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The game theory for making sure individuals maintain an offensive advantage remains. It makes the land generally inhospitable to tyrants. It is true that there are costs but I tire of people that think simply pointing them out and also the that the decaying retirement home husks of once vital nations don't pay them should make me jealous. To put it as kindly as possible, I am not jealous of these nations. Pointing out that these once giants and now living museums have adopted a policy in the last few hundred years makes that policy sound as appealing as rat poison. I don't have any particular attraction to guns. I own none and despite having been shooting with friends on a few occasion generally recognize no personal appeal. But I hate the idea of being part of a disarmed population. I will not childproof my my home for my own safety. Fuck that.
The practical outcome of the US government being afraid of its armed citizenry wasn't a bulwark against tyranny, it was the enabling of Jim Crow (which, for the avoidance of doubt, was tyrannical oppression from the point of view of its black victims). During WW2, the Feds acquired a large standing army sufficient that the government was no longer afraid of its armed citizenry, the American people elected the man who embodied the values of that army to the Presidency, and the South folded in short order.
Given
we can be reasonably confident that the modern 2nd amendment movement centred around a politically-active NRA loosely aligned with movement conservatism was founded by people who thought that gun culture was good because it enabled Jim Crow, not in spite of it. The viewpoint that the 1st Klan and the Redeemers were justified resistance to tyranny, that Jim Crow was the liberty the 2nd amendment existed to protect, and that the Feds imposing civil rights on the white South was a tyrannical usurpation, was entirely mainstream in right-wing circles in those days.
The problem of political violence does not have a technical solution - there is no substitute for civic virtue. A government that has the technical capability to protect you from warlords has the technical ability to oppress you if it chooses to. And an (organised or unorganised) militia which has the technical capability to protect you from a tyrannical government has the technical ability to overthrow a non-tyrannical government and take up warlordism* on you if it chooses to. Empirically, warlordism is worse for the people who have to live under it than tyranny. The American approach of setting up the nation-in-arms as a counterveiling power to the armed forces of the democratic state has failed - the worst incident of democratic backsliding in American history was imposed on the democratic state violently by a section of the nation-in-arms. The approach to the same problem taken by the French Revolution was to set up a conscript army in such a way that the nation-in-arms is the armed forces of the democratic state. That approach failed fast and spectacularly in France, though it seems to have worked very well in Switzerland. It remains as central to the democratic mythos of Continental Europe as the 2nd amendment and the Minutemen are to the democratic mythos of Red America.
* I am happy to make the mildly tongue-in-cheek claim that the actually existing form of government in the South between the withdrawal of Federal troops in the 1870's and the establishment of functioning Jim Crow state governments in the 1880's and 1890's was warlordism, but defending it would take more space that one Mottepost.
The NRA was created by Union officials who thought pro-Union forces needed better training. You are describing a Michael Moore-style history which is the opposite of actual history.
The NRA went from being a primarily-sporting group of the type you mention to being a primarily-political one as a result of the Cincinnati revolt. This isn't Michael Moore history - "The NRA leadership was useless until a grassroots takeover put real 2nd amendment supporters into place" is the story gun rights activists tell themselves. The NRA was not a white supremacist organisation either before or after the change, but the new leadership was dominated by Southern conservatives, and the vast majority of Southern conservatives in the 1970's were white supremacists by modern standards. "Jim Crow is protected by states' rights under the Constitution", "Civil Rights law is an unconstitutional expansion of federal power", and "Reconstruction was an abuse of power by carpetbaggers and scallywags" were all standard Southern conservative positions at the time, and "Jim Crow is good actually" was still within the Overton window.
Yes. And the 1977 Cincinnati revolt was a result of the Gun Control Act of 1968. Which itself was AFTER the end of Jim Crow.
I presume that if you had evidence that the actual leaders of the NRA following said revolt were supporters of Jim Crow, you'd have posted it.
The fact that they were Southern conservatives is Bayesian evidence that were supporters of Jim Crow, given that the vast majority of Southern conservatives born before the civil rights era were supporters of Jim Crow. The racist murder that Harlon Carter was convicted of was of a Hispanic, so it is definitely possible that he wasn't shockingly racist against blacks, just unlikely.
