Honestly though gun control will do nothing to curse the current situation in the U.S.; Europe is fucked since they decided to give welfare to ISIS. Predominately the people committing violent gun-related crimes in the U.S. are usually gang affiliated, drug addicts, or your other common filth. These people will, and do, stab you to death for the same reason they shoot you.
Want proof how trashy they are? Come to any minor-city in Illinois. Our wonderful state is moving them, predominately from Chicago, to our neighborhoods. Places with low crime rates and drug problems have sky rocketed in less than five years. Large towns that hardly ever had gun crime now have it. Disarming people here will just make the entire state burn.
I believe a better question is will we or will we not have large-scale-vehicle control. If it can carry a few tons of cargo it must have extensive control and background checks. We must stop such vehicles from being in civilian hands.
If you look at a lot of big cities and even many not so big cities and even some rural areas, the trend is to reduce automobile traffic in favour of public transport etc. Maybe not so evident in US but very noticeable in Europe. So, irony maybe not so strong.
I believe a better question is will we or will we not have large-scale-vehicle control. If it can carry a few tons of cargo it must have extensive control and background checks. We must stop such vehicles from being in civilian hands.
When you buy a gun, regardless of your intentions, you're buying a weapon; when you buy a truck, you're just buying a truck. There's also an argument for utility here, gun use is rarely something a society genuinely needs, transportation on the other hand is important to just about everything.
For the same reason as any other lobby. Money and power? Mind you, I am not saying this is some kind of giant conspiration. But I don't think that it is far fetched to say that the weapon industry in the US has a keen interest, that well weapons stay as how they are. The tobacco industry fought for decades in favour of their product with lobbyism and in some cases outright missinformation, despite of their knowledge that it was harmfull to their consumers. I am not saying tobacco and weapons are the same. But there are a lot of different interests here. For some it is their love for weapons, for others how many they can sell, most probably a combination of many motivations.
Well, I would say they have also the role of educating people. And if their opinion is that weapons can have an effect on public health, they should have the right to express that. It feels to me as if the lobby of the oil industry would act against the NASA, to further the agenda of global warming because it could be used to their disadvantage in a political debate. Beacuse people could be persuaded to ban or restrict the oil industry.
Do you know who's the last person to have pulled funding for firearms related violence? Obama, after his famous "executive orders to combat gun violence". Do you know why the research got nipped in the bud? Because it was looking like the outcome would not have been in his favor. The last CDC & FBI published statistics actually favor a pro-gun narrative.
Well, that's the other side of the coin of course, I give you that. They should be free to come to their own conclussions. No matter which side it supports.
I think most people didn't see it coming when Hitler, Stalin & Mao started murdering people by the millions. It's hypocritical to think that either humanity has changed and would be unable to do that again or that we are smarter and that we would be able to act in time.
But that's my point ... weapons aren't going to make you more likely to see those things. Education, information and well generally speaking free thinking is. That's the best defence you have against opressive regimes that are born from the inside. An elected legislature can trample a mans rights as any dictator, if he doesn't perceive the opression as wrong.
Weapons might have their use when shit hits the fan. But what use are they when people are simply convinced that they are fighting for the good cause, and just a very very small minority actually wants to oppose it. Again, as you said most people didn't see it coming. And the Milgram experiment frightenly shows that almost everyone is capable of such attrocities, given the right conditions.
Do you? Were Belgian, French & Polish resistance forces in the second world war were not relevant? There weren't that many of those guys either. They sure made a difference, though.
They certainly contributed to the efforts, but they didn't bring down the German warmachine. I think that was done for the most part by the bulk of the allied forces. Namely the American and Soviet ones. I don't want to dimnish the bravery, courage and suffering of the resistance movements. But I think what we saw in Kursk, DD-Day and Bastogne and the many other engagements did a lot more to win the war against the Germans.
You say the conflicts we face do not require guns or that guns have no influence on them, but which group of people is easier to repress? The ones where there are rifles hanging over the fireplace and the house is populated with people who know how to use it? Or the house where anything pointy has been removed for "the greater good"?
