I meant the experiment of further restricting firearms ownership.
> Your rights are being eroded and nullified daily by an increasingly militarized police force, an ever more pervasive surveillance state and an authoritarian government going off the rails.
On that we can agree, at least.
> How are your guns helping?
There's really no way to answer that, except in retrospective. I'll leave the final word on that to the historians who will come along well after I'm gone.
That said, I will note that it's very possible (but probably impossible to prove one way or the other) that the knowledge of how heavily armed the US populace is has in fact at least slowed the erosion of our rights, as the leaders (the ones who aren't brain dead stupid) fear the prospect of an outright shooting civil war.
And even short of a full fledged war, we have already seen cases where armed civilians confronted the government, and the government eventually backed down - even though they could have easily squashed the resisters in terms of absolute power. That is presumably again because they knew that doing that squashing would just lead to further escalation and Bad Things happening. I'm referring here to the "Bundy Cattle Standoff" or whatever they dubbed it, back in 2014.[1]
[1]: It's not my intent here to say that Bundy and his crew were in the right. Merely pointing out that being armed and willing to point guns at agents of the government ultimately led to a outcome other than them all being slaughtered. And I think they got their cattle back, or whatever it was they were trying to accomplish.
I meant the experiment of further restricting firearms ownership.
> Your rights are being eroded and nullified daily by an increasingly militarized police force, an ever more pervasive surveillance state and an authoritarian government going off the rails.
On that we can agree, at least.
> How are your guns helping?
There's really no way to answer that, except in retrospective. I'll leave the final word on that to the historians who will come along well after I'm gone.
That said, I will note that it's very possible (but probably impossible to prove one way or the other) that the knowledge of how heavily armed the US populace is has in fact at least slowed the erosion of our rights, as the leaders (the ones who aren't brain dead stupid) fear the prospect of an outright shooting civil war.
And even short of a full fledged war, we have already seen cases where armed civilians confronted the government, and the government eventually backed down - even though they could have easily squashed the resisters in terms of absolute power. That is presumably again because they knew that doing that squashing would just lead to further escalation and Bad Things happening. I'm referring here to the "Bundy Cattle Standoff" or whatever they dubbed it, back in 2014.[1]
[1]: It's not my intent here to say that Bundy and his crew were in the right. Merely pointing out that being armed and willing to point guns at agents of the government ultimately led to a outcome other than them all being slaughtered. And I think they got their cattle back, or whatever it was they were trying to accomplish.