You guys should take these thoughts somewhere else. This specific sub is for just small silly thoughts not politics like 2a rights and the rise of fascism.
“Resisting Unlawful Government” is when you need to fight a Ranger who is trying to keep your stray cows from grazing in a public park.
“Stop Breaking the Law, Asshole!” is when you need to throw on a mask, wave a gun, and snatch someone into a van after they showed up to court for a green card hearing.
The things that radical fascist media talking heads are hyperbolically lying about nonstop are justification for invoking 2A rights.
Unfortunately liberals are pussy-assed bitches so nothing will happen and they’ll all be chunked into an oven.
At some point people confused peaceful with harmless. Harmless people who got accustomed to the idea of outsourcing the capacity for violence… but then the vendor had a change in ownership…
People don’t understand the game.
That’s still the purpose of the second amendment, for people to own guns to defend themselves and others against tyranny
You can’t expect everyone to agree with you ideologically, and obviously they won’t rise up against a government they agree with. Conservatives don’t see the current administration as tyrannical, so there is no conflict for them between the ideals of the second amendment and their actions.
However, you can absolutely choose to exercise your second amendment rights.
As a gun owning liberal, I’m tired of my peers acting like the second amendment is some conservative agenda. The right to firearm ownership is an eminently liberal ideal. More liberals and leftists should own guns— the second amendment is more important now than ever before.
If you think there is a pressing need for an armed liberal/leftist citizenry, go buy guns and arm yourselves.
This is honestly, the dumbest, most American take in the world.
It literally ignores the plainly obvious fact that not a single other developed country allows gun ownership, and yet, still have rights and democracy and freedom.
Guns did not get your rights, and they do not protect you from a government that has AI powered drones with anti tank mines on them. Hell a fucking APC with a sound cannon will make your AR look like a child’s toy.
Guess what happened when a pair of guys had enough guns and body armour to challenge the local LA government in the 90s? Oh would you look at that, every single local government’s police force across the country just militarized and bought tanks and SWAT teams in response. Oh how safe guns have made us!
Wide spread gun ownership makes everyone less safe. Full stop.
This is honestly, the dumbest, most American take in the world.
Hell yeah brother 🦅🦅🦅
It literally ignores the plainly obvious fact that not a single other developed country allows gun ownership, and yet, still have rights and democracy and freedom.
Many other developed countries allow gun ownership. Educate yourself, my man.
But more importantly, I literally do not care if they do or not. The point was never that democracy cannot exist without firearms, but rather that in the worst case scenario an armed citizenry can act as a force against tyranny. It’s a rare thing that it might be needed, and a last resort. No sane person wants a civil war
Guns did not get your rights
Except they literally did. How do you think the revolutionary war was won, softly spoken words?
they do not protect you from a government that has AI powered drones with anti tank mines on them. Hell a fucking APC with a sound cannon will make your AR look like a child’s toy.
Guerrillas with small arms in developing countries have repelled the US military repeatedly over the past half century. More importantly, if you don’t think a combination of small arms and low cost homemade munitions are effective against a modern military you haven’t been paying attention to the war in Ukraine at all.
Do you know how many innocent people’s blood that has cost?
Encouraging people to arms themselves will get people killed. You’re racing to the bottom in a doom loop and yelling hell yeah nonsensically rather than actually trying to break out of that doom loop.
America is fucked because it’s convinced it’s population that it has to keep participating in its toxic behaviours to survive. That’s false. It’s literally just fear mongering.
Each good human being only needs to kill one fascist, and the fascists will quickly be gone.
Unilaterally labelling people ‘fascists’ and thus worthy of death, makes you a fascist.
You would “both sides” your way right to the gas chambers.
it’s not fear mongering when we’re literally months away from being the next fascist state.
And another thing to consider, cars kill about as many people in the US as guns, so we should be talking about banning cars as well?
Oh do tell us the value of goods and services transported every day by gun.
Because I can give you a number for the approximate economic value provided by cars and vehicular transportation generally, can you tell us the economic value provided by guns and every random person being able to point and click murder whenever they want?
Gun crimes are largely committed by people who do not have the legal right to those guns. The vast majority of legal gun owners are responsible people. When you ban guns, they’ll just go to other means of killing. You won’t stop it, if they want to kill people they will.
Nope.
Just objectively and provably false, this is NRA talking point nonsense.
