One Standard Anti-Second Amendment Talking Point is that the Second Amendment is outdated and can’t possibly provide a bulwark against tyranny, because no group of citizens armed merely with legal firearms could possibly stand up to the technological might of the U.S. armed forces. The notion has a certain surface-level plausibility, as a bunch of guys armed only with AR-pattern rifles isn’t going to take out an M1A2 tank in open combat.
Tiny problem with this argument: recent history shows it’s demonstrably wrong:
Who exactly do you think has stymied the U.S. in Afghanistan for 16 years? The Taliban is made up of Afghan Bubbas. The Taliban doesn’t need to defeat nuclear weapons, though they are humiliating a nuclear power for the second time in history. They use a mix of Kalashnikovs and WWII-era bolt-action rifles. Determined insurgencies are really difficult to fight, even if they are only armed with Enfield rifles and you can target them with a TOW missiles system that can spot a cat in the dark from two miles away. In Iraq, expensive tanks were destroyed with simple improvised explosives.
If the U.S. government (and the American people behind them) doesn’t want to use nuclear weapons on foreign fundamentalists in Afghanistan, why does anyone presume they’d use them against Americans in Idaho?
It is not just our fecklessness. All great powers take into account the moral and manpower costs of implementing their rules and laws on a people. And an armed citizenry, especially if they seem to have a just cause to rally around, will dramatically raise the price of ruling them. The British Empire controlled one quarter of the world’s territory and ruled one quarter of the earth’s population in 1922. In that very year, they were forced to make an effective exit from the main part of their oldest colony, Ireland. Why? Because a determined group of Irish men with guns made the country ungovernable. The British technically could have deployed their entire navy, blockading the restive island, and starving any rebellion into submission. But they were unwilling to pay the moral price, or the price in blood. It was precisely this foreseeable event that had caused the British to ban Irish Catholics from possessing firearms hundreds of years earlier.
And just as in the 1770s or the 1920s, governments in similar positions today or in the future would have a difficult time maintaining military morale while trying to impose rule on a people who resist it manfully.
Let’s say that liberals get their wish, put Democrats in control of congress and the White House, and instantly pass Australian-style mandatory gun confiscation laws. If Democrats jump straight to violating the Constitution, the gloves come off. Not only will American gun owners form the largest armed insurgency the world has ever seen, but the “civilized” rules of engagement would no longer apply.
Let’s let Scott Adams spell it out:
The way private gun ownership protects citizens is by being a credible threat against all the civilians who might be in any way associated with a hypothetical tyrannical leader who uses the military against citizens. Citizens probably can’t get close to the leaders in such a scenario, but it would take about an hour to round up their families, and the families of supporters.
That would do it.
America is unconquerable.
Imagine the top hundred Democratic Party donors in every state being taken hostage by an American insurgency. Imagine the immediate families of every Democratic U.S. Senator and Governor being taken hostage.
Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad had two states and a dozen police departments freaking out in the Beltway Sniper attacks of 2002. Now imagine that times a thousand.
The problem is compounded even further that those same “bubbas” are exactly the sort of men who make up the bulk of the United States armed forces. Do liberals seriously believe that, come an actual civil war and suspension of the Posse Comitatus Act, troops from Texas, Kansas and Georgia will cheerfully do the bidding of elites from New York and San Francisco to disarm their own fathers and brothers (many ex-military themselves) in deep red states?
Once again, liberals openly pining for a civil war between red and blue America seem to have overlooked the tiny obstacle that red American is the half with all the guns.
A well-armed citizenry as large as that in the United States would make Afghanistan and Iraq look like calk walks compared to trying to occupy America. That’s why the Second Amendment remains the ultimate bulwark of American liberty.
Tags: Afghanistan, asymmetrical warfare, Guns, Iraq, Military, Posse Comitatus Act, Scott Adams, Second Amendment
[…] may go away a response, or trackback from your personal web […]
Two comments;
A) A bubba with an AR-15 can’t take on a M-1A2 tank directly but said tanks have to be rearmed and refueled and that can’t be done under armor. Artillery, armored vehicles, etc. all depend on soft human targets that would be accessible to bubba with a rifle. This isn’t obvious to liberals since most of them haven’t served in the military.
B) Unfortunately, to confiscate firearms, it’s not necessary to send the police or military to round them up. Once they have an ownership list via registration, credit card data mining, asking your kid’s doctor/teachers to ask your kids, etc. then it’s easy. They would just make any interaction with the government contingent upon surrendering your guns. Want to renew your driver’s license or license plates? Turn in your guns. Want to get a student loan? Surrender your gun. Want a tax refund? Get your Social Security check? You get the idea. Most of us couldn’t stand the heat of such things and would cave in. Unless people quickly banded together en masse to stop this, it would be the death of gun ownership by a thousand cuts…
Coming to the realization that with the kleptocracy in place, economic warfare is in play. Its called starved into submission; deny the ability to be self-sustaining in the ‘land of plenty’ and eventually, being denied employment (in the free market), you will be stripped of all resources. No home (‘legally’ stolen via the government/business partnership), no more 401k/ira (all used up resisting). Time to start selling few remaining personal properties, mental diversion to how screwed I am. Next goes my truck (the piranha wait), doubt the insurance collector will even notice or the tag agency. Once that’s done, the idea of driving over to the local soup kitchen, where ever that may be, is out.
So much for attempting to be a law abiding citizen with those who chose not to abide by the law. Blacklisting smokers, had a part in this; ‘non-existing’ age discrimination, had a part in this; being white and male, has a part in this.
This is how it is being done – starved into submission.
Please, please, please! Send in the UN first!!