Reasonably well, all things considered. There are something like 20+ million ar-15s in america, were american gun owners considered an army it would be the largest ever conceived of with no close second; perhaps here you will find the reason you enjoy more liberties than someone living in china or north korea.
And I never said it was fair, I said it was a balance; the balance is very clearly biased towards the government, but they do not enjoy such power for complete and violent subjugation. They rely instead on propaganda, I would argue that is the foundation of their power in fact; the creation myth of our government, that the public interest is represented, keep a critical mass unwittingly subsurvient.
Guns do not make an army. Should 20 million AR-carrying Americans rise up, the "government" would be the least scared. The day after they stormed all the state houses, they would fractionize and turn against one another.
>Reasonably well, all things considered. There are something like 20+ million ar-15s in america, were american gun owners considered an army it would be the largest ever conceived of with no close second;
And how would those ar-15 bros would fare against an organized, professional army, with training, logistics, and coordination, not to mention air support, tanks, and the state on its side?
Not to mention most of those millions of gun owners would need to be on the same side to begin with, to count together.
>perhaps here you will find the reason you enjoy more liberties than someone living in china or north korea
I doubt it, First Amendment aside, European countries are freer than the US in more substantial ways (for starters, they don't have the kind of kafka-esque over extention of the law in the US, or the biggest ratio of prison vs general population, SWAT-ized trigger-happy police, and so on), and they don't have guns at home, except the ocassional shooting rifle.
> And how would those ar-15 bros would fare against an organized, professional army, with training, logistics, and coordination, not to mention air support, tanks, and the state on its side?
Depends on the terms of engagement and the makeup of the professional army.
Are ar-15 bros going to effectively take and hold territory? Maybe on a temporary basis, there's a lot of potential objectives that are regularly barely defended. But it's pretty easy to roll out the national guard or whoever to flush people out if desired.
Can ar-15 bros be a significant problem for occupying forces? Almost certainly yes.
If you wanted or needed to remove this group or their weapons from a territory, it's going to be a major challenge, and highly disruptive to the other occupants, and that's going to inspire more people to take up arms. This is insurgency 101.
FWIW, there are tens of millions of former US military in the civilian population. Once you've been trained you don't really lose it, you just become rusty. In this scenario the AR-15 bros would have a logistics advantage because they start from a state of decentralized resources, whereas the military does not. The US government does not have remotely enough military equipment to control the geographic size and distribution of the US. In a large-scale domestic conflict, the ability to produce more equipment also comes under great risk.
The government doesn't have a safe harbor they can operate from in a civil war, particularly one that has no clear geographic split. This severely curtails the use of heavy ordnance due to the importance of not killing the uninvolved populace, since that would only encourage them to also question the legitimacy of the government.
As a practical matter, it is not possible to control the US via military force short of indiscriminately murdering most of the population, and a domestic military force doesn't even have that as a realistic option. Everyone knows this, so this is a deeply unserious scenario and the government would avoid precipitating it at all costs.
You are so secretly obsessed with the thought of a civil war you have taken to projecting your views on others. I never said american gun owners were an army, nor did I suggest an armed insurrection. It is merely a bulwark against the most extreme forms of government oppression. The cost of a more overt version of oppression of the american public is too high for the government to entertain. Regarding anything the government does, if they cant do so quietly, then they must do so through propaganda, and if they cant garner enough public support then they back off.
The american public has no guns, only the occasional shooting rifle. Did I do it right? You do not distinguish between freedom and liberty, those liberties are at times suspended. Things are definitely not ok in the united states, but thats not what guns are there to stop at this stage of our political system. The most valuable tools in the day to day are encryption and censorship resistant systems.
You mean like the US did Native Americans in early 20th century, or the Japanese-Americans in WWII? Or seggregation between blacks and whites?
Or like the fact that the US has the largest prison population (percentage wise) than any western country, by a huge factor? And where over a million people are convicted of felony per year?
There is nothing logically inconsistent with saying disarming the native population was a tactic used to further subjugate them, as an example. Racially motivated violence has almost unilaterally been the causal result of insufficiently armed minorities. Im all for letting non violent offenders out of prison.
And I never said it was fair, I said it was a balance; the balance is very clearly biased towards the government, but they do not enjoy such power for complete and violent subjugation. They rely instead on propaganda, I would argue that is the foundation of their power in fact; the creation myth of our government, that the public interest is represented, keep a critical mass unwittingly subsurvient.