Guns increase the rates of suicide, they increase the rates of domestic violence murder, and they make everyone less safe around police by giving police an excuse to use deadly force.
Guns also are not manufactured clandestinely en masse, anywhere, because it takes a lot of precise industrial machining to do at scale. They are not like sex or weed that are impossible to ban, when you stop manufacturing them for nonsense reasons, they stop circulating and criminals stop being able to get their hands on them.
I do not understand why Americans think they are such unfathomably unique snowflakes that none of the evidence or lessons learned from every other developed country could apply to them.
You are just pulling out all the false NRA tropes today, aren’t you?
Do you have any idea how much blood fascism will shed?
Yes, arming the public will get people killed, do you think death camps are a preferable alternative?
Many countries permit gun ownership, not like the USA does.
You’re right. It’s a liberal idea to allow the (largely) unregulated possession of firearms. However, it takes a certain mindset to pickup that forearm and try to decide how the country is run with it through armed insurrection. One that’s more akin to authoritarian, or at least paternalism.
Personally I feel if the 2nd amendment is there for this reason, the ln the no kings marches should have had arms. That’s a powderkeg scenario and we’d probably be looking at hundreds dead at this point. However if there was ever a reason for the 2nd amendment, this is it and that’s the cost. Otherwise there’s no point in the right to bear arms and you should scrap it.
That’s a fair statement.
I don’t think we are there yet. It will be far better for our country if our problems can be solved by diplomatic and political means, and we are far from running out of levers to pull.
That’s still the purpose of the second amendment, for people to own guns to defend themselves and others against tyranny
It isn’t, and has never been. The language of the constitution is plain as day:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”
The mythos of the 2nd amendment being this poison pill for a tyrannical state government is only so pervasive because institutions like the NRA perpetuated it for decades in service of arms manufacturers and their bottom line. No sane government anywhere in the world would bake such a clause into their constitution, it’s antithetical to government itself.
The 2nd amendment is absolutely an artifact of a bygone era of American history where, as a fledgling nation, we did not have a powerful standing army to rely on for defense against foreign adversaries. A people’s militia was the final defense against such a threat.
However, all that being said, I agree with your sentiment that leftists should be arming themselves. Just because the 2nd amendment has almost completely lost it’s original intent or meaning, doesn’t mean we can’t take advantage of the fact that it exists with tons of legal precedent to strap up in preparation for what might come next. Things are unlikely to get better from here, and if things get worse you will be glad you have a firearm for protection.
The founding fathers have written at length on their reasoning for including the right to bear arms in the constitution. It is very clear that they believed in the people’s ability to resist and overthrow the government if needed.
After all, this was a group who escaped the grip of the monarchy through force of arms. It’s odd to think that they didn’t see value in the ability of the people to do the same, especially when they repeatedly wrote about it in period.
However, all that being said, I agree with your sentiment that leftists should be arming themselves. Just because the 2nd amendment has almost completely lost it’s original intent or meaning, doesn’t mean we can’t take advantage of the fact that it exists with tons of legal precedent to strap up in preparation for what might come next. Things are unlikely to get better from here, and if things get worse you will be glad you have a firearm for protection.
Also this here is kind of the point. The original intent is not important; many people believe in the modern era that an armed citizenry is important as a last ditch balancing force to government overreach. We are all better off if left leaning people arm themselves instead of using pro-gun arguments as some sort of self-righteous gotcha against the right.
If you need to exercise your right to bear arms, you have already lost. The battle is won in education, critical skills, and mobilising together (unions, etc).
If we ever need to raise arms against the government, it will be a dark day indeed. No reasonable person wants that. We have many methods of recourse before that even enters the conversation IMO.
However, there can eventually come a time where resistance is appropriate. Hitler never would have taken complete control of the country, exterminated so many Jews, and started Europe on the path to a world war if the Germans were armed and actively resisting his rule.
It seems self evident that the German people would been better off resisting Nazi rule than allowing the death camps and WW2 to come to fruition.
However, there can eventually come a time where resistance is appropriate. Hitler never would have taken complete control of the country, exterminated so many Jews, and started Europe on the path to a world war if the Germans were armed and actively resisting his rule.
Bruh, come the fuck on. Jews were 1% of the population, meanwhile like 30% of the population actively supported the Nazis, and far more would have continued to turn a blind eye as long as violence wasn’t being perpetrated against people like them.
