reduce ways to kill massive amounts of people easily. But again, I have a car, I know how to make chlorine gas, so on and so forth.
You can argue that a mentally ill person could build a fertilizer bomb or drive a car into a group of people, but I'll point out that we have laws restricting those things too--let's not assume that people who support restricting gun rights don't also support restricting fertilizer and car rights.
> Stop talking about mass murders and start talking about tragedies, do a black out on mass murders names. That'd probably fix the issue in time.
I think that this is part of the issue: that won't "fix" the issue. It might help, but people will still want more gun control, because the magnitude of the issue isn't relevant to how people feel about it.
More people die every year in car accidents than die from civilian-owned guns in 10. By all statistics, we should be much more worried about why we let drive than who we let own guns. But again, the magnitude of the problem isn't what people are reacting to. Guns are just much scarier to the average person than cars.
So people are always going to push for more and more gun control as long as gun violence exists at all, and gun violence will always exist, because it's impossible to control it completely. You aren't going to "fix" gun violence, so unfortunately we need to accept that that isn't an option on the table, even though everyone wants it to be. And once we accept that we can't "fix" gun violence, then it's easier to stomach that gun rights might have some validity worth weighing against restrictions of questionable efficacy.
> I'm telling you right now, by removing these videos you're arming people, and exhasborating the problem.
This is absolutely true, and I think it's one of the biggest problems with the left right now. Too many of us don't seem to understand that by restricting free speech we create martyrs.