crazy2medic wrote:J.R.@A&M wrote:cb1000rider wrote:rotor wrote:
The right to keep and bear arms means that the government can not do what the British did to our colonial population or what the Nazis did to the Jews in more recent times. The 2nd amendment is to protect you from government, not just the bad guy that breaks into your home. I think in this respect our country is unique. With Obama we are already seeing oppression. When you take your first breath you either buy Obamacare or pay a tax. No freedom of choice. To be alive means you are taxed or must buy a government decided insurance. Didn't see that in The Constitution.
Totally agree that such is the basis for the 2nd amendment.
I definitely don't trust the government, but I feel that it'd be naive of me to think that any amount of civilian firepower would have the capacity to stop a modern government. The Branch Davidians were reasonably well armed and they were only fighting non-military law enforcement. They lost.
Back in the colonial days, a government couldn't launch a drone strike from the other side of the world. The playing field was somewhat level and a well-armed militia could defeat a British force from across the sea. That's simply not true anymore.
There is simply no way that our forefathers could see 200+ years into the future. I'm glad we have 2nd amendment rights, but I really don't think it stops the trolls in congress. Besides, they generally want my money.. Killing the population isn't in their self-interest.
I have seen hesitation on the part of law enforcement to shut down civilians that were operating outside the law, but I think that's more about media coverage the bad press and resulting lawsuits than it is about being unable to find an APC to drive in and shoot people up.
Civilian firepower does not have to outmatch the military in order for an armed citizenry to put a limit on tyranny. And armed citizenry makes it more expensive for the government to come arrest you and whisk you away to an internment camp. That is what happened to countless victims of Soviet, etc. oppression -- they were quietly arrested at midnight by a couple of secret police. You could do that in Stalin's Georgia, but you can't do that in Jimmy Carter's Georgia. You'd have to send a SWAT team, and it would make the news, and it would be both financially and politically expensive.
Add to that once your citizenry figure out that they are truly in a fight and start forcing the government to guard facilities they have never had to guard before it wouldn't be long before they found that there are not enough guards and even the guards are vulnerable!
The man who wrote the quote below was a Soviet dissident. He endured very bad times, indeed. He agreed with what you have to say, though.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn