The US constitution was written specifically to limit the power of government.
Basically giving the government the absolute minimum amount of power to be functional. With crazy restrictions on making changes so that it’s hard for the government to grab more power.
An armed population helps keep the government from going too crazy like what China is doing to people over Covid.
Hard to weld doors shut on peoples homes if they have shotguns.
It is truly interesting seeing in Canada how they're slowly removing gun rights away from their citizens - while also pushing bills like C-11 that allow governments to influence what social media companies can show to Canadians' eyeballs. They've recently said they're not going to ban hunting rifles, but 5 days ago the SKS is now part of the list of banned guns in Bill C-21, one of the more popular hunting rifles - due to generic bill wording of "center-fire, semi-automatic guns capable of firing more than 5 rounds in a magazine"
Even better, the original (at least, publicly known) intent of the gun ban was to limit ownership of handguns.
Bill C-11 is promoted under the guise of "promoting Canadian content" but of course it's going to be mis-used and abused to control information and the narrative on both domestic and foreign events - if they have the power then they're going to use it for what they want to. A Liberal MP actually stated that they could use the bill to limit 'misinformation' on platforms, though my memory is blank on exactly who it was.
I'm eagerly awaiting for the western first-world political climate to do a complete 180 so all the citizens who supported these emotionally-backed "feel good" laws while voting for the candidates who support them can have "I told you so" thrown into their faces at Mach infinity when the laws they thought were a good idea get used against them by people they don't like.
The western-world is getting increasingly authoritarian now that people are realizing that their country isn't what was sold to them anymore - the never-ending cycle continues.
Is granpaw's shotgun really going to prevent the government from enforcing a law someone doesn't like? Highly doubtful. Police are likely going to be more heavily armed than a random citizen, and if not, the military definitely will be. An armed population is not going to be effective against a professional force. What an armed population does seem to be good at is: hunting and sport, but also domestic violence, mass shootings, school shootings, road rage shootings, and so on...
The idea, presumably, is not that an armed populace would win an all-out battle against the government in which the people fighting on behalf of the government are fully motivated and committed.
A bee does not expect to kill a dog(or whatever) with its stinger. It is a deterrent.
Now, I'm not saying that it is necessarily worth it for the population to be armed in this way. I don't know whether it is worth it. Maybe not? But the question is more complicated than "well obviously the government is going to be more armed, and therefore there is no point." .
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
While sieges haven't ended favorably throughout American history, the threat used to be explosives/IEDs and domestic terrorism.
The ATF did a decent job of policing this but now the threat is shifting to insider threats and insurrection (something we're terrible at policing). When you can't beat the adversary in conventional warfare, you turn to psyops to use the adversary's own weapons against them.
If the military gets called to your ranch, there's no guaranteeing whose side they'll fight on. You may start with plastic AR-15s...until sympathizers toss you the keys to the Abrams.
And a lot of them won't care what the government does as long as it doesn't touch their guns. Hell, a lot of them will probably take the government's side in the revolution, depending on who's in office and who they're oppressing.
Some of the strongest gun control laws in the country (Mulford Act) were made not because of a liberal idealism against firearm violence but rather as a direct reaction to the Black Panthers doing armed patrols of police and community watch under a republican state government.
I predict you'll see more of this as more minorities lean deeper left and the culture war types start blowing gaskets about armed antifa whatevers.
>Hard to weld doors shut on peoples homes if they have shotguns.
This point is always brought up but is never argued to its natural conclusion.
On the surface it seems you are implying that citizens should have powerful guns so they can threaten and potentially kill police officers trying to do something despotic. However if someone did that, the police would just crack down 10x as hard on that individual with more powerful, government purchased guns and arrest them for life. No matter what guns people are allowed to have, it's not a deterrent against despotism on an individual level.
The argument that the point of the 2nd amendment is for the citizenry to defend against government power is ridiculous. Why would a blueprint for a government install protections to make sure it can be violently overthrown, when the rest of the constitution is entirely focused on ensuring the consent of the people is funneled up to government power in a non-violent matter? To argue that that's the point of the 2nd amendment implies the founders didn't believe that the Constitution would be effective in forming a representative democracy.
>Why would a blueprint for a government install protections to make sure it can be violently overthrown, when the rest of the constitution is entirely focused on ensuring the consent of the people is funneled up to government power in a non-violent matter?
You're confused that the constitution has more than one kind of safeguard against tyranny?
"The idea that airbags are to prevent injuries is ridiculous. Why would a car have protections stop someone hitting the steering wheel, when there are also seatbelts entirely focused on ensuring that the driver doesn't hit the steering wheel?"
Also note that the guarantee of anti-tyranny violence makes it much less likely that someone's gonna try to do a tyranny in the first place. Compared to a disarmed and helpless population just waiting to be tyrannized.
A mugger is bound by law not to mug you. But he might do it anyway, regardless of what the paper says. However, if he knows you're armed, he's less likely to try. And if he does try, he's less likely to succeed.
The "defense against tyranny" argument for the 2nd amendment was borne out of individual regulated state militias defending against a federal army, not each individual being free to exercise their will as they see fit.
Are you asserting that the American Revolution was launched by "regulated state militias", as in: regulated by King George, or indirectly by his governors in the American colonies?
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Because given the chance, one person at the right place at the right time can make all the difference in the world. See _any_ political assassination attempt/success in recent history.
It's not to defend against the local police force that smashes your door down - it's not to defend against the military that wants to predator drone your hidden compound of Q-cultists in rural Montana because they've been popping shots at National Guard convoys.
It's to give anybody a chance (albeit an infinitesimally small one, with gigantic risks their own life) to immediately and permanently remove a government representative from office.
I personally don't agree with the premise or concept, but that's probably the most likely intention.
The temptation of course is to elect a ‘strong good man’ (or woman, but historically it’s men) to untangle it. They’ll of course need lots of power to do it.
Also, they’ll of course have lots of detractors (whiners all of them!) when they start to untangle things and step on toes, so the temptation is of course to shut them up or get them out of the way.
And voila, fascism and/or outright dictatorship.
Or, you know, we could research what our elected representatives actually do and accomplish instead of what they say they do and accomplish, and vote for those who effectively and reliably do what is in our best interests.
You bet. But when you think about it, that’s exactly what we’re expecting of the dictator too. But we remove any potential checks and balances by giving them unlimited power.
It’s the ‘this relationship ship will get fixed by having kids’ of politics.
You do the government pokey and you spin the media around. That's what it's all about.
You put your pay raise in, you take your public good will out, you put your pork in and you shake the public about.
You do the government pokey and you spin the lies around. That's what it's all about.