I actually know this one. Federalist no 46 by James Madison.
Not arguing against or for it, I just probably know what your fucked up 2a gunfuckers are referring to. either that or John Locke.
"Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
The issue is about endurance. Are you okay with losing the majority of battles and having x10 the casualties? Not to mention all the left over bombs and chemicals causing deformations long after. A philosopher once said everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face.
That's an imperial war where local knowledge is extremely limited and your relying on sympathetic locals to let you know the terrain and who the enemy are. If that sympathetic population is low like in Afghanistan or Vietnam then you'll walk into every ambush and never root out the enemy. In this environment guerilla war with small arms can work
If tyrrany comes to the u.s. though it'll come with at least 30% support if not more, ironically most likely by the 2a nuts. They'll happily point out every enemy of the state on there block and warn you about every ambush, hell they'll probably shoot them for you.
What you just described makes it easier to control a country...they don't look like us, they didn't sound like us, and they didn't dress like us....now try that shit with people who do. A civil war in the US would not end well for anyone.
This would also be true of a guerilla civil war in the US though. You'd be relying on locals--people that had probably had friends and families killed by gov't military operations and indiscriminate bombing--to help you root out insurrectionists.
Would a large number of 2A supporters be in favor of tyranny as long at it had an (R) next to it? Sure. Certainly not all of us though.
No, no, see it was the right of private gun ownership in Afghanistan. Just the guns nothing else necessary. And, by the way, âwe could be like Afghanistan â is actually a very good argument and not at all an admission.
This shows ignorance in history but also understanding of warfare. There are too many examples of this: Vietnam as a historical example and Afghanistan as a recent one. Let's not forget what's going on in Israel rn vs all the proxies. It's not necessary to have advanced weaponry to fight a war.
Vietnam as a historical example and Afghanistan as a recent one.
The biggest asset these countries had in their favor was distance from the American industrial core. First Nations people employed many of the same techniques used in Vietnam and Afghanistan but were ruthlessly slaughtered. Guerrilla movements in Latin America - the FARK in Columbia and socialists in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador got massacred by American military power. These countries are wholly within the US sphere of influence now.
Letâs not forget whatâs going on in Israel rn vs all the proxies.
Israel is a textbook case of advanced weaponry tilting the playing field. Air superiority, naval support from the US, and a high tech anti-missile/anti-personal system along with one of the most advanced spy networks in the world all allow this relatively tiny nation to punch far outside its weight class. By contrast, less developed countries like Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Sudan routinely serve as punching bags for more advanced states.
Yeah this is similar to what I always tell these idiots. "You all know the government has tanks right. How many tanks y'all got? Three Broncos, an F-1f0, and a tractor? I'm sure those will hold up just fine to 120 mm cannon.
To play devil's advocate, the US is enormous with over 330 million people. The current military strength is roughly a few million, including civilians and contractors. Additionally, there are roughly about 4,000 main battle tanks in service. There's maybe a couple thousand fighter jets and bombers combined. Keep in mind, a lot of the US military is abroad, especially our combat ready equipment.
Now, try to spread all of that out over roughly 4 million square miles. Hell, LA itself is around 470 square miles with almost 10 million people. The military would be idiotic to just blindly carpet bomb everything, since y'know, soldiers have families living all over the US, too. Not great for morale. Not to mention, the economy is pretty essential to keeping the machines of war going. Also food. And fuel. And infrastructure for logistics. And medicine. Etc, etc.
A civil war would not be cut and dry, regardless of how well armed and trained the formal military is. It's why China tries to keep an iron tight grip on its mass surveillance program to squash uprisings before/as soon as they start (and they periodically have them, think there's been one or two in the last decade). That's what the US is also trying to do. They call it antiterrorism precautions and other bullshit, but it's to keep all of us underfoot so no one is able to start an effective movement against the State.
Considering the observed behaviour of the self designated militias in the US, the army would only need to say that there's a gathering of whatever group the militia opposes on main street and then gun down anyone that shows up in tactical gear. Even without the hyperbole, 2A people are too damaged by their desire to be in their personal action movie to be effective in any kind of war.
What number of those people are of military age, though, fit, able, willing to upend their lives and would support whatever cause? A lot less than 330 million, Iâd guess.
Try running tanks or planes without fuel, parts or ammo production. Covid was a little inconvenience compared to the supply chain nightmare a war could bring. It takes a TON of upkeep to keep a military rolling.
And to be fair the taliban never had conventional air support either. And Ukraine has proven that commercial drones can be just as lethal.
Try running tanks or planes without fuel, parts or ammo production. Covid was a little inconvenience compared to the supply chain nightmare a war could bring. It takes a TON of upkeep to keep a military rolling.
What does this even mean? That a private citizen is going to have better access to fuel, parts and ammo than the government?!?
