Gun Control

[CapnAwesome]

Pretty rehashed points, but I'm going to specifically respond to #3



I assume this is in response to people who say they need guns in case they have to fight the government. While I think there are flaws in that argument I also think that obviously an armed populace could overthrow the government, regardless of whether or not they have cruise missiles and tanks. People who say this need to think a little. The Afghans are only men with guns, and they've successfully fought the most powerful militaries in the world in the last 100 years. They are far less numerous and have less guns than Americans. The actual number of combat troops that the US has is pitifully low. Something along the lines of a few hundred thousand. Compare that to 100 million armed Americans and it doesn't matter how many cruise missiles they have, the US population could easily defeat the US military. I even suspect that an unarmed populace could probably overthrow the government if they had to, just given the numbers. So while I do understand many arguments for gun control, I find this particular one to be based on a false assumption.

The Afghans have a few things going for them that most insurgents don't. First, they live in a very mountainous country, which tends to negate some of the advantages a superpower brings to bear. Secondly, they have a homogeneous culture which gives them a natural base of support. Thirdly, when they fought the Brits, air mobility hadn't been invented, and when they fought the Russians, they had the aid of a superpower. Those conditions don't obtain in any hypothetical gun-owner rebellion I've seen. Would gun owners take aid from China or Russia? I hardly think so. Fourthly, while there may be millions of gun owners versus a few hundred thousand combat troops, the troops are trained, and in most cases combat-experienced, and certainly much more disciplined. When it comes to fighting power, the willingness to fight is a big part of the equation.

Such a revolt would certainly cause big problems, but unlike, say, the Revolutionary War, the citizen army would  not be facing an opponent resupplying from across the sea in the age of sail; they would have deep difficulties resupplying themselves as a government with tentacles in many IT systems froze their accounts, tracked their movements, and used satellite imagery to track the rebels down.

And in a civil war such as is the subject of fantasy by some extremist gun groups, how much support could the rebels count on? To an American population accustomed to leisure and easy credit, a roving band of armed militia would not be very popular, I don't think, and fetching the support of the citizenry would require educating them.

Good luck with that.

This is just hypothetically speaking, I'm not talking about some roving band of wackos from Michigan in modern times, but say a Christian-facist future government. Something worth fighting against by large numbers of people.  I don't think at all there should be armed revolt at all right now, but...The US is also a very unhospital country to fight in. That's part of the reason that the greatest nation to have existed up to that point in time (Great Britain) got thrown out by a relatively small force of Americans and French. That's on the east coast. The west coast is covered in forests and mountains and the main thing, our population is enormous compared to the size of our armed forces. In the early 20th century For all the talk about the invincibility of the US army, we really aren't that good. We lost in Vietnam and have struggled against measily forces in the middle east. I'm pretty unconvinced that 100 million Americans with guns is less formidable than the Afghanis.