unless you can arm yourself with a nuke, “arming” yourself for a fight against US government is laughable :)

You don’t have to defend yourself from the entire US government, just the government representation who shows up and decides to violate laws or your rights (and your life is in imminent danger). “Better to be judged by twelve vs. carried by six.” Otherwise, you’re default dead. Odds are better in jail on US soil than an El Salvadorian prison. I agree full out civil war against the US military on US soil is a different threat and engagement model. 5 million people participated in the No Kings protest, more than double total active military members on US soil, for example.

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-are-in-the-us-...

https://www.militaryonesource.mil/data-research-and-statisti...

(position derived from first principles and threat modeling, with input from several US military service members and a physical defense subject matter expert)

> You don’t have to defend yourself from the entire US government, just the government representation who shows up and decides to violate laws or your rights (and your life is in imminent danger)

No matter how much I hypothetically might train on firearms, I'm pretty sure if a SWAT team (or the federal equivalent) shows up at my house, they're going to arrest me no matter what I do. Well, no, that's not true: if I pull out a firearm, they'll kill me. No need for an arrest then.

And sure, maybe just one or two officers show up at my home. Either I still lose in a firefight, or they leave and come back with more firepower, and then I lose. I suppose before their second visit I can run? Not sure to where, though, and not sure how I'll get out of the country, living nowhere near a land border.

> 5 million people participated in the No Kings protest, more than double total active military members on US soil, for example.

I'm not sure which position you're taking here, but I don't buy the idea that one armed civilian is equal to one member of the US military when it comes to predicting who is going to win. I don't even buy the idea that two armed civilians are equal to one military member. Also consider all the right-wing nut-job militia groups in the US; they would certainly join in, on the side of the military.

Training, coordination, and access to the best weaponry (and ammunition) will win. US military will beat down 5 million civilians, no problem. Probably even 10 or 20 million. I could even see the military bombing cities; Trump already seems to think LA is "in rebellion" based on his National Guard and Marine deployments. Only hope there is that enough people in the military realize what they're doing and refuse to fight. Not sure I'd want to bet on that, though.

For people who believe the US will slide (or already has slid) into authoritarianism, and believe they have a strong chance of being targeted by the government in the future, the only sane thing to do is to leave the country now. It really hurts me to say that, but that's where we are. 77M people voted for this disgusting garbage, so this is what we have.

Read the history of authoritarian movements.

The tip of the spear is consistently a bunch of incels and incel-adjacent losers. Think Meal Team 6, not Seal Team 6.

The vast majority of Americans won’t “see” anything, but there could also be all sorts of opportunists taking advantage of social dysfunction.

A million good reasons to go buy a gun, and the only reasons not to are either fatalism that you’re completely fucked or blind faith that nothing could possibly happen.

It is illogical to think either of those but find the in-between state so implausible that it’s not worth hedging with $<1000.

I am prepared to leave the country semi permanently on very short notice (having prepared for this), but I’m also arguing/proposing that everyone should be prepared to defend themselves from other humans that would harm. You can hope for good faith and positive intent, but hope is also not a strategy. No one is coming to save you. Doesn’t mean you’ll succeed, just improves the odds.

Lawyer. Passport. Locksmith. Gun. (A Talk About Risk and Preparedness) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33509164 - November 2022

> This is a presentation about risk, preparedness, and how to do make your best attempt to build defenses against some of the worst threats and potential problems that might ever arise in your life. Keeping your loved ones as well as your community safe is something to always keep in mind and this presentation walks through some of the most critical steps that it is possible to take... before your world explodes in a disaster.

(I work in risk management)

Worked pretty well for the Vietnamese and the Afghans

It didn't though. It was really really bad for them.

Well, for a country that's faced attempts to be "tamed" by three superpowers over 200 years, Afghanistan's holding up pretty well. It exists and independent! By the way, it crossed my mind that all the superpowers that tried their luck are no longer superpowers. Britain's just a weak shadow of itself, the USSR completely collapsed. What fate awaits the USA?

same

Even beyond the lives lost on the side of the anti-US fighters in those places, who wants to bet on if the US would give up and walk away and just let any random local armed community in its own territory ignore it?

Will you see eventual retreat, or will you see eventual overwhelming force? The US didn't want to bulldoze these other countries and jail or kill everyone and set up a new state; very different than how the US would handle more Wacos.

Waco wasn’t a problem due to any separatism or resistance to law enforcement.

It’s because they were raising children to rape them.

So tired of this equivocating on what those people were about.

The Vietnamese were being backed by the Soviet Union and China. The Taliban has piles of soviet era equipment and US military and intelligence training.

The Middle East managed to fight the US government since 2003 without using Nukes. I guess nobody told them AK-47s and IEDs were ineffective