(February 23, 2018 at 7:19 pm)KevinM1 Wrote:(February 23, 2018 at 6:39 pm)wallym Wrote: Organized crime can still operate, because their fire power is a massive deterrent to government intervention. It doesn't have to be a revolution. The populace can be enough of a threat that subduing them isn't feasible.
My brothers and cousin and their friends own, between them, somewhere around 15-25 AR-15s in different configurations. And all that firepower is going to do jack shit if a Predator drone is pointed their way. Or if tanks actually roll down the street. Or if a few Apache gunships decide to have some fun with them. Or if an F-22 drops some ordinance on them. Or any of the other sudden, no-way-to-defend-against-it ways the government has at its disposal to kill people.
Weekend Rambos would have absolutely 0 chance in a revolution against the US if the government was actually tyrannical. And it's absurd to think that their weaponry, rather than the moral choices of the government, is what's stopping it from happening.
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.
