I thought the “major” gun arguments were:
A well armed civil population was more able to defend itself against oppression.
Self defence and the right to defend one and one’s property.
Well - if there is a belief that the current president is not legitimate then that is oppression in the highest order. Quite genuinely you have an un-elected dictatorship. The fact that in the face of oppression the tool of use is not a gun surely means that such high levels of level of gun ownership are not required. Because at the moment we are 18 months into what millions of gun owners believe to be an illegitimate presidency. And the well regimented militia which is supposed to safe guard against this does not seem to have materialised.
I’ll be fair I had not considered this. And I have 0 idea how true this is.
I do not find it strange. It is 100% logical. A well armed civilian militia could not stand against the USA government. So it did not.
This is absurd. Let’s picture a room of 100 people. An election is held. 51 vote for President A, who campaigned on a promise to kill those who didn’t vote for him. President B’s backers manipulated the votes to make it look like P.B. Got 51 votes. P.B. campaigned on a promise that he wouldn’t do anything if elected. President B takes office. He doesn’t do anything. That is not oppression.
In other words, the legitimacy of elections has nothing to do with oppression. There is likely a relation between the two, but it does not follow that illegitimate elections are oppression.
Maybe - but I guess what the question is does the civilian population?
Assuming Biden did not win the vote and he is in power through voting fraud.
So you think having an un-elected head of state does not count as oppression? You think having the power of your vote removed does not count as oppression? If you think having the democratic process of your country subverted is not oppression?
If you think Biden was not voted in but got there through fraud then what happened was not an election. But a well disguised coup. And should be resisted.
Who cares? We allow people that pay zero-dollars in taxes to have the same vote as people that pay $100,000, etc. in taxes.
The same people are in charge that are always in charge. There was no coup. You seem to have a belief that it was “Trump v. Biden-Winner takes all." If elections mattered, they’d be illegal.
Edit: I’d also like to add that there was no fraud that mattered anyway. IF there was fraud, it was in the general election, which is not where a President is elected.
The population in that compound in Waco sure put up a good fight, didn’t they? 4 dead government agents and 16 wounded during a massively expensive 51 day siege. All to take out some religious zealots in an unfortified compound with no utilities who were keeping to their own weird selves. It was a total PR disaster for the government and the Clinton Administration in particular that was met with great public backlash.
The government has neither the capability, the manpower or the will of the people behind it to carry out enough Waco’s to satisfy the woke progressive dream of a disarmed populace. The scale would be staggering and unprecedented.
I think you may be confusing the president of the USA with a monarch. The two perform very different functions. As it stands, our mail-in president remains very constrained by other parts of the government, as by design.
You seem very persistent in your belief that Americans ought to be leaving our jobs and putting our family’s well-being at risk to engage in an armed uprising to get rid of Joe Biden. Americans don’t see it that way. I’m sorry if you were hoping for a little Civil War 2 schadenfreude, we’re just not there in 2022.
I think we can wrap this line of policy talk up. You’ve got us Yanks dead to rights. Joe Biden is the president and will be for the next two years, despite the objections of a great many American gun owners. Unless you have a gun policy corollary to build off of that notion, let’s move on with the discussion.
@NickViar I do not understand your point. You claim it is absurd to say an illegitimate president is oppression. BUT agree with the statement that removal of the democratic process is oppression.
They are the same thing.
100% not. I’m only trying to understand how people hold two seemingly contradictory beliefs at the same time.
And I will move on / drop it. However it feel like a side step of a difficult proposition. Which is: At the moment millions of gun owning American’s feel they are being lead by an illegitimate government. Which means that the second amendment did not provide protection for the free State.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State
I don’t see this as black and white as you do. Sure there are millions of gun owners. Who would consider that disorganized group of a multitude of opinions could become “a well regulated militia”?
But nonetheless the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The contradictions you are imagining only exist in straw men caricatures of American gun owners who aren’t real, unless a particular one comes to mind you can name. You seem to be operating from the premise that Joe Biden winning an election that was openly rigged at the last minute should be a nation-wide call to arms for American Patriots to abandon our civic process, take up arms, organize ourselves into combat units and start raising hell.
That’s not how Americans think, let alone act. We’re going to give the old electoral process at least one more try before we light the place on fire. We’ve got jobs and families and you more or less need to start fucking with the family before Americans get nasty. Joe Biden sleeping his way through the presidency while his woke handlers display their ineptitude doesn’t strike me as an existential crisis. One shady election win for a party in its death throes does not equal oppression.
Besides, we’ve still got enough guns to raise more hell than the government could ever hope to deal with, should push come to shove.
I appreciate the civility. It’s an interesting fictional rabbit hole to ponder, but this is a thread primarily designed to get gun control supporters to explain their actual ideas about policy in clear terms.
So unless you’re prepared to follow your premise through with a policy corollary, let’s keep the Civil War 2 hypotheticals in an appropriate thread.
What if they all showed up armed and started shooting? (Not saying they should have).Dont misunderstand, i dont for a second think merely the presence of and armed population keeps things in check. Its the last resort when every other avenue has been attempted. If every peaceful means has been exhausted, violence or compliance become the only options. Free people maintain the ability to have those options.
The article reflective of a saner and healthier time in American. There is talk of guns and other things and activities that carried risk, but that unsupervised and responsible, sane people did without harm to others.
I’m 43, not an old geezer, and even I had more liberties in the 90’s, though that was a time when many loonies started to rear their heads and society was becoming more and more permissive, and “progressive,” and “civilized.”
From the article (link is after):
“Things were looser then. When I wanted to go shooting, I put my rifle, a nice .22 Marlin with a ten-power Weaver, on my shoulder and walked out the main gate. At the country store outside the gate I’d buy a couple of boxes of long rifles, no questions asked, and away my co-conspirator Rusty and I went to some field or swamp to murder beer cans.
Today if a kid of fifteen tried it, six squad cars and a SWAT team (in all likelihood literally) would show up with sirens yowling, the kid’s parents would be jailed, the store closed and its proprietors imprisoned, and the kid subjected to compulsory psychiatric examination. Times change.”
“We had them. The consequence? Our heads were screwed on right. We probably even thought that the world looked to be a good place for a while. Although the entire high school had easy access to fire arms, nobody ever shot anyone. The idea would have seemed lunatic. In rare fights, boys might punch each other in the nose. Pick up a tire iron? Kick the other guy in the head? Not a chance.”
It’s not just modern progressivism. The original progressives, like Woodrow Wilson (ptew) believed in top down central planning authoritarianism to drive “progress.” Fascism, Communism, and Progressivism, are all cut from the same cloth.
The Eugenics movement is the brainchild of the progressives. The Tuskegee experiments? That was the progressives. In fact, the Nazis were apparently inspired by the Eugenics movement in the US.
The word progressive wasn’t used for generations in the US because people knew who the progressives were, so they hid under the name “Liberals” and gave liberalism a bad name.
