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Originally Posted by Checkman
I think where private firearms really come into play is for self-defense and the occassional civil emergency...That's where RKBA is important - IMHO.
Okay that was a long winded response and I could write more, but hopefully I covered some of the bigger issues. Did I make sense?
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Absolutely. BUT...I have never disagreed with the idea of people being entitled to own guns for self-defense against criminals, or in a disaster situation like Katrina. I own guns myself precisely for those kinds of scenarios.
The only thing that I disagree with is the idea that American gun owners will be able to carry out a guerrilla campaign in a "Red Dawn" or "1984"-type scenario, which is the fantasy of many pro-RKBAers in this country. I argue that being able to function as a viable insurgency has many, many dimensions irrelevant to gun possession.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Checkman
Also many cops, soldiers, saliors, airmen, firefighters and even federal agents belong to the so called "American gun-culture". That includes me. What does this mean? Well I guess it's hard to say, but I would imagine that if some type of political doomsday scenario occurred and gun ownership became ilegal in the U.S. it might make things harder for the goverment to carry it out. I will leave it to the novelists in the group to work out that scenario.
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I think you should leave it to the political scientists instead.
I respect you for your service to the population, but here's the problem: Cops and firefighters aren't going to make good guerrillas for many of the same reasons I've said. Soldiers have greater potential (I usually agree with pro-RKBAers who point out the possibility of mutiny by our armed forces in a "1984" scenario), but even then, their ability to fight guerrilla wars is still dependent upon whether they have a very particular skill set that is usually reserved only for SF units.
As for the idea of the 2nd Amendment being a "reset" button on the Constitution, I usually tell people (mostly, the ones who accuse me of being a Democrat/socialist/Marxist/whatever) that I support a reformed and decentralized version of the National Guard which is funded and supplied almost entirely at the local level (instead of federal and state) and which trains in bush war and insurgent-style tactics. It would amount to a reversal of past Militia Acts passed by Congress, and it would ensure that regulation stopped at the state level. The basic idea is that this would permanently delegate a certain amount of military authority from the federal government and the regular armed forces.
There's only one problem with this - every time I suggest it and pro-RKBAers agree with me, I tell them afterwards that it's a system which isn't that different from many of the "totalitarian" countries they claim to hate. In fact, it's a system that dictators from Khomeini to Chavez have used in order to ensure that the regular armed forces (the ones who are suspected of being loyal to the previous regime that they overthrew) are never able to stage coups.