Even my fellow liberals are starting to get a clue.
Read here.
And here. The second one, by Georgetown U. law prof Jonathan Turley, is rather significant. Read it for yourself, rather than read my bloviations on it.
Beyond that, I suspect that there is an undercurrent in the changing attitudes of liberals towards guns and that is this: They are slowly giving up the idea that tyranny cannot happen here. They are realizing that we are standing at the edge of the slippery slope with an administration that is determined to put this country on the path towards a fascist state.
They are realizing that the Founding Fathers were right, after all.
Fish And Shipped Out Unjustly
59 minutes ago
2 comments:
Don't get me wrong, I own guns and have no totematic opposition to having guns, but this is a case where I don't think guns are going to do a lot of good. More than 1 out of 300 Americans is part of the Police State Apparatus and benefits greatly from it, and they have advantages in terms of communications, ability to concentrate, and training over ordinary Americans. They already view themselves as at war with ordinary Americans (thus all the "war" metaphors going around in law enforcement circles nowdays) and thus are likely to remain loyal to their masters (who are not ordinary Americans) rather than to the American people.
Even if the majority of Americans owned assault weapons and RPG launchers, that just puts them into the same position as Iraqis during Saddam's regime. As we all know now (and only a few Libertarians noticed before March 2003), Iraq during Saddam's era was one of the most gun-crazy nations in the world. It was a NRA wet dream. Every adult male had training in how to use an AK-47 and every household had at least one AK-47, and a significant proportion had RPG's. None of that was much use when there was a hard core of regime loyalists willing to brutally put down any uprising against the dictator before it got the chance to reach any sort of critical mass, because Saddam's security forces had significant advantages. They were able to concentrate i.e. bring large force to bear upon individual dissidents. They had better surveillance systems and significant ability to infiltrate dissident groups -- see, e.g. the NYPD's surveillance of activists and organizers prior to the 2004 Republican convention. They had better ability to communicate and coordinate their activities. In short, Jubal Early's "get there the fustest with the mostest" is the best description of the modern police state, and it is rare that a modern police state falters while there is still significant personal loyalty to the State on the part of the secret police.
Now I hear you talk about East Germany. But East Germany fell because, without subsidies from the Soviet Union, the rulers were no longer able to pay their secret police, and the country was so impoverished by decades of misrule that even the secret police were getting hungry. Sort of like why most of the Confederate armies deserted in the last year of the American Civil War -- as one hungry soldier who walked off the battlements near Richmond said, "if the Confederacy can't even feed its soldiers on the battlefield, why should I be loyal to the Confederacy?". But point to me one modern example of a dictator being overthrown by an armed insurgency sans massive external help. You can't. Even the Vietnam War was eventually won by armored units of the North Vietnamese Army, not by the VC insurgency. The modern police state simply has too many advantages, and the fact that armed insurgencies have been successful at making foreign occupations miserable for the foreign occupiers doesn't change that, because foreigners, uhm, well, they don't know the culture, they don't have the intelligence (DIA-style, not IQ-style), and don't have the advantages of a native-born police state.
In short, guns are nice to have. But I don't view them as anything other than a form of suicide if things get so bad that I'm tempted to use them to deal with the police state. The modern police state simply has too many advantages to be overthrown by an insurgency today.
-Badtux the Well-armed Penguin
I hear what you are saying, but at the end of the day, I don't care. I don't have any fantasies about being able to hold off the US Army or the local SWAT goons. I don't think I am going to be able to run into the hills and pull off a "Red Dawn" sort of resistance.
I won't go quietly, Badtux. That is what is important.
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