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To be honest, I'd be against a right to bear arms if I was writing a constitution for a new country. HOWEVER, in light of the fact that the US constitution does grant a right to bear arms, I am very strongly against allowing anyone to do an end run around the process for amending the constitution.
The true test of the strength of your institutions is whether or not you can stick to them even when there's a legitimately good idea that you can't implement because your institutions are in the way. If you can't respect your institutions when they're actually wrong then you don't respect your institutions at all.
I'm curious why, in the abstract?
I'm pretty partial to the ancient prejudices of Englishmen personally.
I don't think an armed uprising is plausible in this day and age. People revolt because they're desperate, and the western world is too rich to foster that kind of desperation. The big difference since the days of George Washington is that we're much richer and more comfortable now.
With no possibility of being able to productively use them against the government, guns can only be used against the citizenry. Having a right to guns just makes your society more dangerous to live in.
Anglosphere governments do not enforce laws particularly evenly, and this being known, I’m sticking with being allowed to carry a gun over criminals being ignored when they do it but being policed with presumption of guilt for firearms ownership.
In Japan, sure, I would happily go unarmed, and comply with whatever ridiculousness they demand for hunting shotguns. We’re not Japan.
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This is a bad and inaccurate model for how successful revolts happen. The American Revolution was led by dissatisfied elites who were living at the pointy end of life satisfaction at the time and risked it all for reasons that were partially ideological.
Desperate people foster low-level street violence that is typically easily crushed. Dissatisfied elites are the true threats to regimes, and they don't revolt out of desperation. There's a reason that every few years people discover that DHS or someone has been flagging disgruntled O6s as threats to homeland stability, and it's not because they're stupid.
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I guess we disagree on that very premise. You think we're beyond warfare because you haven't done it in a while. You obviously haven't been to Northern Ireland. They have video games there too you know. And the 90s aren't that far back. Pretty comfortable times then too, arguably more comfortable than today.
Nonsense. Citizens can also use them against criminals. Who always have them anyways.
There's certainly a tradeoff but my bias is to favor a slightly more dangerous society where I'm allowed to execute the man that has designs on my property (and therefore myself).
I have, in fact, been to Northern Ireland.
Then you may have seen large mementos of people using small arms to get concessions from their government within living memory. Which makes the implausibility of something that did happen very weird indeed.
Except they failed. The express goal of the IRA was a united Ireland. Indeed there is an argument their goal would have been further along without their intervention. They accepted a peace deal that had been offered to them in the 1970's in 1998. All the violence didn't actually get them any further forward than the government had been willing to accept beforehand.
With another 25 years of (mostly) peace we are now closer to a United Ireland (polling wise) than we ever were during the Troubles.
I fail to see how that's relevant to the plausibility of the insurgency in the first place.
You can say the PIRA failed, but it did exist.
I'm just correcting an erroneous statement. Because you said in Northern Ireland you can see mementoes of groups using small arms to get (not try to get) concessions from their government.
First the Provos main and most effective weapon was arguably bombs not small arms and they failed to get the concessions they wanted, means your statement is facially incorrect.
To address the main argument, I think explosives not small arms is arguably the only plausible route for an asymmetric insurgency (see IED's, PIRA bombs in Canary Wharf etc.) Whether even that is enough is I think arguable, but small arms won't do it, for the same reason the IRA moved to bombs. Guns put your small number of people who are willing to kill at risk against government forces. Expertise and access to bombs seems much more important than firearms.
Indeed most firearm use at the end was about punishing their own side and defectors. (Kneecappings and executions). Used to maintain control of their own enclaves. Indeed, the Loyalist Paramilitaries relied on guns more frequently because they lacked big targets for bombs as they were not fighting a government. Conflict at similar (low) power levels is more conducive to firearms I think, whether that is neighboring groups or criminals.
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