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A popular uprising against tyranny is possible today. See Venezuela, Hong Kong, Ireland, etc. Just because we haven't reached the boiling point doesn't mean that we would never rebel on the face of tyranny, and it also doesn't mean that arms haven't subtly discouraged tyranny.
Meanwhile the poor saps in HK and venezuela got no chance in heck of throwing off the yoke of communism.
I think this isn't applicable to a theoretical "disarmed" US. Just look at how other recent civil wars started out, where an autocratic Government pushed the populace to far. Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Ukraine.
They all tried to violently suppress street protests, and the moment the badly armed population needed to fight back because they were getting shot in the streets, they either sacked police stations and military armories; or entire guard/police/army battalions switched sides and brought their guns with them.
I see no reason to think the US would turn out different. It's unthinkable that large-scale violence would be used against citizens in the streets with police/national guard/fed. armed forces just watching their neighbors and brothers being killed. The US still has sufficient diversity in its armed forces, there is no large distinct outgroup they would collectively tolerate being violently suppressed.
Also, police armories have gotten ridiculous, and defending them seems like a daunting task once you start slaughtering people in the streets. We've seen burning police stations before, at much lower stakes. Looting them before setting the fires is kind of a given.
This all depends on state capacity. The state capacity in these shithole countries is low and the discipline and morale in their armed forces is even lower. This can't happen in HK at all.
History has shown that they will kill if ordered to. Kent state is the most obvious example but there are others.
True, HK is a totally different story. But it's also very different than the US. I'm also not at all convinced that a few hundred thousand AR-15s would change their situation all that much.
That's kind of my point. Kent State is the obvious worst case example. At 4 dead and 9 wounded. The number of guardsmen actually aiming at bodies was probably lower than those two numbers, and it happens exceedingly rarely.
Which brings us back to discipline and morale. Unless some out-group is identified and systematically "othered", I can't see a guard unit murdering students in larger numbers without both going out the window on day one.
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Vietnam war protestors were pretty much hated by working class Americans at the time, IIRC, to the extent of unions siding with republicans when it meant they got to go beat up some of them, so the national guard being violent and brutal towards them means less than you think.
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I don’t think this is true. The US security forces are pretty much all blacks and republicans. The FBI is a small minority.
Just above 20% and just below 60%, respectively. I'm not too worried yet. Also, in the grand spectrum of possible political ideologies, Republicans and Democrats stand pretty closely together.
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The Soviet union fell without guns. The people who built Detroit, south side Chicago and Atlanta largely were forced to leave their cities and were replaced without any resistance. The US has never really had any insurgency or militia fighting the government. Northern Ireland had the IRA, the Spanish have independence groups, Italy has had groups fighting the state, Germany had the Baader–Meinhof Gang. The US has had indviduals go bananas and a group of Saudis conduct a major attack but no organized insurgency.
The significance of your observation depends on your causal model. Usually the fall into tyranny is treated as exogenous: it is just as likely when the civilians have guns as when they are disarmed. Eventually it happens, and if the civilians have guns we get to see if they can shoot their way back to freedom.
I prefer to add two upstream stages. Before you can have a coup or a tyrant, you need that kind of person in politics. Once in politics they scheme and calculate. Perhaps the civilians have been disarmed by a well meaning predecessor. Now the would be tyrant's calculation is whether the police and the army will kill on his behalf. Perhaps the civilians have guns. How the calculation is whether the police and the army will take incoming fire. Some will die. Dying is a bigger ask than killing, and I anticipate the would be tyrant biding his time, waiting for a better opportunity that never comes.
But upstream of that is the question: does the would be tyrant even go into politics? Some-one who grows up in a disarmed country may see his fellow country men as sheep to be sheared and enters politics hoping to transcend electoral politics and become Lord Protector. Some-one else, growing up where civilians have guns sees less chance of grabbing ultimate power and probably ends up following a different path through life. Perhaps he aims to become very rich, by up newspapers, and then to half-rule from the shadows, using the media to shape public opinion, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but never at risk of being shot.
Perhaps the lack of organized insurgency shows that the second amendment is pointless because the guns never get used. I think that the lack of organized insurgency shows that the second amendment works better than expected, shaping who goes into politics. The guns are never used because those with ambitions to be tyrants find others paths through life.
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In the grand scheme of things, the RAF was utterly insignificant. They made a lot of headlines with their murders, but they were no closer to taking over the German government than Bin Laden was to establish a caliphate in the US.
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I mean this is objectively not true if you look at the whole of its history, but lets just look at post-1900.
On the small scale:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff
That armed resistance WON their conflict.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)
So did that one.
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So the KKK and other adjacent Reconstruction-era militias don't count?
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