You can't make an argument like that Kag. It's false and null and your grasping at straws and you know it.

Two words: Red Dawn


*edit* I can think of numerous examples where an opressed body of people successfully fought in an urban setting. You saying high explosives are the only reason they won there too? I find that hard to accept and I do not give your argument credence.

Yeah and in Red Dawn they used rockets, grenades and several other explosives. They used guns to acquire them but they still used them.

So everyone run out and watch Red Dawn for all your rebellion trainig. Patric Swazey and Charlie Sheen will show you how to kill Russian commies trying to take your country over with the help of some latin American country. I can't remember if it was Mexico or Cuba.

Against powerful, modern armies such as the one US has at the moment? Great, let's hear them. The last ones you gave were worthless for arguing that you need firearms to beat armies but not explosives, missiles and other heavy weaponry.

Like Austere said against a modern army in a real world situation not a movie world, you would need a supply of explosives before the actual fighting broke out. Chances are you will not get them from the army during combat. Unless you know how to use "duds" to improvise your explosives and are willing to take on squades of troops and try to capture small amounts of explosives at a time. In order to defeat a modern army you will need a ready and steady supply of explosives, either form supporters or a group of good improvisers.

Oh just for the record I support the idea that the second amendment gives the citizens of the US the right to own firearms privately.

I disagree with the idea of the state running a qualification senerio to allow people to buy guns. Here in America as was pointed out already, our government is like a fungus. If given a chance it will start small and then before you know it everything is covered in it. Once we allow them to regulate what is nessecery for gun ownership then they will just keep making it harder and harder to get a firearm. The government will also impose "fees" which will be a tax subsidy that will get increased every year to take up the slack in bloated budgets caused by mis-spending of all the taxes they collect anyway. After awhile the price of the firearm will pale in comparisson to the fees you will have to pay to own the firearm. It will start of as a fee for the background check, then a registrey fee, then you will need to pay a fee to keep liscens up to date. The same thing they do to vehicles. I can see a rule stating that if you go to a firearms school you get something in return, like when you go to driving school you can get your liscense faster and insurance is cheaper, at least in my state.

As for vehicles and the requirements to drive. I knew a guy who took the written part of the test 27 times before he passed and was allowed to drive. I don't think he got to the point of actually getting past the learners pint. He fell of a high rise building, he was a high steel welder, he was until the 15 story fall that is. Any screwball can get a car. Also getting a car is a previlage as they say, we have no law granting every person in America the RIGHT to drive, we do on the other hand have a RIGHT to own guns. Just like a RIGHT to vote and a bunch of other things. Oh yeah the rules fo rowning and driving a car is governed by each individual state, the right ot own a gun is guaranteed by federal law, subject to further restriction by each state.

Besides outlawing guns from the hands of honest citizens will do fuck all for keeping guns out of the hands of criminals. If drugs can be smuggled into the country by the ton, why not guns? The only thing you would do is put peopel out of work, the ones who make all our guns, right books and all that stuff. Then create a much larger black market in fireamrs. Prohibition never will work, it will only make people desire those things more. Look at drugs, look at the 20s and 30s with alcohol, hell I hear Domincan cigars are better then Cuban but since Cuban cigars are contraband they are worth twice a Domincan and people desire them more. Drinking is illegal for anyone under 21 in my state, I started when I 15, it was fun, I turned 21 and it was not fun any more, so I stopped.

Then don't use a gun. If you are not planning on shooting to kill, use a different weapon. A gun is not a wounding weapon it's a lethal weapon. It kills people. Depending on where you live (I live in nevada) I will be far better off statistically killing an intruder that wounding him so he can survive to sue me.

That is a horribly inefficient use of resources. Tanks are easy to spot and light tanks can get ripped apart by man-portable rockets. An automated turret defense grid is much more effective, especially if supplimented with remote activated mines.

They can't sell their cars if everyone's dead. As long as the vehicle keeps its driver alive the statistical majority of the time, they would see it as good enough. A rolling deathtrap that kills 100% of its occupants doesn't inspire resale. Car manufacturers would rather the car break down as soon as they can get away with it while leaving the driver completely alive and interested in buying another car.