So MAGA is not the side I would take in a civil war, even if I were an American, however: "Experience has shown that attacks against tanks with close combat weapons by a sufficiently determined man will basically always succeed."
Look at the early stages of the Ukraine war Russia had in many heavy equipment categories a 5:1 superiority, Ukraine had comparitively few Tanks/AFVs/Aircrafts/Artillery/etc... yet still held it's own in no small part due to trenchlines of conventional boot-on-floor infantry men, mines, cheap drones, shoulder launched atgms and good motivation/organisation.
Every time this fucking meme is made I'm reminded that the US military is currently being embarrassed in the red sea by a non-state actor with zero air superiority, which began itself with a thousand-or-so civilians with AK47s.
That or how Israel is currently struggling to achieve any kind of military victory against two groups of lightly-armed militias which rely on scavenged and hand-made explosives to defeat state-of-the-art tanks.
Let's not even remind ourselves about the Taliban.
In fairness Israel isn't struggling to beat Hamas. They could quite handily just carpet bomb the place to oblivion and kill 2 million people. It's not really any bigger than Grozny, and we saw what even the Russians managed to do to that.
But that doesn't tend to sit well with anyone, not even the US. Better to commit genocide by making the survivors leave and stealing their land, rather than going full holocaust on them.
Still, they've killed 2% of Gaza in a year. Give them 50 more and there won't be a Gaza Strip.
People who drop these kinds of memes still think warfare is carried out and progresses like it did in the Napoleonic era: two orderly opposed fronts clashing head-to-head in theaters with well-defined boundaries - where the adversary with more guns/people/resources win. Because more guns/people directly equates to military power, right?
These folks would do well to spend even the slightest amount of time learning about fourth generational, guerilla war.
Let's take this meme back a couple hundred years and cast OP as a counter revolutonary American at the onset of the revolutonary war.
/*Wants to have muskets to fend off british empire
/*british empire:
Starts to seem silly when you realize even our founding fathers were doing guerilla warfare not long ago.
I mean, if you park your navy outside of the enemy's ports and bombard their cities from the air, it's gonna make it very difficult for them to hit YOU, but that won't necessarily break their resistance. Here we're talking about a civil war tho, that would entail the country bombing itself... which happens, mind you, but it's not super effective.
Vietnam was as much a modern war than an insurgency. The Chinese/Soviet govts supplied the PAVN with modern weapons including air defence, armour, and an air force. The Viet Cong were the irregular militia forces that supplemented that. At least by the time of US deployment.
Though then again, that started with a unit of 23 people equipped with a machine gun and two revolvers. It really doesn't take long for any militia to achieve some serious weaponry if it can get the attention of sympathetic states.
Pretty much. The US military can take on any other nation state (China is trying to change this, but it's not there yet). The initial fight against the organized militaries of both Afghanistan and Iraq didn't last long, and was as much of a one sided curb stomp as you'll ever see in history. It was the insurgency later on that was the problem.
Iâm reminded that the US military is currently being embarrassed in the red sea by a non-state actor with zero air superiority
Houthi rebels in Yemen are leveraging the mathematics of actuarial accounting to shut down the Red Sea. The cost of sending a ship into a free-fire zone skyrockets, compared to the cost of simply sailing around the Horn of Africa.
If the Americans were doing the flotilla strategy of the WW2 era - where FDR realized he could build cheap concrete shipping vessels faster than the Germans could sink them - then the Houthis would be an ugly nuisance rather than an insurmountable stopgap.
But international shipping has a zero-margin for losing ships. They're not sending these things out on the ocean with the expectation of some attrition.
Yeah I guess if we're doing hypotheticals then perhaps the US could suddenly overhaul its naval shipbuilding capacity, recruit thousands more sailors, and march through North Yemen within a week.
So long as you have an endless stream of brain washed kids who are happy to die, as they paradise at the end of a barrel, and are happy the kinds of losses they do you'll be fine
Whether you see it as brainwashing or principles is irrelevant when they're still capable of effective military resistance against superior nation-states.
If anything, you're right; people who are ideologically driven for their cause are the bane of a professional army; ideology is much cheaper and much more motivating than a paycheck and promise of a cushy pension.
I sure hope those 2nd amendment fanatics can afford the naval vessels and foreign military bases they're going to need to get involved in the South China Sea! đž
That was the Framers' intention. It was not for a hunting permit. Do you have a better idea about how to enforce the self-preservation of liberty and freedom from tyranny when the tyrannical government is armed and disposed to use force against a subjugated population? How would you prevent another King George? Say you don't like Trump and he has all the top guns as the next POTUS and decided to declare a military dictatorship? Sure, they have the most powerful weapons but lawyers aren't going to help. Wouldn't you rather fight for freedom than lay down and die in the camps?
It'll be a whole different thing for the government to send military against the population. An armed population should be plenty to keep the cops respectful, and cops are the real problem.