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In the last 80 years of federal government overreach, how many federal attempts at imposing more rules were successfully resisted by gun owners? Because it seems to me that the answer is none. American gun owners are too fat and lazy to mount a rebellion. The few victories they’ve had have come through the courts.
In truth, a large enough unarmed mob can easily successfully overwhelm an autocratic state, and a respectably sized group of civilian firearms owners can be easily crushed by a committed and powerful security corps and/or military, both of which the US effectively has.
You're not counting all the rules which might have been imposed, but weren't due to the practical considerations of an armed population. That which is seen, and that which is unseen.
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Don't get me wrong, I agree we're all cowards that will meekly agree to be crushed.
But the past 30 years have seen massive expansions in gun rights, ownership, and (available) competence. More people can and do conceal carry a firearm than ever before. More people own weapons that make them capable of defensive or offensive work against multiple assailants (I.E. Kyle Rittenhouse). Extremely high-quality training that can put you on-par with an army infantryman in close combat is widely available to the middle class, along with the plates and carriers to engage at a similar level.
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The 90s assault weapons ban sunsetting seems like an obvious example. They definitely wanted to keep it, and we definitely killed it. Likewise holding the line on bump stocks and braces. But the framing of your question elides much more significant advances: normalization and proliferation of concealed carry, suppressors, automatic weapons, the standardization of the AR-15, 3d-printing and DIY tech, and general cultural penetration are all monumental achievements that have greatly eroded the control landscape. The general level of defiance is steadily improving, from "comply, guys," to "I lost them in a boating accident" to "I didn't lose shit," and this correlates with general defiance throughout Red Tribe and the steady collapse of capacity in Blue Tribe institutions.
I think this assessment is wrong, but time will tell. The coordination problem is, in my view, largely a red herring, with pernicious effects on both sides of the debate, in extremely unwarranted confidence in the security of their position from blues and equally-unwarranted black-pilling and despair from Reds.
That’s not really an answer to my question. My point wasn’t that gun owners haven’t successfully kept their right to own arms. My point was that none of the other tyrannies of the federal government have been reversed by the threat posed by firearms owners.
Unless you count abuse of cattle rancher’s grazing rights in eastern Oregon.
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Apologies, I thought you were referring to gun-related rules specifically, and in fact, gun-related rules have indeed been rolled back, and others have been prevented.
If the question is about federal tyranny as a whole, it seems pretty clear to me that the last two decades have seen significant erosion of federal capacity, and the gun culture has been a crucial vanguard in that erosion. Social cohesion is decaying at a significant and accelerating rate, and with it the capacity of the federal government and blue tribe generally to impose its edicts on society as a whole. We are now seeing open, organized defiance to federal edicts from state governments, and the federals backed down. We are seeing a complete collapse in trust for the media, for the federal bureaucracy, for the federal courts, a deadlocked congress, collapsing trust in elections. The military is facing a severe recruiting crisis, serious readiness and procurement issues, most notably in the Navy, and a deep-rooted toward any foreign mission among its historical core source demographic.
You claim that gun owners are too fat and lazy to mount a rebellion. I counter that the federal government is so sclerotic, deficient and mismanaged that actual enforcement of actual laws against anything other that the fat, lazy and supremely comfortable is completely beyond them. They can, sometimes, make examples of unfortunate individuals, but even this capacity is increasingly failing, and each "example" they attempt generates significantly more defiance than it does compliance.
It is common for moderate Blues to opine that the tribes need each other, that the Conservative commitments to order and stability are a necessary counterbalance to the Progressive commitments to change and innovation. This makes sense if you believe that the old order was a good thing that should be preserved. But then, that same order is the tyranny that you're asking for examples of Gun Culture resistance from, isn't it? To the extent that Conservatives have done what moderate Blues claim to want them to do, you would be correct in accusing them of failure to impede tyranny. Only, those commitments have largely been eroded, haven't they? Red Tribe has in fact embraced Trumpism, abandoned fiscal conservativism, largely turned against foreign interventionism and the maintenance of the international order, become deeply critical and skeptical of the "free market" and of corporations, and is increasingly hostile to the concept of law and order generally. We are pretty clearly done being a moderating counterbalance, cleaning up your messes and paying the bills in an unreciprocated pursuit of an entirely theoretical "we". It is evident now that there is no "we", and likely will never be a "we" in the foreseeable future.
All this, over a period of relative peace and prosperity. It was often claimed that what we needed was a good external threat to pull people back together; we saw how that went with Covid, and now that claim seems to have been quietly retired. The stability and the unity are gone, and they are not coming back. Likewise the state capacity, and the orderly, instinctual rule-following it was built upon. What follows is an escalating conflict terminating in separation of one kind or another. There is far better hope for meaningful freedom in that breakdown than there ever could be in a federal government cementing unitary power over a population of pacified subjects.
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They've been reversed by using the other three boxes, which is...vastly preferable.
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Notice, these are all guns rights victories. Which just, again, reinforces my point about how they can take away all your other rights without concern.
Battle of Athens, and to a lesser extent Bundy Standoff.
Several generations ago, and well before the NSA began watching veterans' groups as closely as they do now.
