[emptysongglass]

The right to bear arms was enshrined when the US didn't have a standing army. The military never dissolves back into the populace, rendering a few poorly trained people with a few guns (no APCs, no tanks, no hellfire drones) completely ineffectual. It's completely pointless today.

[ajmadesc]

I have this argument a lot being a self identified liberal with liberal friends.

Two points: 1. Although it wasn't the intention, the 2A creates the conditions for insurgency. Super powers don't do well against insurgency. 2. The military by nature is much much less likely to turn against the citizenry. The militarization of the police is much more likely.

[_underfl0w_]

> 2. The military by nature is much much less likely to turn against the citizenry.

While comforting, is this actually true?

We have seen this happen very recently with protests occurring - yes the police were there and heavily armed, but so was the actual military, who came swiftly to the president's beckoning.

It's an organization that prioritizes rank, the chain of command, and doing what you're told without question or hesitation. There even seems to be quite a lot of perks (think education, monetary reparations) to getting your hands dirty so that elected officials don't have to.

[curtainsforus]

It's a matter of economics. The US government wants (has) to rule, not just nuke the country and call it a day. If the whole country's armed, it becomes more costly to have boots on the ground everywhere enforcing the occupation. It at least shifts the equation more in the direction of concessions from the occupying force.

[meheleventyone]

It's the same economics for both sides though. A large-scale, protracted guerilla civil war would be economically devastating for both sides.

[curtainsforus]

There are myriad historical scenarios where large-scale protracted guerilla civil wars would have been economically preferable for the would-be guerillas compared to the alternative (or rather, default).

There's plenty of scenarios where the utility benefits of guerilla warfare (to the guerillas) outweigh the economic costs. To go right to Godwin's law as an extreme example, if every jew in 1930s Germany had engaged in guerilla warfare against the government instead of meekly getting on the trains, the utility benefits to them as a group would have wildly exceeded the economic costs of the hypothetical civil war.

Of course, the best gun is one you never need to fire. A rational alternate-universe government would foresee this, and know that by pursuing policy goal X they would create conditions where guerilla war was utility-positive for group Y, which would hurt the economy and so also the utility for the government. So the government would be (depending on the hypothetical ability of group Y do impede it) incentivised to pick policies that don't leave group Y no recourse but to start shooting.

Mutual armament as common knowledge leads to incentives for both sides to cooperate.

[xwdv]

The idea that a few people with guns are ineffectual is a common fallacy. A person with a gun at the right place and right time can easily be effective.

Also look at stuff like the Millennium Challenge, in which the United States Navy had multiple battleships with the latest and greatest technology sunk to the bottom of the ocean because of a couple guys riding around on bicycles passing notes and some small rafts with explosives.

An individual can do a lot.

[AdrianB1]

If it is pointless, the amendment should be formally removed (voted, ratified), not breached, otherwise any existing law and right can be breached with the excuse "this is completely pointless today".

[pmyteh]

That is essentially impossible with the high constitutional requirements for amendments and the current extent of polarisation and constitutional hardball. Even for things which are almost objectively broken: the electoral college, for example, has never worked in the way the Founders anticipated and no-one would dream of writing a similar system into a constitution today. So talk of amendments is pretty fantastical, regardless of the merits of the second amendment.