Please don't take HN threads into flamewars, and especially not classic generic ideological flamewars. They are predictable, tedious, and nasty, and we don't want that here.

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Fair enough. Although my comment is probably tangential to the topic, I intended it as related and relevant.

I've always found talking about firearms in response to a legislative body acting to be reactionary and shortsighted, but also a little humorous, in a sad kind of way.

I wonder if you realize you're intimating, even obliquely, that you'd be willing to kill cops, soldiers, and democratically elected officials for performing their duties because you individually don't agree with their decisions.

In other words, you're mad at the government for being too authoritative, so your reaction is to take the most authoritarian step possible and literally murder them for their political beliefs.

Officials being democratically elected does not necessarily mean anything - in theory, a majority of the population could vote to literally enslave a minority of the population. I think that it is fair for a minority of the population to have some threshold beyond which they are willing to use force if necessary even if by doing so they are going against the wishes of the majority.

51% of a population having a say over their own lives is better than any other system I know of, because every other system I know of ends up with substantially less than 51% of the population having a say over their own lives. It's far from perfect, but I do think we should realize the comparison is to other forms of government, not some abstract ideal.

And I'm not suggesting that there's never a reason to act violently towards a government, I'm suggesting the people who talk about guns in response to legislation don't understand what it is they're saying.

To use firearms against your government means killing patriots, definitionally. People need to realize this, because they generally don't.

Yes, it likely means killing people who think of themselves as patriots. However, many people who work for oppressive governments genuinely think of themselves as patriots. I do not see why it matters whether using firearms against a government means killing patriots or not. Many of the people who worked for Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union to oppress their fellow citizens were patriots by the standard meaning of the word.

It often matters to the people making these statements, is my point.

I haven't expressed my opinion about it, I'm just saying that the folks suggesting using firearms to "stop tyranny" very rarely know what they're actually saying.

Some do.

Psychologically I think it is very easy to resolve any possible contradictions. "My side are the real patriots - their side are false patriots who are actually bootlickers/oppressors/occupiers/traitors/etcetera."

I think you're getting wrapped up in the word choice here. Someone espousing these beliefs is supporting the killing of cops and soldiers, an act which is very often reprehensible in the same circles.

I think that most people who generally support cops and soldiers but who also contemplate violent resistance against the US government have already thought through this issue and their usual resolution is "I generally support cops and soldiers for now but if they cross certain lines then I am fine with fighting against them". I do not think that there is nearly as much cognitive dissonance or hypocrisy on this topic among those people as you might think there is.

I disagree, I believe the vast majority of people (including the person I replied to here) who believe in using firearms to "prevent tyranny" don't understand that what they're saying means they'd have to kill cops and soldiers.

They tend to believe the threat is enough and that they'd never have to act on their threat (rendering it meaningless), or that all of the cops/soldiers will just let them kill the politicians (and killing a politician for a differing political belief is somehow generally okay for these folks).

It’s not about shooting them but rather deterring them from totalitarian government. That our ruling bodies understand there are lines and boundaries.

Yes it is about shooting them, as that's what your deterrent is. Your threat is that you'll murder them if they don't do things you like.

No you’re missing the point I think. The point is that a gun let’s you defend yourself from tyranny. And that is a sufficient number of people find a government tyrannical they can choose to organize against them by not following their tyrannical laws which are illegitimate. And the tyrannical government would have to take up arms against these people to enforce their power with the knowledge these people can defend themselves.

Guns rights are about defense not coercion per-se. The knowledge that the public is already armed is a deterrent in even trying to create or enforce law that meets this criteria. Thankfully we aren’t there and I hope we never will, but as they chip chip chip away you start to wonder what will be tried next.

I am not missing the point, you are. Guns aren't some abstract concept you get to hand-wave away, they have exactly one function -- to kill things.

You "defend yourself from tyranny" by killing patriots of your own country. That's literally the only way to do it, so when you say things like "defend yourself from tyranny" you are saying, "I'm willing to murder cops and soldiers." because that's who you'll have to "defend yourself from tyranny" against.

There is no way around this, it is the direct meaning of the words and phrases you're using. What you are doing is using the threat of murder to try and get your way in a society.

Nah, you’re missing the point entirely I think and you’re trying to use language devices to create a straw man.

