This is a bit more obscure than that, but mostly yes.
The real problem is that the army doesn’t want more tanks. They’ve asked congress to stop building armored vehicles. Don’t need money for tanks, want money for R&D.
Congress love building tanks because it falsely creates jobs in their districts. So more tanks. Most of these factories are located in red districts.
Too many tanks and they have to sell them. That’s how police can buy tanks.
Sell all your AR15? Most AR15 owners are in red states. There are direct correlation with voting republicans and owning firearms. So if you decide to sell you AR15 it might indicate you’d switch vote? It’s a stretch but less republicans, more jobs from other types of factories (e.g. Green energy related), less money to build tanks, less armored vehicles being auctioned off to police.
The police aren't a part of the community they serve, it's explicitly trained into them to treat every situation as "us" vs "them". If "they" have rifles then "we" need armored vehicles.
Edit: to be very clear, I am not in support of police militarization.
What's more is thanks to the gun ban there, the black market cost for a glock handgun not counting ammunition is around $12,000 cash versus what, 10x less in the US?
Now my conservative acquaintances who adore supply-side economics should understand that increasing cost inhibits demand.
You can buy a glock new for $500. In Chicago you can probably get a second hand one free off a car tire if you really need it, just don't worry about it's history
Own an ATGM for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Police APC column rolls toward my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Stugna-P. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first car, it's dead on the spot. Draw my mortar on the second car, miss it entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the MT-12 mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with APFSDS, "Tally ho lads" the tungsten dart shreds two cars in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix FPV drone and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the more police to arrive since multiple fragmentation wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.
That's exactly the argument that conservatives always give for gun ownership. But like, how would they possibly overrun the largest military in the world with their personal arsenals?
Maybe they could take a city but I can't see it being a long lasting victory.
Meal team 6 ain't going to put up a fight lmao. There is zero chance these dumb random civilians have the ability or desire to kill all the cops. These are the same chuds that want police more heavily armed too and "back the blue". It would literally never happen.
I've got no horse in this race, but I'll tell you, the amount of time people spend fixating on AR-15s, when rifles in general (including AR-15s) are only responsible for 3% of gun deaths...it really doesn't give the impression that people are in command of the facts. And it doesn't seem like pretty much any characteristic of a gun being effective for a mass shooting doesn't also carry over to the gun being effective for self-defense against more than a single person. Or even a single person, for that matter. I feel like people just kind of dug their trenches on this one and nobody's really thinking too hard about it.
I think it was in California in the 90s that some guys tried to rob a bank, but they had full body armour and helmets, and were armed with assault rifles and high capacity magazines. The cops were useless against them as all they had were squad cars, pistols, and a few shotguns. It was a huge wake up call for police forces across America and it didn't take long for them to start acquiring better equipment.
If you don't like the militarization of your police, then you need to do something about the militarization of your general populace.
Thnx for the link. Didn't know their body armour was home made. That's some pretty good dedication to one's trade. Too bad they couldn't have put that talent into something constructive.
How dare you point out that this is an example of weapons that have been federally prohibited for a century! Now how can people moderation fallacy their way into sounding reasonable?
Taking reliable existing semi-automatic firearms and modifying to fully automatic still would not be feasible for these dunces if they were starting out from scratch (at least not with any semblance of reliability from an engineer's standpoint). Finally, should be noted that there's little reason the outcome would've been different had they been semi-automatic, considering ammunition waste and less attention to accuracy. If their goals were that of the Aurora shooter, then that would be different.
"home made body armor" implies they made it from scratch. No. They used several vests worth of manufactured body armor to make full body armor.
This is the stupidest thing I've ever read on the internet. Sure give up all your rights as a citizen based on one (probably fake, but either way) story about a single supposed situation where someone outgunned the police
I think having some higher power weapons for law enforcement in case it ever comes to that is (while related) a different problem than police militarization. I think the best bet would to be have specialized units for those extreme cases they could reasonably deploy in a timely/effective manner. Every cop having access to surplus military gear is a huge problem and I wish weren't to a point where having specific units was even a necessity.
I mean… “¿Porque no los dos?”
Neither should exist in civilian hands. A MRAP has no use for civilian police nor does an AR15 have any use for a civilian.
The fat fucks parading around in their plate carriers frothily screaming "shall not be infringed" at traumatised school children aren't going to fire on a tank.
Most of them won't even wear a mask in a pandemic to protect their countrymen, they're definitely not going to die in battle for them. It's who they want to be in their fantasies, not who they actually are.
You know what a lot of them would do though? Enthusiastically vote a fascist and then fire into crowds of people protesting fascist policies.
This highlights a weird side effect of weapons rights. The right to own weapons by the citizens to protect themselves from government tyranny, combined with the need for law enforcement to arm themselves adequately against heavily armed citizens breaking the law, becomes an arms race between the citizens and their country, with whoever is better funded being the winner.
Telling the citizens to drop their weapons doesn't mean the cops drop theirs. Telling the cops to stop arming themselves against citizens just sends them to their death during confrontations.
Most of that hysteria was about GTA, which in hindsight is really a pretty deep satire of the violent American mentality. Kinda the classic "freaking out about how we should censor a creative work we don't understand" thing.
Wasn't these basically donated because the military had too many? I understand them completely. The SWAT units needs armored trucks, even in Sweden they have Sandcats. The options were these extremely cheap former military MRAPs that are bulletproof, or buy armored civilian vehicles which costs multiple hundreds of thousands.
I'd bark up the tree of military spending rather than the police accepting hand-me-downs.
Police militarization is not because of citizens having arms. Rather, overproduction by the military trickles down into surplus sales to domestic police, and they eagerly gobble it up for various reasons such as "they like power", "they like to feel like big men", etc. They aren't outgunned against anything besides a civilian uprising.
My best guess is that this is just one of many things they were able to grt acceas to using federal subsidy programs. The very famous Obama-era 1033, but also The Department of Homeland Security's "Urban Areas Security Initiative".
We all know that they can be used by SWAT, ATF, etc. When it may be needed - but they also get used to intimidate protestors and violate their rights.
Apart from that one vehicle they have some mini busses and such for transporting. But they arent really special, or built specifically for the police or whatever.
The guys in white robes bought a gun just as easily and they're thrilled to hear you're armed because it's all the excuse they need to execute you in the street.
Because they won't actually be wearing white robes. They'll just look like any other generic white American male, and they're going to kill you long before you find out their political opinions.
You've sold your minority group out to the gun lobby and now you're doing their astro-turfing for free.
The flipside of that argument is folks who wear pointy white caps on weekends really don't like when minorities also have rights to gun access and it makes them squirm a little. A lot of racist people are all bark and no bite and just like to put on a tough guy persona (but of course there's a lot of racist people who will kill someone if given the opportunity)
As long as there's as many weapons in this country as there are, I think it's more important to breed a culture of gun safety before gun restrictions ever have a chance of taking hold
Too bad that (1) doesn't make you any safer in reality, (2) increases several vectors of risk to you and your family disproportionately, (3) just benefits gun lobbyists and muddies the water of national debate.
itt: those in the priveledged position to rely on the state for defense of self and community would rob others of the ability to enforce their bodily autonomy and community defense.
'only the [fascist] cops should be armed' brain worms,
enforcing the capital owning class' monopoly of violence (against ourselves),
The only thing keeping the American government from full on tyrany is the first amendment. The only thing keeping the American government from abolishing the first amendment is the second.