In any case the claim I was trying to make was the slightly weaker claim that the leaders of the Cincinnati revolt were people who accepted the moral assumptions of the Dunning School of history (which would have been taught as uncontroversial fact in the high schools and colleges they attended) and would therefore have seen the 1st Klan as an example of righteous-but-doomed resistance to tyranny and the Redemption-era white militias as a good example of successful resistance. The set of people who thought that the 1st Klan were the goodies in Birth of a Nation (which was not small - the movie enjoyed mainstream success) is much larger than the set of people who were actively working to bring back Jim Crow in 1977. The Sons of Confederate Veterans gave Nathan Bedford Forrest a posthumous honour in 1977, so "the 1st Klan were the goodies" was still comfortably within the Overton window at the time.
I am happy to admit that I have no evidence whatsoever that Neal Knox was a segregationist apart from the fact that it was normal for white Texans who attended segregated Christian colleges in the 1950's to be segregationists.
OK, so you don't actually have evidence that the particular people involved supported Jim Crow. You just want to use the word "Bayesian" to justify your stereotyping. Your intimation that Carter and Knox were supporters of the Klan (any Klan) is, I presume, similarly supported, and comes down to "they were Texans".
He wasn't convicted of having racist motivations in the killing, and his conviction was overturned on the grounds that the jury was not adequately instructed on the law of self-defense.
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And the NRAs turn to politics began with the Gun Control Act of 1968 (which the NRA did not object to, resulting ultimately in the replacement of NRA leadership). Rather later than the abolition of Jim Crow. Earlier gun control laws were often intended to disarm blacks.
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I know "private guns enabled Jim Crow" was one of those successful leftist memes (along with "jury nullification enabled lynching"), but it's not true. They were called Jim Crow LAWS for a reason; they were enforced with state violence.
Jim Crow was enforced by social pressure. My grandparents remember the system and they remember it falling; there were blacks getting beaten by cops but there were far more bus drivers who just didn’t care anymore who sat in the front.
That's...the point, sort of, isn't it? Social pressure normally doesn't entail armed threats in most societies, and one can make the argument that most laws that are worth a damn are enforced by social pressure everywhere. It's a rather big stretch to say that Jim Crow was facilitated by racist whites having easy access to guns.
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Armed resistance in the South was crushed. Except in Louisiana, Jim Crow was imposed at the ballot box, with a decent helping of more normal threats of violence.
Armed black men were a bulwark of African American freedom.
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I'd say the most you can argue is that it was both. It seams clear as day that since governments stopped being afraid of it's citizens, they implemented programs of unprecedented surveillance, social control, manipulation of information, and political oppression. The UK (and the rest of Europe to a lesser extent), which is far more advanced in this process than the US is happily locking people up for shitposting, as they let out rapists and murderers.
A tyranny of the majority also being possible, and guns possibly enabling it, is not the own that you think it is.
I think that’s proof they are worried about the citizens. They’re not scared of rapists or murderers, really, any more than they’re scared of sharks. They’re worried about allowing dissent to foster among the working class, so they stamp on it.
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I will note that there's a certain bimodality here. Small arms alone don't help against tyrants these days unless the tyrants have the gloves firmly on; you want at the very least MANPADs and anti-tank (recoilless) rifles, and probably private tanks and mortars, if you really want to make tyrants have a bad time (also tunnel systems that the tyrants don't know about, which has certain conflicts with building permits).
The argument that having an armed populace increases the lethality of crime and thus reduces total crime by attrition of criminals holds water with small arms, but this argument doesn't.
(NB: This is not a reductio ad absurdum; militia maximalism is a colourable position. I'm merely pointing out where the goalposts are.)
I think the Waco and Ruby Ridge stories show that while the state can defeat partisans in battle with small arms, this isn't always a win for the state. There's a convincing case in my opinion that the state lost the wars there: even decades later they're still treating groups like the Malheur Wildlife Refuge standoff and the Bundy conflicts with kid gloves. And even despite that, the government lost most of the resulting court cases even when you'd think there was clear evidence of their case.
Absent a huge swell in public opinion away from small-armed partisans (most obviously: poor trigger control and injuries to uninvolved parties), I think actually rolling out the jackboots might well burn public support faster than it can put down rebellion. And I don't think that's purely right-coded either: I doubt squashing riots in 2020 would have brought a more peaceful resolution there, either. There's a fine, if observably fuzzy, line dividing public support for state violence from denouncement: even the Ma'Khia Bryant shooting was controversial.
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I don't buy the Hollywood scenario where a tyrant suddenly has tanks rolling down the streets from a bunker where they never interact with the common man. Trump's recent experience with American small arms should shatter any illusion that assassination is beyond us and fighting a full military occupation is a step I don't think anl properly armed population willing to fight gets to.
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