I meant to say I would shoot him until he died or gave up. I know he'll sue or I will be sued by his family. And being a white guy in Baltimore I can only pray he is a white guy or I am toast anyway. The point I was trying to make is that I would not empty the clip into him. So if I do have to go to court hopefully the judge will relise I was using just force. Not killing the man to kill him. If I shoot a man and kill him with one shot and stop there I hope the judge sees it as self defense or what ever they call it. If was to go crazy and shoot him ten times and the first shot did the job I will look like a mad man and get screwed. Then had a case here that had a guy shot an intruder, one shot killed him, the home owner walked. Another case had a guy shoot an intruder several times, the first or second shot did the intruder in, the home owner had to pay a fine for using excessive force, but that was after a whole mess load of lea bargaining. IN a third case they had a guy shoot an intruder and continued to follow him out onto the front lawn, the final and fatal shot was in the intruders back. That guy is currently in jail.

"Pretty please Mr SAM-crewman, could I borrow your Patriots for a moment? kthx." I wouldn't actually call those chances as much as absolute certainty. You cannot supply yourself in a war against a huge army with gear stolen from said army. If you could, insurgents would likely be doing just that the world over.

But in none of the cases mentioned thus far, or in any other cases that I can come up with (all the different groups fighting in South America, mainly), has anyone ever even attempted that -- begin a war without any serious weaponry whatsoever and then try to steal it from the enemy.

Then I suggest you start doing something. If your government is that horribly ran, start voting some sane people into it. Although I still don't see exactly what the problem is in this particular case, when you already have agencies directly related to the control of firearms.

What's it cost around there to get a driver's license? Assuming you don't go to any school or course for it.

I'm mainly discussing this as a world-wide topic, however, not one limited to the US. Thus I don't feel restricted by whether you do or do not have a bullshit government. Other countries have well-run governments capable of controlling themselves and the agencies that work for them well enough not to let the kind of worst case scenarios mentioned here happen.

In other words, you think it's a very good idea that the government has extensive legislation covering the safety of cars. Then I assume you also think it's a very good idea that the government has extensive legislation covering the safety of firearms, right?

Te point is car makers will do wha tthey think is best for the company. If it is to make cars a little safer fine, but don't expect them to do wha tever they can to save your life. Most of the technology we are seeing put into cars now has been an option for years. Airbags have been availible for years before they were being put into cars. The same with anti-lock brakes. I fforget who is doing it now, but they are making car headlights turn with the steering wheel, because headlights can not see around corners and so with them turning with the steering wheel they will look where you want to turn. Guess what that idea has been arounf since the fifties. So much for car makers really caring. They do enough to not be sued or make it a selling point when sales are slumping.

Correct. The consumers are neccessary for a company to succeed, but the specific consumer is typically irrelevant. There is another factor related to the features. Cost to make vs. price. Features are added to make a car more desirable than the competition, but other features are held back because there is not enough real demand for such vehicles despite all the shouting for them.

Then I suppose the first thing that you have to do to make your government work better is to demolish the two-party system. The only thing worse than a 2-party system is a 1-party system.

I'm certain enough that no one will manage to find such a link that I can say definite things. If such a story emerges from somewhere it's BS, or I learn something new, which is worth much more than an argument about whether you should be allowed to have the means to overthrow your government.

Well i have had a few college level US Law classes, as well as history so maybe i can shed some light on why we Americain think we live in the wild, wild, west!

If you read document written by the authors of our constitution it is very clear why they wanted us to have firearm and well as a local miltia. They had no trust in the central government and want them to be respectful( Scared ) of the local. This would keep them from getting to out of line. The local militia was suppose to be made up of local people, citizens, not military personell exclusivly.

Also, they already had them. Ever see what happens when you TRY to disarm people?? Doesnt work. We are combative by nature i think.

Anyway, Believe it or not alot of Americain dont trust our Government much farther than we could throw'em so it keeps us warm and safe to know that if anyone come here to cause trouble Ill blast them out of there shoes (in my case that would be my trust double barrel shootgun!)

I could be wrong about this, and i have been known to say some outrageous stuff, but we have a real flip view of this in the US. I cannot understand, as well as many other, why anyone would want to just lay down and take it from someone. You have to fight back, and in the age of guns that mean having one yourself.

There is a bumper sticker that i see here...usually on beat up pick-ups...but it says..

"If you outlaw guns, only outlaw will have guns"

Remember...whats a criminal? Someone who breaks the law. So why would anyone with an IQ of more than 80 think that restricting access to guns would help the common person?? The criminal could care less what they law says and will have them anyway!

Just my thoughts, I have had some Dutch friends who think we are all nuts here because of all the guns, but what my Hard Core Redneck friend pointed out, and this is harsh so please dont Flame me, is that we havent been invaded fifty times! From talking to my gal friend from Holland she say thats why Europeons are so against guns is because of all the fighting in the first have of the 20th century.So there is a good arguement on both sides! I do own a gun to protect my children. I live in a farm community and every year when the field hands move into the area there is a rash of breakins and attacks on women so i have to defend my family! Would anyone really do less???

