[hga]

Lots of liberals were famously armed when they went into the South, like Eleanor Roosevelt, many blacks kept themselves alive or less repressed with personal firearms, like Condoleezza Rice's father and his friends, and then there's the Deacons for Defense and Justice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacons_for_Defense_and_Justice . jivatmanx in the other reply right now covers a bit of what happened prior to and during the Civil War; I hail from the southern edge of what you might call Bleeding Missouri and have studied it a bit, guns were most certainly a very important factor.

As for strike-breaking and all that, while it's not an area I've studied, it's well established that both sides were armed and used their guns.

[notahacker]

I'm not saying many liberals, strikers and black people weren't armed and prepared to fight where it favoured them.

I'm saying they were, and people got oppressed in a far more direct, blatant and universal manner than anything that is likely to emerge from PRISM or the present US government's policy goals. Citizen-owned firearms might have been handy in the odd skirmish, but they didn't cause legislators or law enforcement to back down. Black people sat in the back of the bus and grudgingly accepted there wasn't much they could do about their neighbour getting lynched. Strikes were bust in a blaze of gunfire and millions of other members of the trade union movement went to work as normal the next day. Even as determined a revolutionary as John Brown failed where the Union military succeeded a year later.

Concern that the oppressed could potentially gain access to firearms neither dissuaded administrations from enacting oppressive laws nor accelerated the pace of their removal.

Why would it be different next time round?

[hga]

Strange, I have this memory of the following successes of both groups:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Act (the Wagner Act, even if moderated by things like the Taft–Hartley Act)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fourth_Amendment_to_the_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_v._Virginia_Board_of_Ele...

And it's always struck me that the Civil Rights Memorial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Memorial) is most remarkable because it only has 40 names on it.

(Just the highest of highlights, I'm leaving a lot out.)

[notahacker]

I am aware the twentieth century happened.

However, I have yet to see anyone seriously suggest that the Civil Rights Act was introduced because the police were terrified that black people defying segregation laws might shoot them, or the Supreme Court ruled segregation in schools unconstitutional because it had proved unenforceable. For that matter, those Southern whites who thought their rights were being violated by "forced busing" proved equally reluctant to resort to armed confrontation. It wasn't a hot war, or even a cold war, it was a culture war.

The right to bear arms was orthogonal to the civil rights movement: it didn't prevent the original introduction of the tyranny off "Jim Crow" laws which were effectively enforced for decades, didn't influence the legislative and judicial rulings against them in the mid 20th century and couldn't even protect the movement's key figures.

[hga]

Obviously we disagree, I think the RKBA allowed a lot of blacks to continue pushing by allowing them to continue living, or living longer, or limiting the degree to which they could be easily intimidated.

One thing you're not factoring in when you compare this period to the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras is economics and technology. Everyone including blacks were much more able to afford small arms and ammo by the civil rights era, and guns were a lot more maintainable after we switched to non-corrosive primers and smokeless powder. And of course technological advances helped the economics by driving down the intrinsic costs of guns and ammo.