Rifles, like any weapons are inanimate objects. They don't possess the power to make people inherently more intelligent or alert to their zeitgeist. Why was racial segreation a thing in the US for such a long time? The constiution was clearly violated here. And yet, it took an tremendious amount for work and courage and decades of political work to make changes here.
The constitution, liberty and freedom is often cited (a least by americans) like a sacred cow that shall never ever even be touched up on, but when I am looking at the American history, what people actually mean is their own priviliges. The moment the arguments of the other side are brought into it, things look different, and we tend to find also excuses in some cases. The psychology behind conflicts.
(...)a team of researchers from The New School for Social Research, Northwestern University and Boston College demonstrates how seemingly unsolvable political and ethnic conflicts are fueled by asymmetrical perceptions of opponents’ motivations – and that these tensions can be relieved by providing financial incentives to better understand what drives an adversary group.
“This research demonstrates a fundamental cognitive bias driving [historic] conflict intractability,” write researchers Jeremy Ginges, Assistant Professor of Psychology at The New School, Adam Waytz, Assistant Professor of Management & Organizations at Northwestern, and Liane Young, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Boston College. “Understanding this bias and how to alleviate it can contribute to conflict resolution on a global scale.” http://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2014/GingesStudy_000.htm
In other words, each group sees their perception of reality as right and rational, where as the opposition is wrong and fueld by emotions. What a novell idea :p.
- Me included of course, it's not like I am a special snowflake. I much easier sympathize with you then I ever could with Damnit Boy, no matter how right he might be with some of his argument. But that just by the way.
You're talking about which side is easier to opress. But I am not arguing about that. I have no doubt that brave americans sitting behind every bush with a rifle would be difficuilt to combat. And yeah, they might topple a potential tarannical regime much easier then the Germans But what I am arguing about is, why gun owners couldn't be persuaded into following and supporting a tyrannical regime in the first place, if that regime isn't aimed at them and if they actually see it as righteous. If you can trick whole nations to act against their own interest, agreeing to surveilance - patriot act, acceptance of torture and despotism - Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, killing of civilians - Dronestrikes, and even to engage in unjust wars - Vietnam, Iraq.
It is constantly mentioned how weapons are not inherently dangerous, how they are merely tools and objects and inanimate things that posses no power on their own. Well, I absolutely agree with that one! When it comes to defending the values from ideologies. Because you can't fight ideas and ideologies with weapons. Die Gedanken sind Frei, mein Freund. Remember that . So when a large portion of the civilians in the US would actually agree with their regime, it could assume power, despite of the large number of weapons. It might at some point lead to a revolt when this regime turns against their own people, but the damage would be already done at that point. And in such a situation an armed population might have possibly an easier time to get rid of their government. No argument from me on that one! But that's already one step ahead of my point.
It would be kinda ironic, to think a future US government operating detention camps outside U.S. legal jurisdiction, torturing and killing of innocent people, conducting mass surveilance ... for decades would get only challanged and eventually toppled the moment it even dares to touch the rights to bear arms.
When you look at peaceful ARMED protests in the US, cops are extremely respectful and entirely unprovocative. And if you say that guns have not been used in protection of given rights, you are wrong. See what the Oathkeepers did during many of these protests. I might not agree with them, but they had a de-escalating effect on the violence.
(...)
On January 26, five of the militants were arrested on U.S. Route 395 about 48 miles (77 km) north of the occupation. Among those arrested were Ammon Bundy and his brother Ryan.[38] Ryan Bundy suffered a minor gunshot wound to his arm during his arrest.[38][39] During the confrontation, law enforcement officers shot and killed Robert "LaVoy" Finicum while he was reportedly reaching for his gun.[40][41] The last four militants at the refuge surrendered on February 11, ending the occupation.[42]
Other related arrests followed in the months after the end of the occupation. Of the 27 people arrested, 26 were charged under federal law with a single count of felony conspiracy,[43][44] and most were subsequently charged with a variety of other offenses relating to the use of firearms and the abuse of government property. Their trials are scheduled to start on September 7, 2016, and February 14, 2017.[45][46] As of August 1, eleven of those charged have pleaded guilty to crimes related to the occupation.