Thanks guys for the soapbox!

And as we all know, shooting government agents will cause them to leave you alone. Yes indeedio, forget about politics or talking sense; the right way to deal with a government you don't like is stockpiling machineguns and shooting everyone on their payroll.

Yes, I'm a bit flammatory. I just hope the guys who think they need to protect themselves against the 3v1l Government, or think they've got the slightest fucking chance of doing it, are also capable of laughing at themselves in a healthy manner.

[Edit]If you instead meant that you need the shotgun to protect yourself (or others) from the criminals that the government doesn't deal with, using your much-advertised democratic system and freedom of speech is a far better way of changing things.[/Edit]

You may believe something and that is fine. You've yet to mount a halfway effective argument however and there are several pages of convincing dialog from the pro gunners. Which I have to say suprised me and encouraged me. I was expecting far, far worse (not worse just anti gun) from this forum. I think it's great.

That's great and all, but these days you quite rarely get infantry on its own anywhere. At the very least, they have light vehicles and extensive air support. Trying to shoot down helicopters with light firearms is, like I already said, futile. It just doesn't happen. And now even HMMWVs are almost bulletproof.

Can you think of any example where a population with only small-caliber firearms as their weapons has managed to beat a modern conventional army in any sort physical warfare? None of the examples here so far work. I already went over Afghanistan. The North Vietnamese had all sorts of heavy weaponry, including tanks (although outdated) and missiles, rockets, mines, grenades, artillery, you name it.

The French were occupied during WW2. Sure there was resistance, and the Germans in France might never have felt completely safe, but for most intents and purposes France was conquered. It is extremely unlikely that indigenous resistance would have managed to drive the Germans out of France. Without the help of other major, conventional armies, France would have been screwed. (Not dissing the French, could have happened to any country next to Nazi Germany.)

Let's hear that example, then. All so far have only proved that you do need the grenades and rockets and missiles and mines and everything if you wish to stand a chance against a modern conventional army.

Us Finns would prefer if you just referred to it as "Finnish M/91" and forgot about the Mosin-Nagant...

Explosives can be made in a bathtub. Even I've made homemade pastique when I was a teenager as a chemistry experiment (and to blow stuff up without harming anyone).

And you can't tell me Afghanistan and veitnam doesn't count. It most certainly does count. Kill the troops, take thier supplies... like heavy weapons, rockets, etc. Guerilla raids can net you all the weapons you need and it works. You just need the will power and attitude to make it happen. A defeatist attitude gets you nowhere.

Neither the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan nor the North Vietnamese Army supplied their forces by killing enemies and taking their equipment. On the scale of assault rifles and ammunition to them the Mujahadeen might have stolen gear from fallen enemies. The majority of their heavy weaponry they already had before the major conflict or it was supplied to them from somewhere else.

The Vietnamese did not do this in the least. Of the weapons used by the NVA, a tiny little fraction was war-spoils, the rest having been procured from the surrounding countries or made by the war industory of North Vietnam itself. This is immediately evident from looking at equipment lists of either side -- there was the clear division of Western/NATO gear in the South and Russian/Chinese gear in the North. This is true with all sizes of weapons, from pistols through small explosives to tanks.

[Edit]The North Vietnamese war industry certainly didn't consist of making plastique in a bathtub, either. We're talking large, heavily industrialized facilities pumping out supplies. The Mujahadeen did not have that, which is why they had to get their heavy weaponry elsewhere -- the US, mainly.[/Edit]

Until someone can present an example where it has happened, you are talking about more willpower and attitude than any people has ever had anywhere. Realizing that you might not be better than everybody else ever anywhere is not "a defeatist attitude", it's realism.

So your position is to just roll over and play dead? You prefer to be oppressed?

Pacifism is not a survival trait and neither is wishful thinking.

A man who has nothing worth dying for is never truly alive.
- Martin Luther King.

That's got nothing to do with what I'm saying. If the laws of reality were totally broken, this plane of existance crashed with the Plane Where Bad Shit Happens and Finland suddenly found itself with a totalitarion regime, you can bet your ass I'd be doing something other than rolling over and playing dead.

But that won't happen here in the foreseeable future, because we have a working democratic system and enough people who actually give a shit and think about who to vote and do it. We have a conscription army that wouldn't fight against The People, because it consists of The People. The massive majority of people would never let anyone with a totalitarion streak to get to power, let alone stay there for more than a week. We got our Prime Minister fired because he exaggerated and was suspected of maybe suggesting someone to give her copies of a not-very-secret paper.

