Re:The children will go bathing
by dsfyu404ed on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @01:20PM
(#17357397)
You're missing the point. The government of the US is still beholden to public opinion on issues where the public is mostly in agreement and power is distributed among enough different entities with competing interests that you can't just make a unilateral decision to use military force internally and at scale.
The point of being armed is not to rise up against the government, it's to make government abuse on a small level more difficult, risky and costly for the government than just not acting like jerks in the first place. By greatly occasional abuse it's much harder for abuse to become more normalized.
The Waco Siege is a good example. If those people hadn't shot back there would never have been a standoff, the media would never have shown up and the public would never have been able to scrutinize the government's actions.
Another example is police no-knock warrant abuse. In places where many people have the capacity to shoot at you if you kick down their door in the middle of the night the police generally don't abuse no-knock warrants because everyone knows that if you hand them out like candy you'll eventually get a dead cop and public scrutiny. In places where the vast majority of people cannot shoot back you see all sorts of sloppy behavior (e.g. swat team kicks down a door based on a driver's license address without even checking with the landlord if that tenant is still renting that unit) because the risk of abusing people like that is low.
The point of being armed is not to rise up against the government, it's to make government abuse on a small level more difficult, risky and costly for the government than just not acting like jerks in the first place. By greatly occasional abuse it's much harder for abuse to become more normalized.
The Waco Siege is a good example. If those people hadn't shot back there would never have been a standoff, the media would never have shown up and the public would never have been able to scrutinize the government's actions.
Another example is police no-knock warrant abuse. In places where many people have the capacity to shoot at you if you kick down their door in the middle of the night the police generally don't abuse no-knock warrants because everyone knows that if you hand them out like candy you'll eventually get a dead cop and public scrutiny. In places where the vast majority of people cannot shoot back you see all sorts of sloppy behavior (e.g. swat team kicks down a door based on a driver's license address without even checking with the landlord if that tenant is still renting that unit) because the risk of abusing people like that is low.