*Shrugs* The resolve of all of that doesn't seem that peacefull to me.
Sure, but there we differ in what we should protect and how.
The damage done by giving up these gun rights (or privileges in Europe) is viewed (by gun nuts such as myself) as being higher than the cost to society in keeping those rights.
Well, most European nations don't have this gun-tradition as we see it in the US to begin with, and I would say that most of us are at least as soverign, liberal and free like the US society in general. At the same time, we don't see a militarisation of police forces and increased police brutality - at least Germany.
I would say, we are doing still absolutely fine. Despite the fact that we never had those kind of gun-freedom as the US to begin with. I can't talk for Belgium of course, just Germany in that respect. And Germans is today more liberal and peacefull then it ever was in it's whole history.
Artillery and air support are responsible for 80-90% of all battlefield casualties in modern warfare.
Small arms are an important part of fighting mostly because our current morals do not allow us to employ the alternative tools on things where civilians might be present. If we had no such scruples, then artillery and air support would be responsible for 99.99% of the casualties of war.
Against civlians definetly yes. You are absolutely correct as far as unprotected target goes. Most of the casualties in WW2, even against military personal, have been caused by the artillery this is also true.
But as every militrary expert will tell you, if you want to make a difference, one way or another you have to put boots on the ground. Almost every weapon in the arsenal of a military force, be it artillery, tanks or planes, is there to one way or another support the efforts of the infantry. And this is also reflected by the design where the most succesfull tanks are those that can actually do both, combat enemy armor and defeating infantry.
Neither planes, tanks nor artillery can actually hold areas. Even if you kill 99,99% of the other side. You have still to send your own infantry in to deal with the remaining 1%. If you want to conquer and hold the teritory. But I would challange that number of loses you cite due to artillery, because as many wars have shown, artillery is relatively ineffective in destroying enemy positions to the point where they pose no resistance at all. As shown by the casualties American troops suffered on, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and the DD-Day invasion, who all saw an extensive and unparall use of artillery and explosives, be it from the air, land or sea. Vietnam and the Korean war have also shown that an overall reliance on air superiority and artillery doesn't win you the war. And there really wasn't a lot of considerations on where, how and what kind of weapons the US used, other than for nuclear weapons. I won't rule out that thouse might have won them the war in North Korea, I guess. But that's a different story.
Tell that to the people who mobilized to go fight in the Middle East (ISIS, Kurdish resistance, and so on). If you look at wars like Korea or the Spanish revolution, a very large amount of the fighting forces were foreign volunteers.
Apples and Oranges I would say. Albeit ... I am not sure if it is also in favour of the argument if we always compare their political situation and climate with third world nations. Like when people say, see the viollence in detroit! We need weapons to combat crime! It's as dangerous like in Somalia down there! Oh well ...
And at the same time for opression. Maybe even more so, when you're looking at how many so called freedom fighters simply turned out to be just the same like the groups/governments they fought. What we saw in the US with the war for indepdence is, sadly, the exception in human history. Not even the French revolution was about liberty and freedom.
Not anecdotal, but rather a decade's daily exposure to it, and continual amazement at what must be seen to be believed. Like a whetstone, it makes one jaded to a razor keen edge on the topic.
The old world [view] is gone, and where once parents would organize a school bake sale or other event to raise money for a school project, now they will simply picnic on a city median, with their kids (and possibly their friends kids); panhandling all day, possibly all week from every car that stops at the intersection. I would say allegedly for something like school uniforms or such, (if indeed anything at all).
At least one card carrying vagrant roosts on almost every major intersection in downtown New Orleans, and almost every intersection in the commercial side of the French Quarter. Bad things can happen to [basically] good people, but here it is exceedingly the case that the person you see [or God help you ~give money to] will be there every day for months... It's a booze teat, and most exhibit zero desire, or incentive to walk away from it, nor to seek out better circumstance for themselves.