This is nonsense alt history that ignores the fact that Nazis steamrolled and enacted death camps in far more countries than just Germany, and personal ownership of firearms didn’t make a dent in stopping them.
What makes you think they didn’t have guns?
Never suggested they didn’t. I’m suggesting that the country would have been better off if they both had weapons and chose to resist.
We aren’t Germany. The founding fathers made sure we could arm ourselves. The choices we make are our own.
You aren’t wrong… but leaving guns off the table feels short sighted.
Good luck with whatever the fuck you’re smoking.
History shows time and time again that collapsing cities/societies/empires cannot be stopped nor redirected with violence. The endemic causes are there, violence may provide a respite but it just accelerates the overall disintegration of the society.
May what is happening to the USA be a wake up call for the rest of the western world.
You have proven the second amendment is just so you can shoot your neighbour. None of you rose up against his first term, none of you will now. All the child sacrifices you have been doing were just so you can feel cool with your gun and dream of shooting someone one day.
Its time to admit it.
That’s still the purpose of the second amendment, for people to own guns to defend themselves and others against tyranny
No it isn’t and it never was. Go read it. It’s about defending the state from invaders. Wars at the time we’re mostly fought with militias, especially for more poor or smaller nations, like the new United States at the time. We didn’t have a standing professional military for a while, so our military was solely militias, and as such they should be legal and trained, hence the 2nd amendment.
I largely support (safe and with training) gun rights. They’re protected by the 9th amendment, whether the 2nd does or not. It’s just this blatantly incorrect repetition that the 2nd amendment is about something that isn’t written in it is crazy. It’s really short and pretty clear. I feel like no one supporting this idea has actually ever read it, or at least hasn’t considered what it actually says.
Is it worth the amount of problems that guns brings to a country in exchange for a chance of a shooting competition against an M1 Abrams?
I believe it’s fundamentally important to that we that right to an equalizing force.
Acting like we are going to directly fight a tank with an AR-15 is either a straw man or just frankly ignorant. The US military has repeatedly been repelled by guerrilla forces with small arms, and if you have been paying any attention at all in Ukraine you will see what can be done with very little technology in terms of drones etc.
You don’t understand what happened in Vietnam or Afghanistan. At all.
If you think those guys truly defeated the US and that you with your rifle are going to do the same… I don’t even know if there’s is a point explaining it.
The ones that created the government had to actually fight for their freedom. People became complacent afterwards, and seem to think that freedom is a given.
It reminds me of some quote “freedom isn’t owned, it’s rented, and rent is due everyday.”
Well one party told gun owners that they’re awful people. Of course a chunk of them are gonna be okay with what’s going on. The people who hated on them are being “owned”. Can you blame them for not rising up to fight the party that pretends to give them lip service?
can you blame them
Yes.
“A Republic, if you can keep it”
They can’t do the work because their feelings were hurt? I will absolutely blame them
Almost every tyrannical regime in the 20th century systematically disarmed their citizenry, leading to some of the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. It’s not a coincidence.
That’s not true, they disarmed their undesirables.
However private gun ownership would have done next to nothing in those scenarios anyway.
I guess “undesirables” don’t count as part of the citizenry? You’re only reinforcing my point, that the government stripped firearms from the people they wanted to kill/oppress. If it wasn’t worth doing, nobody would have done it. Instead, Pol Pot, Hitler, Idi Amin, Stalin, Kim I’ll Sung, Mao, Mussolini, etc., have ALL taken away firearms in some way from their peoples.
Moving the goalposts a lot is your favourite pastime I guess.
One aspect of the U.S. Second Amendment that I struggle to understand is how owning firearms can be seen as a check against government power in the modern era. No matter how much money an individual spends on collecting weapons, they can never match the resources of a government with access to advanced technology like orbital GPS networks, fighter jets, drones, bioweapons, logistics, and nuclear weapons.
When the Amendment was written, weaponry was still in its early stages of development, and the assumption was that a well-armed populace could, with sufficient numbers, overthrow a tyrannical regime. However, in today’s world, this seems unrealistic. Even if someone owned a thousand .50 caliber Desert Eagles, it wouldn’t make a significant difference against such overwhelming governmental power.
So what your saying is we need to give people more weapons to even up the fight.
The Vietnamese and Afghans could probably tell us a thing or two.
