You can't solve that kind of problem by escalating firepower. I mean, even if they did have the power to fight the army to a standstill (cf: ISIS), they would be the bad guys in everyone's eyes.
We've learned a lot during WWII and in the decades after, in matters of mass destruction. A modern Warsaw Ghetto would share the fate of Grozny: razed to the ground by artillery and air bombings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grozny#First_Chechen_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grozny#Second_Chechen_War
> deprived of the legal ability to own firearms
There are dozens of militias around the world, deprived of the _legal_ ability to own firearms. They own arms nonetheless. Plenty of arms. When push comes to shove and it's down to a struggle for survival, who cares about legal restrictions?!
Book bans (in general, with few exceptions) have been recognized as unconstitutional far, far longer than we've had mass adoption of the internet.[1]
Here's the Supreme Court in 1982: "Local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books …"
What's your definition of sizable?
Thats incorrect, see switzerland, they have a lot of guns there, maybe even more than america per person but their gun deaths are very low.
In Switzerland guns are mostly long guns that are heavily regulated and are under very tight storage restrictions. In the US guns are mostly hand guns that are unregulated and under no very tight storage restrictions.
So if you want to make an argument from Switzerland, it would necessarily be of the form: "To reduce gun deaths in the US we should pretty much eliminate handgun ownership and require that all long guns be stored under lock and key in a specified manner, only to taken out on state-permitted occasions for military use."
Your implication is incorrect. One point does not dissolve a correlation. 0 guns -> 0 gun deaths. N guns -> M gun deaths, therefore positive correlation. QED. Switzerland is an outlier in many metrics. They probably don't shoot as many of themselves because they tend to care a bit more about the well-being of their communities. Far fewer people feel the desperate need to lash out against their community.
Some communities in Switzerland actually offer somewhere to keep the bullets in the town hall instead of at home, reducing accidental deaths.
The demand for home gun manufacturing in the USA is very much related to a sizable portion of the populace looking at the changing political climate of the country and extrapolating their self defense rights meeting the y-axis at some point in their lifetime. The potential commonality of such technology makes any sort of future outright ban completely untenable. Do we not ban books anymore because our governments and societies are so much more enlightened or because the internet makes it completely useless?
The lower receiver is not a component bearing serious loads during firing and isn't really where catastrophic failures in the weapon originate.