I kid you not, it is a shockingly common occurrence in New Orleans to step over sleeping people on the sidewalk. If you try to offer them food, they will ask for money instead; order them food in a restaurant, and gain the enmity of the restaurant, and as soon as you are out of sight [conscience assuaged], they will try to trade back the food for the money you paid for it; this from the personal experience of myself and others known to me who have tried. This is ENTIRELY by their own choice that they remain so. This city rarely has harsh weather ~even in winter, and those few nights of the year when the temps turn deadly, the city homeless shelters open up for free to all. The city is filled with abandoned houses to sleep in; there are three in my own block. Every winter we get fires in the city because the homeless set the houses ablaze during the night [presumably by negligent accident, but who knows].
There are people that will nurture a meal-ticket wound ~by not letting it heal; it makes them pitiable to the tourists; it increases their panhandling income.
Alternatively... [the con artists] I knew of a woman (seemingly in her 80s) that would [expertly] beg hotel guests as they came and went... As they passed, she would weakly exhale "...h..hhheelp meh" with an open palm held out; and I would sometimes see husbands or wives stop 20 feet past her, break down, and walk back to hand her their money. At the end of the night, she would trade 1's & 5's for 100's [plural] in the strip bar across the street from the Royal Sonnesta Hotel. Yes this grand hotel has a huge strip club not fifty feet directly across from their lobby front door. These people generally qualify for ~and accept state welfare stipends and disability checks; with which they acquire food and housing for free, but they have cellphones, and cars, and flatscreen televisions, and often even cable/satellite subscriptions [sometimes the dishes are actually installed on rent controlled public housing (!!?) ~where the rent might be as low as $16 a month... but the cable bill could be 5 times that amount per month ~if it's legally installed that is, and anyone who can afford that, is not supposed to be living in the housing complex].
It is parts of Atlas Shrugged come to pass, but in ways worse than she ever imagined. The culture here is complicit with this, and people are gaming the system wholesale as a way of life, in tandem with the new cultural norm (in addition to begging from the State) of begging from everyone they see on the street. Living off the State charity has become the only life they know or care for. Their children grow up perceiving the world this way, and when they are eligible, they (or their parents) apply for their own benefits; and the cycle repeats.
If you can sell beer to thirsty people, someone around here will hire you to do it, and provide the beer. People can get jobs here if they want them badly enough... People here can easily invent their own jobs... There are a about a dozen people in the French Quarter [at least four of them I see almost daily] that make $20 to $30 an hour standing around letting themselves be photographed for tips [this is licensed by the city]... Some have constructed costumes, or performance props, but at least three of these people merely buy a can of spraypaint (yes hardware store spraypaint!), and spray their face and body in metalic silver or gold, and strike poses on the street.
One dresses up as Vader, and dances to the Village People song YMCA...
But the city is filled with those that are content decay on the city's park benches, and get drunk every night on charity alms. They don't want jobs, or a respectable home life; they want you to give them cash that they can trade for alcohol and cigarettes. People will sit in droves on the sidewalks and benches here, watching street vendors and performers make sales, only to then approach them begging for money... They obviously have [free!?] money, how dare they not share it.
I knew a lot of people who experienced poverty. I still have a lot of relatives that do. And I also experienced poverty on my own as a child. For years. Because my father was a viollent drunk and gambler trough most of his life and I personaly am suffering from severe mental problems trough out my whole life, from anxiety disorders, suicide attempts to depressions of various degrees. I am not trying to hidde behind my condition! I certainly make a difference between people that try and those that don't want anything else but free money. But a large part of my energy is spend on keeping a sense of sanity. And I also had to be hospitalized once.
Things change a bit when you actually have been on the other side. That's all I am saying.
I am not disagreeing with you! Those lazy people you're talking about certainly exist. I met them. And I do get frustrated by their attitudes as well. But they are, at least here, not the majority. And the same people also exist in wealthy, rich and middle class households from what I can say, who believe that what they get is a right and not a privilege. But we're still talking about individuals here after all. And everyone has his reason and explanations why things don't work out.