One aspect I don’t think many appreciate is the deterrent effect of private gun ownership. The fascists would have already overrun us were we not armed. Notice the major ICE raids have been in NYC and California? Those are the two places in America with the strictest, and often dumbest, gun laws. Anecdotally, being visibly armed likely saved me two ass beatings in the past year. LOL, one guy was so fucking mad he was shaking, choking himself to be polite.
Most of our military might can’t be brought to bear on civilians. The examples you gave are purpose built to fight another military on their turf. The Air Force isn’t going to deploy fighter jets to put down a riot. And NONE of those things will continue working about a week after civilians pull support.
Would have already overrun us?
They have.
Look who is in charge. The fascists won by courting the far right and telling them they needed guns. Now they have the guns and the government.
They have the guns and the government because liberals disarmed themselves.
Guerilla warfare works. It’s great against large systems with small vulnerabilities. In those cases a small imbedded group is far better than outside force.
I hear.
You see, if the government bombs it’s cities flat, it no longer has anything to govern, and falls anyways.
What we need are armed protests. Something you can’t just easily police thug your way out of. We can all go protest and wave signs all we want, but until those in power are once again afraid of it’s people, nothing will change.
One aspect of the U.S. Second Amendment that I struggle to understand is how owning firearms can be seen as a check against government power in the modern era. No matter how much money an individual spends on collecting weapons, they can never match the resources of a government with access to advanced technology like orbital GPS networks, fighter jets, drones, bioweapons, logistics, and nuclear weapons.
No shit they’ll just burn your place to the ground Tulsa style. USA is quickly becoming North Korea.
Because the military would fracture during a civil war.
even much simpler than that… being more than just one guy.
The government still needs people to enforce their laws, you can’t use fighter jets, bioweapons, and nuclear weapons against your own citizenry without losing legitimacy and leading to a civil war where foreign governments would arm all sides. Take a look at Syria, they successfully overthrew the Assad regime with the support of other nations.
We currently have armed unidentified state thugs snatching random minorities off the streets, that’s the sort of government abuse that could be stopped if liberals were armed. The state can only go so far in using force against their own citizens before it fractures and we look like the Syrian civil war.
I agree with you that the government is losing legitimacy. However, I’m deeply confused and frustrated by the second part of your argument. The United States was literally built by immigrants from its very beginning. People moved there seeking a future in a brave new world, and this diversity made the country a cultural and intellectual leader in music, literature, science, and finance. Yet now, immigration is somehow viewed as negative, largely because a few loud voices claim immigrants are criminals or spread absurd rumors like them eating dogs.
What’s even more troubling is how politically divided the country has become. The simple act of helping a fellow human— a fellow American—avoid unjust ICE arrests is labeled a “liberal” issue. In my view, watching Americans being essentially kidnapped by government-paid agents is exactly the kind of tyranny the Second Amendment was meant to prevent. This division and inaction feel entirely pointless and contrary to the values the nation was founded on if i am to be convinced by conservative side.
Oh I’m by no means a conservative, I’m just trying to be descriptive. Conservatives are largely fully on board with ICE rounding up random brown people. They don’t value the 2nd amendment as a means of resisting government tyrany because they aren’t doing it, they’re on the side of the tyrants.
This is precisely the type of tyrany the 2nd amendment should prevent, but because guns have largely become a conservative issue, we’re stuck in the worst possible position of having both a lot of guns and tyranny.
Look at somewhere like Syria. Governments still get taken down by armed revolutionaries. Yes, there is the issue that governments are better armed. But there are a few fatal flaws in the idea that this makes them invincible:
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A lot of expensive weapons systems like airplanes and tanks can be taken out by much cheaper and accessible systems like MANPADS and drones.
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There will be people on the side of the rebels with previous military experience that will know how to use the heavier weapons.
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Groups of revolutionaries armed with civilian-accessible weapons can find lightly defended military bases, storm them, and seize heavier weapons.
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Rebel groups always receive outside assistance from foreign powers.
If a group of revolutionaries deposes the California state government, declares the New California Republic, and tries to secede from the US, they won’t be fighting with AR-15s for long. They’ll be using the strongest available civilian weapons to raid National Guard armories and other locations that may not be so heavily defended. They may even do so with the tacit support of those working at those facilities. Then their goal will be to hold out long enough against the US government that they can petition foreign powers like China to support their rebellion against the US federal government.