Stockpiling guns is not a good way to fight against an oppressive government. Instead, you should be trying to make a differense in how the politics of your country work, making sure an oppressive government cannot ever materialize.

Even if you had those guns, did nothing to stop your government from becoming the kind of horrible monstrosity that is being discussed, and then begun open war against that government, you wouldn't stand a chance. You'd need those (not centrally) regulated militias with heavy weaponry of all sorts. Considering the massive safety liability such things would be at a time when your government is not playing Evil Empire, you're far better off being interested in politics and doing prevention instead of Preparing for the Apocalypse.

Funny, I'm not seeing them. Maybe I need special glasses to see these arguments?

Note he didn't say "worth killing for".

~J

As soon as I start seeing examples of it having happened, I'll acknowledge it not being far fetched.

This has nothing to do with being allowed to own firearms. Defectors from the Army and National Guard can supply massive amounts of firearms and all kinds of other gear to others. You don't need to have firearms in the first place for Army defectors to help.

In Iraq, you're seeing large amounts of commercial and military explosives coming from the neighboring countries as well as remnants from the old military. RPGs are very common as are actual mines, and these two make the single greatest threat to coalition soldiers there -- both the RPGs and the mines are certainly not improvised weapons, they are all made in actual weapons factories way back when.

If you've got smugglers to supply yourself with heavy weaponry when war breaks, then why do you need the small-caliber firearms? Can't the smugglers smuggle those, too? From this perspective, why are small-caliber firearms (much easier to smuggle) the guns that people should be allowed to have during peace, and not ATGMs?

You'd think the Mujahadeen, the North Vietnamese and the people fighting coalition forces in Iraq now would've understood that, eh? The attacks against supply bases and columns in Iraq are still done with explosives and rockets. The attacks against civilian targets are invariably done without any significant small arms fire. Small arms can sort of do the job that the bigger weapons can against such soft targets, but they are far less effective at it.

I'm willing to bet that more coalition soldiers died of small arms fire during the actual Iraq War than have after the war ended. All the pictures you see on TV are of vehicles having been shot with RPGs, of houses bombed or attacked with rockets, etc. You never see clear signs of small arms combat. At least I haven't.

That's what you've got an army for. You don't need an armed population to make an invasion a bad idea. Even if guns were completely outlawed in the US, no one would be invading you, not for a long, long time.

Somalia is a near-anarchy where genocide is only put off by the fact that the other tribes have got armies as well. There is no oppressive, totalitarian regime there because the people don't need one to be totally fucked up. Imagine trying to bring civilization to Somalia.

Nothing. But every effort you take to increase your rights to pack weapons is less effort towards making sure you have a sensible government.

Overall, I'd say your approach is a good one. In a democracy, people should be required to think about their approach to politics. My biggest problem are people who just whine about having a bad government and think they can correct this by stockpiling weapons. They can't. But you can make sure PWBSH doesn't happen by remaining politically active.

Wouldn't you agree that it's much easier to do something about if and when that time comes IF you have at least standard firearms to do so? A prepared person has much better odds than someone who only prepares with wishful thinking.

Wishful thinking is not a survival trait.

Wishful thinking is not a survival trait.

Say it with me again. Wishful thinking is not a survival trait.

Stockpiling guns is the LAST way to fight against an oppressive government. Diplomacy and politics only work if BOTH sides are willing to use those tools to make it work. Even when diplomacy and politics are used correctly, you still have NO guarantee that the government won't go oppresive because you don't know what will happen in the future.

A defeatist attitude only results in defeat. You'd loose the fight before it even started with that attitude.

What's wrong with doing both? While one is using politics to keep things from getting worse, one could still be target shooting and honning skills. Only fools choose to remain unprepared.

I have to disagree with you here Frag-O. There is something one can do to stop him... don't be prey.

Yeah! Buy a gun and protect yourself!

A gun is not the only answer. learn martial arts as well. Sometimes, maybe only a mere 5%, but sometimes the assailant is too close for a gun to be a feasible deterent or weapon. martial arts, backed up with or without a knife becomes the better option.

That's funny. Ask most criminals and they'll tell you that they go after the person that looks like the easiest prey. Humans are not immune to the laws of nature. Predators exist in human ecologies just as they do in any other ecology. You can think logically all you want, but that won't protect you from a Ted Bundy. And as for thinking logically. A logically thinking person would know it is far better to be prepared than not prepared at all. Is that what Shadowrunners do when they get a run is prepare and plan for all possible events?

Nice SR tie-in there.