But I feel what you mainly experience, in general is a state of decadence and a decay of a society that finally wakes up from the american dream. Which turns out to be simply an illusion based on the missconception that every person, everywhere, could find his fortune and prosperity, if they just worked hard enough. Blaming it on the poor, won't change this when I feel that it is a general problem. Or at least that is the feeling I get from your experience. Again, I am not saying those examples you describe don't exist. But if those can be so easily extrapolated on all places and all groups of people, is in my opinion questionable. And it still begs the question if the solutions that some neo-liberals and Libertarianism propose actually help to improve the situation. Simply put poverity as a whole, is a complex problem that is touching on countless different topics. The history of Argentina, which probably came the closest you will ever see to a neo-liberal dream state, has shown that there is no magic button. People and nations simply don't exist in some kind of vacuum. (...) Argentina went from being one of the most "developed" countries of the Third World, and a poster child for neoliberalism, (...) to reaching the crisis of 2001 and entering a depression in 2002, having experienced the largest debt default by any country ever in 2002.
You also shouldn't forget that Americans as individuals from what I can say, have in general this tedence to rather blame themself for their missfortune, where they identify at the same time wealth with success. But you should also ask your self where the wealth and oportunities the US experienced particularly during the 50s and 60s was actually coming from. What I am talking about, at least doay, are the working poor for example.
I am also talking about poverty as a whole, not New Orleans in particular, which might or might not be a very pecuilar place, I don't live there. The issues you have there might not be solved by money alone - not that I say money and wellfare in general will solve all issues emidiately there is no magic button that you can push and it will just disapear. So I can only talk about the things that I saw and that I experienced - like in Serbia and the people, I knew from places like Kosovo with an unemployment rate of up to 42%. Point is, how much can you talk about fault and lazyness when you look at the bizarre situation of African chicken farmers for example.
Cameroon is a good example to understand the disastrous effects of European dumping practices. In 1994 Cameroon imported about 60 tons of poultry. In 1996 the country joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and accepted to liberalised trade. By 2003 chicken imports had reached 22.153 tons. As a result 92% of the local producers went bankrupt, 10.000 people lost their employment and Cameroon spent 15 Million Euro hard currency to import what it had previously produced locally.
In my opinion the biggest problem is a certain attitude, the lack of empathy on anything that challanges our view on a subject. The US has this tendency to start litery a war on someting. War on poverty, war on drugs, war on terror ... while I think the better method is something that is similar to harm reduction in drug abbuse rather then a hard line policy that hits everyone equally. 'It's easy for the cynical person to say, 'Oh, they're druggies poor, they're junkies lazy, let them die. But when you put a name and a face and a family to that, then it's a different story. Some people who go down this road will never come back, but if we can bring them back, there's always hope."'
On January 26, five of the militants were arrested on U.S. Route 395 about 48 miles (77 km) north of the occupation. Among those arrested were Ammon Bundy and his brother Ryan.[38] Ryan Bundy suffered a minor gunshot wound to his arm during his arrest.[38][39] During the confrontation, law enforcement officers shot and killed Robert "LaVoy" Finicum while he was reportedly reaching for his gun.[40][41] The last four militants at the refuge surrendered on February 11, ending the occupation.[42]
Other related arrests followed in the months after the end of the occupation. Of the 27 people arrested, 26 were charged under federal law with a single count of felony conspiracy,[43][44] and most were subsequently charged with a variety of other offenses relating to the use of firearms and the abuse of government property. Their trials are scheduled to start on September 7, 2016, and February 14, 2017.[45][46] As of August 1, eleven of those charged have pleaded guilty to crimes related to the occupation.
Those guys were a bunch of provocateur assholes who were trying to bait the cops to come shoot all their dumbasses. The FBI didn't take that bait and just starved their them out until that arrest. that LaVoy guy was yelling to the cops to shoot as he reached for his gun because the fuckwit thought he'd be a martyr for a revolution.
Hey what about Yugoslav, Russian, Ukrainian and other Eastern European partisans? They had a greater effect in their respective fronts and acted like actual military units. This made them available and useful as legitimate military units in operations, which only added to their strengths.
If I had to name every armed resistance group, we would be here for a while.
Besides, if they become too militarized we're back at the whole "that's what the national guard is for" discussion.