Revolts don’t happen in a vacuum. Rebels don’t need to hold out against the central government indefinitely armed only with light weaponry. At the end of the day, there’s going to be some other well armed country out there that’s going to be more than happy to see their geopolitical rival be embroiled in a war of secession. If California decided to rebel on Monday, by Friday the PRC would be loading every drone, antitank missile, and MANPAD they can find into crates, ready to smuggle them in container ships past the US Navy. Even if China didn’t support the aims of the California rebels, it wouldn’t matter. Hell, they wouldn’t even care about the final outcome of the war. They would happily fund heavy weapons to the rebels just to make sure the US federal government was too embroiled in a crisis at home to devote many resources to places like Taiwan.
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I feel like it makes more sense if the guns were always there to protect stolen land.
What’s unlawful? You voted them in. Bearing arms against the government is unlawful. Anyone who thinks they can make a stand and shoot a few people to stand up to the government will find themselves arrested quickly and with all their neighbours supporting their arrest.
There is no amount of force that could reasonably be brought that would topple the government.
That’s what most failed governments said. Nothing was ever taken without force.
Ask the native Americans. The Seminoles were badass in Florida, governer kept sending in soldiers to move them, Indians kept killing them all. So many the governor finally said to leave them the fuck alone. One of the only tribes left in Florida. My ancestors were pushed from their land on the trail of tears.
That’s just inherently not true, and something that medieval serfs also probably heard a lot.
I did not vote them in. AND they were elected and swore to uphold the Constitution, and they have broken that vow.
BTW, bearing arms against the government is not only legal, it’s constitutional.
The idea of the right to revolt was famously articulated in the Declaration of Independence, which declared that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.”
The Declaration went on to argue that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
Wait til you hear what happened when the Black Panthers tried to exercise their 2nd amendment rights.
Something bad. Is it something bad? I bet it was something bad.
Funnily enough it resulted in more gun control, so it was something good.
Look at the results of that 90s LA bank robbery. It was the first time that two guys had enough body armour and firepower to challenge the local police. What was the end result? Every police officer across the country getting assigned body armour, high powered rifles, and every police agency militarizing and buying APCS, tactical units, etc.
The idea that the government would allow you to own weaponry that would legitimately challenge them is asinine.
That’s kind of been the whole thing about the anti-2a people: they’ve kept saying "the people"in “the militia” are the cops and states (as opposed to the federal government), and the law-and-order conservatives aren’t saying no to militarizing law enforcement, and the pro-gun right for decades (60s-90s) played along with all the “2a is for hunting” nonsense. The point of 2A is for the government to be afraid to do this crap, but 2A is too watered down at this point to have that effect. The kind of population that could live armed as well as any military (not ours) would just have a different behavior in general.
It’s interesting that voting rights were sold on the basis of instituting democratic government. They seem to have caused and supported fascist government.
Not a bad viewpoint. But I give less credit to voting rights than I do to social media in our downfall.
No! It’s a nonsensical viewpoint, like the OP. I really didn’t think I needed an /s for this.
Yes, Americans voted in a fascist government, but that doesn’t mean that having democratically elected leaders is a primary cause of the problem. Likewise, while it is a real, quantifiable problem that their constitution allows everyone and their emotionally unstable teenaged kids to carry around deadly weapons, the that right being exercised in support of said fascist government does not make it a primary cause thereof.
As you say, the prevalence and influence of social media is more relevant to the US’ current situation, but honestly there are a ton of critical factors and everything is so complicated and oh god I’m getting way too worked up over a stupid showertjoughts post and I just need a drink and a hug. Sorry for ranting.
Gerrymandering. Registration purges. Compromised voting machines. Voter suppression and intimidation. Banning mail-in voting. Closing, relocating, and reducing polling sites.
Insert meme: “Is this voting rights?”
I was just failing to point out the non sequitur in the OP. You’re 100% right
Gee, maybe if you shouldn’t expect others to pick up arms for you. Maybe you have to diy your own revolution.
Like honestly, what did you actually expect?
Your post history is a mess.
I have him tagged as ‘misguided soul’
Holy shit - he’s one of those lunatics that thinks Bernie Sanders is a corrupt politician committing crimes!
If I see one more mouthbreather rant about a guy with multiple published books owning more than one house as if that’s a smoking gun, I’m going to go postal!
