(February 23, 2018 at 11:23 pm)wallym Wrote: Yeah, if it was 1740, and your brother lined up in a field across from the US Army, best team wins situation, it'd be nothing. Just like we'd have been out of Iraq in a week playing by those rules. Using Iraq again as an example, there's never any doubt the US could conquer Iraq. The insurgency wasn't thinking "Maybe we'll kill all of them before they kill all of us!" It's about the price. Can you make it so expensive that it's not worth it. And if the US had a rough expensive go of it in Iraq, imagine trying to deal with the continental United States filled with millions of reasonably well armed civilians. Where would you even begin? An urban gorilla war in a 3.8 million square mile expanse of land? Iraq was 170k for comparison.
True but who would actually try invading the US even if the population had no guns whatsoever? Not only does it have the largest military forces in the world, it would take the rest of the world to match it, but even if the military was a normal size, as you say, the landmass is so large.
So because you guys have such a large army and navy and so much land, there is even less need for the population to be armed to the teeth in case of a land war. If you're going to have everyone owning such weapons, you might as well put the money that would otherwise go to the military into something more useful like health care. Or if you're going to fund the military at the expense of the population's quality of life, then at least get rid of the weapons that you don't need and be safer.
At the moment the US has the worst of both worlds. All its money goes to the military yet it still isn't a safe place to live.