Your quoted article actually says it compares state laws when discussing the metropolitan areas. Which kinda makes it useless. There's many states with rather loose gunlaws, with large cities with extremely restrictive gun laws.
Either way, the discussion is moot since regardless of what the stats say, you can twist it. Where some say there are strict gun laws in place due to high gun crime, others will say there is higher gun crime due to the inability of legal citizens to defend themselves from it.
They certainly contributed to the efforts, but they didn't bring down the German warmachine. I think that was done for the most part by the bulk of the allied forces. Namely the American and Soviet ones. I don't want to dimnish the bravery, courage and suffering of the resistance movements. But I think what we saw in Kursk, DD-Day and Bastogne and the many other engagements did a lot more to win the war against the Germans.
Resistance forces ensured that the germans (and their allies) had to keep a disproportionately large presence of troops across conquered areas. Which in turn made sure they were not available to fight elsewhere. Don't underestimate the value of this.
And yeah, they might topple a potential tarannical regime much easier then the Germans But what I am arguing about is, why gun owners couldn't be persuaded into following and supporting a tyrannical regime in the first place, if that regime isn't aimed at them and if they actually see it as righteous.
No discussion there. Armed civilians are as easy to trick as any police officer or soldier. But the fraction which is not convinced could make a stand. In some cases, this might be futile, but at least they had the means to do it.
It is constantly mentioned how weapons are not inherently dangerous, how they are merely tools and objects and inanimate things that posses no power on their own. Well, I absolutely agree with that one! When it comes to defending the values from ideologies. Because you can't fight ideas and ideologies with weapons.
I would disagree here. Genocide is most certainly one of the many ways to further your ideology. It's not because the western world has abbandonned such violence that it is not a danger still.
Winning against IS or the Taliban would be very simple, if we chose to lay aside our western morals and fight an all out war.
As is sometimes quoted (paraphrased): Ask the city fathers of Hiroshima about their resistance to our ideology. Well, you can't, they're dead.
(I'm obviously not advocating any of this, but you must recognise that the extermination of enemies is still the easiest way to get rid of a rival ideology)
Winning against IS or the Taliban would be very simple, if we chose to lay aside our western morals and fight an all out war.
As is sometimes quoted (paraphrased): Ask the city fathers of Hiroshima about their resistance to our ideology. Well, you can't, they're dead.
Well, fascism and even neo-nazis are still a thing. So I would say, no, even if you get rid of all morals. You can't fight ideologies with guns . And fighting terrorism isn't the same as fighting the third Reich or the empire of Japan - Albeit winning a war sure helps to get your agenda across, no arguing there but: 'The thoughts are free (...)' counts as much for the good guys as it does for the bad ones. And opressing a certain view point, rarely leads to a positive outcome.
And even if a totall war mentality would be a vialbe solution, you have to ask your self, if it is worth the cost, money, resources and actually getting rid of your ideals that you actually want to defend, just to clean up a place that you have no buisness with in the first place - aka the midle east.
I am not saying that you're arguing in favour of such drastic measures like carpet bombing ISIS and killing families of terrorists or what ever.
It's just funny how this voice of naivity which is close to ignorance is often the loudest in societies which actually never had to endure such stuff, where as those nations that have been actuall victims to the totall war doctrine, one way or another, don't consider it as a viable option. European and US foreign politics are a prime example of Ultima ratio vs. Clausewitz in action I guess. Policies that, maybe even gave us a lot of the terrorism that we face today.
I also think such measures would be the fastest way to unite 1,3 billion people when you make it an all-or-nothing scenario. And I am not sure if that is really helpfull. Right now, most of the Muslims are much bussier fighting each other, and we should keep it that way so they can actually sort their shit out between them self eventually. It might take another 50 years or even 100 years before they get their shit together, but it will eventually happen, if we leave them alone. This means closing any military bases we operate in the middle east and no more weapon supplies to any group and actuall fair trade deals with nations. We really don't have to get invested into every conflict.
