You might find the extreme gun fanatics this way, but for every one of those there are dozens that just have a regular weapon in the closet for emergencies and don't advertise it whatsoever. (At least in some jurisdictions, may vary based on your location)

In an actual revolution scenario, they're pretty easy to find too. They'd be the people with guns.

I don't think I've actually ever really understood this aspect of American paranoia.

See Venezuala. First came registration, then confiscation, then conflict. The government would round up as many guns as possible before war broke out in the streets.

It's an interesting hypothesis that more guns in the hands of civilians would have resulted in less bloody conflict (as opposed to military escalation in light of armed resistance), but I don't know how one proves it. What's the control group?

I don't think the claim has ever been that it would result in less bloody conflict. On the contrary, likely more bloody.

I think the claim is simply that it can potentially change the outcome.

And before anyone disagrees, how many soldiers died in Iraq & Afghanistan at the hands of insurgencies?

Plenty, until the US pivoted to drone-launched missiles.

Have fun launching missiles at American cities and insurgents embedded in civilian targets. Even shooting missiles at the desert kill enough innocent bystanders to radicalize the enemy, now imagine doing that in Miami and Houston.

I have imagined it, and it's horrifying. But not guaranteed to radicalize people outside the immediate effected area against the ones pulling the trigger.

Philadelphia bombed a city block to flush out an entrenched armed group in the '80s, and life went on (for everyone who didn't have their home burned down). Don't underestimate the American capacity to believe something was done because it was necessary. It's the only country to have ever deployed nuclear weapons. Twice.

The MOVE incident was gross incompetence that spiraled out of control. If you have one of those every month, in every city, on purpose, the country is going to completely break down.

Heuristics. What are the 2 longest-standing governments in the world? US and SUI

What are the 2 most-armed civil societies in the world? US and SUI

Then you have the other end of the spectrum: is regulation of private gun ownership predict government turning on its citizens? No.

Is regulation of private gun ownership a prerequisite for authoritarian govts to turn on citizens? Yes

It is not paranoia when a US presidential candidate states he wants full blown confiscation.

If anything, it is mistrust.

I'm curious as to why gun advocates trust the candidate who says they want to confiscate guns less than the president engaging in authoritarian and corrupt behavior.

The whole point of the right to bear arms is that they're meant to be used against the government when they overstep their bounds. But what happens when the people who bear said arms agrees with how the government is breaking the law?

Hell, they sell those lists. Though just because you are on those lists, does not make you the typical “gun nut”; FWIW I fall in that gun nut category.

The “I lost them in a boating accident” won’t work when they zip tie you to a chair and start cutting off body parts.

I don't consider them "gun nuts." People support the NRA or read Guns & Ammo for their own reasons; it's a free country. So free that someone who has a mind to shoot a dozen strangers can do so with relative ease, but a free country.

What prey, would you do with the list of 5.5 million gun owners? Basically, 4% of US adults.

Take their guns. Though I gather that might still be difficult, since so many Americans profess their intention to lay down their lives to protect their gun(ownership right)s.

I'm sure you can understand why most observers are puzzled by this, since guns are ostensibly purchased as tools used to prevent one's own death.

There's less than a million police in the US.

More than half of them are desk/bureaucracy bound. It's probably more like 3/4 of them, not to mention many of them will favor the gun owners, but let's be generous to the opposing argument and suppose all active street duty cops were in on it.

So you are saying each police officer is going to arrest and remove weapons from 10 people scattered across millions of square miles. They will also need to ostensibly put those 5.5 million 'bad Americans' somewhere. We don't even have jails for that many people. You'd need literally a few million guards just to keep them. And that's just NRA members. There's many more gun owners than there are NRA members.

Have you been in the US? Do you understand how insanely unrealistic this is?

Lists are great when the people you want to hurt are small in number and weak in force. Neither applies here.

A tyrant dictator could send the army, but again, way outnumbered. Not to mention how big the USA is, how rugged the terrain can be, and how well acquainted the locals are. Even just rounding people up is super hard when people WANT to cooperate (look at our response to natural disasters)

The tyrant dictator can take over with tanks, no doubt. But then they would face a long, protracted guerrilla war with all freedom loving Americans. If Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, the founding of the USA, etc have taught us anything, is that you can conquer, but holding a territory is a whole other ball game. And holding is where it's at.

I imagine we'd do it like Australia did, where the cop/population and population/land ratios are presumably even worse.

I'm not very well acquainted with what happened in Australia.

Since you are bringing them up, you must be.

So tell me gun ownership statistics for Australia and participation in gun ownership organizations. I'd be interested to hear what happened there and learn.

I mean I know they pretty much disarmed, and I've seen the positive statistics paraded by anti-gun supporters, but I've yet to hear about the details of what % of the population was armed, what % the population supported disarming, ratio between gun owners and cops, etc. That would say a lot about the feasibility comparison.

Since you are implying the feasibility of disarmament was worse in Australia, I'd love to learn about the exact details that allowed you to come to your educated conclusion that it's worse in Australia. I'm always happy to learn about things I didn't know about.

Unless that is you are just assuming. Like when you said 'take their guns' without even considering feasibility and then you ignored posts that confront you with contradictory evidence to your assumptions. There's a certain type of attitude that will base their conclusions on made up information (aka assumed... I can't say you are presuming as you don't seem to have the data needed to make this about probability), without bothering to check or even ignoring contradictory realities as perceived and recorded by human consensus. It's not very pretty.

>I'm always happy to learn about things I didn't know about.

If this is true, you'll be happy to do your own research. The Australian experience with an assault weapon ban, gun buybacks, and a firearms registry is well-known to anyone remotely serious about gun ownership discourse, and the fact that you aren't familiar with it casts into doubt the ostensible good faith with which you've approached me with this short essay of glib intellectual overextension.

The italicized "ass" in "assuming" is cute, and also 100% against HN's code of conduct, by the way.

Gun buyback program.

Granularity matters. Anyone can find my phone number in the book, but when the government tracks and analyzes exactly who I'm calling it becomes an invasion of privacy and an existential threat to free society.