You wouldn’t be defending yourself from patriots. Patriots wouldn’t take up arms against an oppressed citizenship they swore to protect. You’re logic says the SS were patriots. They were not (even if their government found them to be lawful) and anyone who shot them as they raided an innocent persons home is a hero. There are innumerable examples of this throughout history and I’d argue is the default state of power historically.

Machiavelli wrote hundreds of years ago that liberty can only be secured by the passion of a citizenry. That a paid militia can never secure it in the long run. This type of philosophy is in part what 2a is premised on.

I don’t think most anyone says we need to be armed so we can threaten violence if we don’t get our way on an arbitrary issue. I’m not saying Australia doesn’t pass this particular law if society is armed. But I do think I’d feel better about the direction the government is going if I knew my neighbors were armed.

Patriots would be the soldiers and cops you'd have to murderin order to "escape from tyranny".

It doesn't matter what word you use, you're still advocating for the murder of police and military members.

I'm not missing the point because I disagree with you, it'd be nice if you stopped trying to suggest that to be the case.

And yet American gun owners also tend to be the Americans who most believe their government is already totalitarian. Maybe they think waving their guns around just stops things from getting worse?

Brianna Taylor's boyfriend shot a cop breaking into their residence. It was classified as self defense. Gun laws in California were pushed decades ago to keep black people from owning weapons as a tacit acknowledgement that they knew they were mistreating people and didn't want those people to be able to resist.

No matter what a country dictates, for it to mean something, they have to send someone out to your house to enforce it. Guns quite literally put a very hard hold on how far they will go -- maybe not in passing laws, but definitely in enforcing them.

>Guns quite literally put a very hard hold on how far they will go -- maybe not in passing laws, but definitely in enforcing them.

No they don't. Let's be real - Some American cops won't hesitate to shoot a black person, armed or unarmed. The only thing private gun ownership guarantees WRT the state is an escalation of force on its part. Remember Waco and Ruby Ridge? The government will send tanks and flamethrowers at you if they want you bad enough.

As far as Breonna Taylor and police violence against the black community goes, political action and protest seem to have been more effective at raising awareness and putting pressure on government to change policy and culture than the ever-present threat of private guns and populist violence, and changing culture is how you get to police not willing to step over the line.

I'm not saying (since this is bound to be a touchy comment) that black people shouldn't arm themselves or are never justified in defending themselves against police brutality, but I am saying that doing so has no effect on the system at large.

It possibly does stop things from getting worse, but it is hard to know whether it does or it does not because there is no way to make a copy of the United States, remove private gun ownership in the copy, and then see how things play out.

The point of taking firearms against the government is not that you expect to win a firefight. It is that you are willing to force the government to shed blood (yours) if it is going to achieve its objective. Which means they risk turning you into a martyr.

NZ also used the FF Tarrant attack on the mosques to take everyone's guns.

Please do not take HN threads further into flamewar. We're trying for something different here.

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Indeed, it seems to work for the Taliban vs. the most powerful army on earth.

Mountainous countries remain an absolute nightmare to invade. It is no coincidence that Switzerland managed to remain neutral in the face of far larger powers and that Afghanistan is known as the Graveyard of Empires.

… in a foreign occupied country. Aside from snide remarks is anybody honestly trying to propose that civilians with guns is a deterrent for for anything the government wants to do? You may as well be throwing rocks.

The hypothesis that guns are a deterrent has little to do with the citizenry fighting against the army or the police. It is about the risk of political assassination by a rogue individual every time a politician walks outside. If the leaders start to deviate significantly from the will of the median person, that risk goes up by a lot, hence the deterrent effect. Would Kim Jong Un still be around if every person was armed? Perhaps, but it'd be quite a bit less likely.

In some cases, it probably is a deterrent. It is hard to know for sure because there is no way to A/B test a country. I think that some people probably overestimate the degree to which it is a deterrent, but I think it would certainly be wrong to say that it is not a deterrent at all. In some situations it can probably be a very effective deterrent.

granted we are in a very different place today in terms of warfare technology, history has shown that firing back is what has shaped the world we live in today.

I think you really underestimate what an entire populace geared with small arms can do if pushed too far. And thats the way it should be. The govt should be scared of crossing lines that anger the people they are supposed to represent.

Guns in the hands of idiots. That always works out well.