*Edit
Since we are already somewhat offtopic. Something that really interests me a lot is what future generations will have to say about us, since we're looking at all of what happens now like trough a lense. Namely our own perception. Everything is still to close and to fresh in the consciousness of our societies. Historians in 100 years or even 200 years will have a field day to analyse our time - particularly if we're talking about a scenario with a third world war, if we actually survive it.
For example, you could take the second world war, and it is probably the closest you will ever got a clear black vs white scenario with the good allies and the evil nazis. You won't find any conflict in human history where it was more clear. But even here, with all of the ideology, the hollocaust etc. you will find that not everything was as simple as the people of their time thought it was. And a lot of historians started in the 1990s to slowly change their perception and trully ananalyse WW2 in an unbiased manner, where even more controversial thoughts are now accepted among schoolars.
I am curious what the historians of the future will have to say about our politics today and how we deal with the middle east.
(I'm obviously not advocating any of this, but you must recognise that the extermination of enemies is still the easiest way to get rid of a rival ideology)
If we ever saw such an case. Fascism and Communism are still around for example. Same for many religious ideologies.
*
*Maybe Gizmo is right, we should actaully look to regulate pens and cakes instead :p.
But you're right inso far, that history is sure not short of examples where people just tried that. And I would agree, that it can help to secure power for a time. But even if the catholic church for example, burned Savonarola, it didn't stop his ideas to float around for a long time, which might have even sparked the reformation. Pope John Paul II even initiated a Beatification for him in modern times by the catholic church.
I would disagree here. Genocide is most certainly one of the many ways to further your ideology. It's not because the western world has abbandonned such violence that it is not a danger still.
Yes ... but genocides usually don't happen from the minority against the majority. How many people would stand up in the US against a genocide against muslims for example who make 4% of the population, if there was some 20 years of propaganda, lies and missinformation hammered down on the people by a tyrannical government. Throw in a bit of fear, facts and xenophobia and you get a recipe for disaster.
The Gemans didn't just assumed power one day and litealy opened concentration camps in every corner to kill the German population as a whole. Just the parts they deemed as unworthy of being German. It was a gradual process that took years and was exploting resentiments that existed for a long time.
Particularly fear and anxiety makes rational people behave extremely irrational. The Nazis didn't assume power because everyone was happy and consenting with the Weimar Republic.
I have turned the furniture of an Colt semi-automatic rifle into storage space for survival items before. Its quite easy actually. You can even fortify the bayonet lug to take said stock if you have the stock turn out into a pseudo spade. Viva shovel anything in the wilderness; now with fishing pole, lures, and flint and steel for the limited time price of common sense.
You're not a man until you dig a six foot hole with a modified rifle-spade to sleep in.
I thought this thread was about the U.S. and its gun control. Europe has nothing to do with us. Don't ya'll have to worry about Putin steam rolling your great society?
I have turned the furniture of an Colt semi-automatic rifle into storage space for survival items before. Its quite easy actually. You can even fortify the bayonet lug to take said stock if you have the stock turn out into a pseudo spade. Viva shovel anything in the wilderness; now with fishing pole, lures, and flint and steel for the limited time price of common sense.
You're not a man until you dig a six foot hole with a modified rifle-spade to sleep in.
I thought this thread was about the U.S. and its gun control. Europe has nothing to do with us. Don't ya'll have to worry about Putin steam rolling your great society?
I thought this thread was about the U.S. and its gun control. Europe has nothing to do with us. Don't ya'll have to worry about Putin steam rolling your great society?
Don't you have to vote for a Putin friendly presidential candidate with a dead bleached skunk on his head or an obnoxious women who can't keep her outlook password safe enough?
Don't you have to vote for a Putin friendly presidential candidate with a dead bleached skunk on his head or an obnoxious women who can't keep her outlook password safe enough?
. You love weapons, sure but I wouldn't see you as a fanatic or extremist in that matter.
. So when a large portion of the civilians in the US would actually agree with their regime, it could assume power, despite of the large number of weapons. It might at some point lead to a revolt when this regime turns against their own people, but the damage would be already done at that point. And in such a situation an armed population might have possibly an easier time to get rid of their government. No argument from me on that one! But that's already one step ahead of my point.