Did anybody on the Bundy side ever actually fire a shot?
No, nobody in the Bundy standoff fired a shot period. The national guard refused to engage to avoid bloodshed.
Something tells me a disarmed population would have just been arrested upfront.
see: the UK
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Order a 3D printer and the wrong prefab parts, and the Feds and the State will beat a path to your door. They're tracking all of this.
The last time this came up, the proof was a case where a guy in NYC bought a printer and the parts, assembled firearms, took pictures of those firearms, and then posted those pictures on twitter; IIRC he also tagged anti-gun politicians with those photos. There is a big difference between "they can drop the hammer on people who openly advertise defiance of the law in one of the deepest-Blue enclaves in the country" and "they can drop the hammer on this activity in general."
I can entirely believe that the federal government is tracking correlated printer and gun purchases; they should not be doing this, and their power to do this should be destroyed. But they have not, in fact, demonstrated a capacity to substantially impinge on DIY production of effective firearms. Based on my own knowledge, they can't. It's not a matter of political impracticality, but rather physical impossibility. DIY tech isn't a potential-maybe-someday thing that might or might not happen at some point in the future; it's multiple decades of technological overhang that is already in freefall, only the first pebbles of which have hit the ground in a way that most people have noticed, because most people have not spent five minutes with a piece of paper and a pencil thinking about the matter.
DIY firearms weren't practically stoppable once metalworking tools became widespread; what John Browning and Mikhail Kalashnikov could invent, many lesser men could copy. CNC milling machines and 3D printers have made them even more so, though in earlier days when more of the population could work metal, maybe more people could make them. DIY ammunition, on the other hand, remains a problem. Possibly not insurmountable given the success of meth cookery, but both brass and primers are a real problem. But probably not in the quantities necessary, and messing around with it is a good way to get a trip to Club Fed. By tracking the easy ways (like the NYC guy was using -- a 3D printer + uncontrolled parts), they can prevent any significant illegal arming by people who have to care about the law until shit happens.
You don't need metal. You don't even need plastic. You don't need a printer, cnc machine or lathe. You don't need brass or primers. You don't even need powder. Firearms themselves are entirely unnecessary; you certainly don't need "significant illegal arming" in the sense you are using the term. In fact, I'm convinced it is possible to shift the probabilities toward collapse of centralized authority by a two-digit percentage through the exclusively legal, entirely private and secret actions of between two and five individual people committing to a year or two of dedicated effort. This is speculative only in the weakest sense of the word; there are no pieces of the puzzle actually missing, they are all evidently on the table waiting to be assembled. We do not need to rummage around for a ball of sufficient greyness; it has already been drawn from from the urn. Gibson was correct: the future is here, it just isn't evenly distributed yet.
Maybe it won't have to be, but I don't see a plausible ending where Blue Tribe continues to advance without triggering distribution. The hope is that the fever breaks before that distribution is triggered. It is not an entirely unreasonable hope.
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Ammunition reloading is a sufficiently common red tribe hobby, and the supply chain is sufficiently red, that a scenario where the reds hit ‘defect’ en masse is one in which the wildcat production of ammunition is unstoppable.
The propellant and primer supply chain has ATF throughly up their rear end, and ATF is blue as it comes. Reloading preserves brass (and there's a lot of it out there already) but doesn't help with powder or primers.
The government is phenomenally bad at controlling chemicals, and ‘mass defections’ kind of makes it hard for the ATF to do their job.
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Ever since various intermittent supply chain issues (real and anticipated; starting well well before the most recent ones) it's safe to say that this issue has been... noted well in the enthusiast community. Whether for reasons of price inflation or fear of total unavailability, it's safe to say that there are now sufficient primers in hands both private and unsympathetic to the ATF to supply a serious black market or decent sized army.
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Do successes through the courts not count? I believe that if you look at the last fifty years or so, there's been a steady march of increasing gun rights in the US. My understanding is that prior to the 1960s, it was actually quite unusual to read the Second Amendment as preserving an individual right to own firearms, and state-level laws on it could be quite restrictive. Since then, however, both judicial and legislative pressure, owing partly to advocacy by gun rights organisations like the NRA, have established and expanded individual rights to gun ownership. This is particularly obvious if you look at, for instance, the spread of right-to-carry laws.
Honestly, this surprises me because I would have said that gun rights is pretty much the only social issue on which the right has been consistently winning. They're losing or at best holding steady on everything else, but guns are the one place where they are successfully advancing.
Not when they're totally fake, granting a theoretical right to keep and bear arms but in practice accepting restrictions sufficient to vitiate said right. That's what Heller and Bruen were, and if you think otherwise, try buying a gun out of state, or (lawfully) buying and carrying a gun in New Jersey or Times Square.
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A surprising amount. But mostly by lawfare.
Consider the recent pistol brace ban and how it was defeated.
This is a bit like the ongoing argument that conservatives conserve nothing because they always end up brushed away by time eventually. Without the organized 2a people constantly pushing back, things may be a lot worse than they actually are in America.
This is also quickly forgetting the wins they have been getting pushing for constitutional carry over the last decade.
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