[NoImmatureAdHom]

Heh, I think the level of dislike we're talking about here is different. You may not like them but it's nothing like being a Jew under the Third Reich or, perhaps, living in eastern Ukraine right now. The point at which "power comes from the barrel of a gun" becomes relevant someplace like the U.K. is a ways off for almost everyone living there, thankfully.

The worry is twofold: first, not having an armed populace now might allow things to get really bad in the future, whereas in the case where everyone's reasonably well-armed, or has the option to be, it wouldn't have gotten that bad in the first place. Second, if things are really bad at present, bad to the point that fighting seems reasonable, you want to be able to fight. Disarming now means you'll likely be disarmed in an uncertain future, too.

Our modern social democracies seem really stable, but from the perspective of a historian there is no reason to believe they are. They're infants. There's a war in Europe right now, and there are people alive who remember the Holocaust.

[Gordonjcp]

Okay, again, what do you think you and your supermarket own-brand assault rifle are going to do about that?

[NoImmatureAdHom]

The rifles that Americans own themselves are just fine. Average quality is better than military, though the military does get features that are illegal for civilians (like full auto).

330,000,000 potentially armed people (or about 260,000,000 armed adults) is something to be reckoned with. A bunch of goat-herding peasants in Afghanistan fended off not one but both superpowers, and at that mostly with small arms. The fact that the U.S. chooses to arm its population is definitely relevant for the direction its politics goes. Whether that's good or bad, net...well, we never get to know because we never see the counterfactual situation.

[Gordonjcp]

> The rifles that Americans own themselves are just fine. Average quality is better than military, though the military does get features that are illegal for civilians (like full auto).

And that's going to protect you from a drone strike how, exactly?

[kortilla]

Why are you talking about drone strikes? Those don’t work for insurgency, which is what you’ll get in a civil war.

[ClapperHeid]

  >>it's nothing like being a Jew under the Third Reich or, perhaps, living in eastern Ukraine right now...

  >>not having an armed populace now might allow things to get really bad in the future, whereas in the case where everyone's reasonably well-armed, or has the option to be, it wouldn't have gotten that bad in the first place...

Again, this is a chalk & cheese comparison. People like to forget that the Third Reich was democratically elected. The German people read "Mein Kampf", listened to Hitler's "Make Germany Great Again" speeches and put their cross next to the Nazi party. And, up until the tide of war started to turn against them, most were pretty happy with the outcome.

It's also convenient to forget that, in those times, hatred of the Jews wasn't an exclusively Nazi, or even German, sentiment. In many other parts of the world, Hitler was initially seen as being a "good thing" and giving the Jews what they richly deserved.

Of course, with history being written by the winners, these facts tend to be glossed over now. So Hitler seized power and plunged an oppressed and terrified people into a war they didn't want And the rest of the world was always horrified by the Nazis' treatment of the Jews.

This is what I meant, when I said above that "Oppression is incremental". By the time you realise that you're living under fascism, it's too late to do anything. And you'll be in for a shock if you're depending on your fellow citizens to rally to your "Let's throw off our oppressors!" flag. Most of them will be quite happy to see you dragged off in the night, instead --you stinking Jew-Lover!

[replace "Jew" with "Commie", "Terrorist", "Paedo"... etc. as required by zeitgeist]

And re your point about Ukraine:

The irony is that Russia's justification for seizing areas such as the Donbass in the East is precisely because they say ethnic Russians there were being oppressed by the Ukrainian government. And that was in spite of those ethnic Russians having well-armed militias already in existence. So having an armed population didn't really help there, did it?

And, in the wider context, the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion is being fought by the existing Ukrainian well-trained, professional armed forces, who are being supplied with billions of £££s worth of advanced weaponry.

And they're still taking a pounding.

So the idea that a handful of untrained civilians with their Wal-Mart rifles could have prevented any of this is delusional fantasy.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

> So the idea that a handful of untrained civilians with their Wal-Mart rifles could have prevented any of this is delusional fantasy.

The thing about the U.S. is it's not a handful. They have more guns in civilian hands than people. It would be very easy for U.S. civilians to arm literally everyone.

And, I should note, the quality of the rifles people own privately is as good as or better than what the military gets. The military does, however, get full-auto.

I take your point about the Nazis. I suppose if I had to point out a difference with respect to the U.S. today, it would be that the right to keep and bear arms is for everyone. Americans really don't discriminate (at least overtly), and that's a core tenet. The Jews in Nazi Germany obviously were or had to be disarmed before terrible things happened to them.

[ClapperHeid]

  >The thing about the U.S. is it's not a handful. They have more guns in civilian hands than people. It would be very easy for U.S. civilians to arm literally everyone...

You're still labouring under the false assumption that, were an oppressive government to come to power everyone would rise up against it. That's simply not true. A sizeable chunk of the population would perceive said government as a "good thing" either because; it smacked down on some section of society they detested [cf. Nazi Germany and the Jews], they profited from its existence [cf. Nazi Germany and companies like Krupp, IG Farben, VW, etc], it elevated them from nonentity to a position of authority [cf. Nazi Germany and people like Heinrich Himmler, etc.].

And there would also be a sizeable chunk of the population who would just keep their heads down and hope that, if they didn't draw attention to themselves, they'd survive it all.

I mean that is pretty much what the current policing system depends on. Enough people who might be tempted to step out of line are just frightened enough of the possible consequences of getting caught, that the numbers who actually do transgress stay just about manageable.

How much more so would that be true if, instead of a "civilised" interrogation, followed by a fair trial and a justified prison term, the consequences of raising your head above the parapet were being dragged out of bed at night, whisked away somewhere to be beaten into confessing and then put up against a wall and shot?

I think you're massively under-estimating the number of people who would either support an oppressive regime, or would just knuckle under and wait for things to improve.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

You could be right. I hope not!