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by 1101010010 1166 days ago
I'm not interested in discussing personal anecdotes, only factual history which is replete with examples of state-sponsored genocide and tyranny when the population is disarmed.
2 comments

Seems to me your claims are also personal anecdotes. You claim something, the other guy claims something else. The real difference is that you're claiming that the answer is universal, whereas the other guy is saying it depends.

The way I see it you're making a stronger claim and thus have a higher burden of proof. And yet, you offered none.

You can start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre and follow with a middle school history book about Germany, China or about a dozen other nations.
That looks like a personal anecdote to me, exactly like what the other guy said.

He said "in my country such and such happened". And you're saying "here's an example of such and such happening".

EDIT: But now that we're at it,

> The Wounded Knee Massacre, also known as the Battle of Wounded Knee, was a massacre of nearly three hundred Lakota people by soldiers of the United States Army.

300 people seems like nothing compared to the number of people that dies every year due to (civilian) gun violence. You're just thinking binary, you're not thinking with numbers. Also your best example is from 1890. Roughly the same amount of people that died in school shootings in the first three months of this year. Your commitment to ideology is hilarious.

You asked for a citation, you were provided one. If you think 300 unarmed civilians being murdered by the government because of their race is "nothing" then there is nothing left to discuss. I am honestly worried about what you might think of Mao's China or Hitler's Germany and their respective civilian disarmament; I bet very few lives were lost to "civilian gun violence" under their rule, too.
I'm not interested in discussing personal anecdotes.
None of what I said is anecdotal, but you only seem interested in the taste of licked boots, so this conversation is over.
China never had a citizenry widely armed with firearms.

Germany was also never widely armed prior to Hitler. This is an urban myth.

Only a handful of societies have ever had widespread civilian armament. Certainly not enough to make any kind of causal inference about the general effects of firearms on revolutionary or counter-revolutionary activity.

And Wounded Knee? This was a continuation of a policy of Manifest Destiny and genocide that saw hundreds of massacres and battles. The many armed battles that took place would suggest that being armed wasn't a significant deterrent to US cavalry.

PRC had massive public firearms ownership stemming from people's war, villages were settling beef with home made artillery into the 90s until gov crackdown.
There’s nothing factual about that fantastical history. Possessing a firearm doesn’t prevent state violence, if anything it justifies further escalation. An armed rabble doesn’t have a chance against trained soldiers, and a citizen militia doesn’t have a chance against artillery.

Ask the various native peoples, who at various times outgunned the then pitiful US Army, how well that worked out. Read the survivor accounts about how well the Easter Rising did in Ireland. Political movements defeat state power, period.

It does prevent state violence the same way nukes prevent world wars. State violence rarely looks like soldiers vs citizens, because soldiers would rebel if they were given such an order. What tyrannical states do is they employ a third party, gangsters or cartels, that are given a carte-blanche to terrorize citizens. See what happened in Hong Kong: CCP hired Triads, those attacked citizens, while the riot police standed behind and arrested _citizens_ who dared to push back. The same cannot happen in the US because the gangsters would be outnumbered 1000:1, and the order to engage soldiers against citizens would split the army into competing factions. Edit: when I say gangsters I don't mean those who rob banks, I mean radicalized mobs who are far more dangerous because their motive is not money, but ideological control.
What happened in the United States when cheap guns began flooding the streets?

A: Tactical teams with automatic weapons, sometimes snipers or air support now serve warrants and raid moderate risk suspects.

We don’t have a tyrannical government. The US unrest scenario is different than China as the citizenry is neutral or pro-government, but you have a vocal minority. We have reactionary political parties that use armed LARPer militias to intimidate voters and influence policy.

I'm far more worried about BLM-style riots. Iirc, in Seattle they even managed to cordone off parts of the city, called them "autonomous zones" and declared themselves kingpins of the square, while the gov forces were ordered to not engage. The local citizens who lived there had to get over it. Only when BLM kingpins killed someone the gov forces had to engage.
Reference to these events, please?
Can you name just one example of a US armed "militia" intimidating a voter?
Which native peoples outgunned the US Army? Please provide a citation for such an outlandish claim.
Try reading stuff not written for a gun audience. Lots of scenarios in American history exist where tribes were well equipped with repeating rifles while the Army was stuck with Civil War surplus or breechloaders. The 1870s army was a ramshackle affair underfunded and poorly maintained.

Ditto with the Boers and the British. The Brits weren’t faring well against mobile artillery and people not marching around with redcoats and brass. The Brits “won” when they put the families in concentration camps and half starved them.

Guns are powerful, but power doesn’t come from the barrel of a gun.

I'm trying to read it by asking you to cite something, but you have so far been unable to. "Lots of scenarios" is vague and you should be able to come up with at least a few specific examples to support your argument.