Jun 2, 2022·edited Jun 6, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
There would be no quicker way to a second US Civil War than some federal confiscation dictate. Tim Pool believes the fault lines are directly under the Abortion issue (just using him as an example of a dominant media personality. What is the US at now? Over 400 million guns circulating?
Hopefully it never gets there. Human nature has not changed much in the last 100 years and there is no reason to assume that genocidal incidents couldn't take place right here in the USA. Look at the political tensions. There are factions all over the country that would have no problem seeing the other side "cleansed"... Shit, just look at good old fashioned gang violence.
As long as there are humans, there will always be a left versus right, blue versus red, right versus wrong, black versus white paradigm. Look at all of the incidents listed here. It's all of the same ingredients time and time again. There is a wisdom in the 2A that most overlook.
It's beyond naive to believe that there could never be another ethnic cleansing event in our modern era. As long as we the people are armed, we at least have this invisible line in the sand to stave off any true push to "cleanse" any minority political faction. There still exist sociopaths in the US government and elsewhere.
Look at how much death was wrought across the Middle East over the last 20-30 years. Then, once the war was lost, the US was salivating for more... and now we find ourselves in Ukraine. If the US couldn't get away with its foreign adventures, where does anyone think that energy for war, for an adversary would manifest? The Neocon/neolib establishment is going to rule by force wherever it can. It's already been turned on US citizens. Think of the Trump era. Think of the "deplorables"... the Trump "rats" and "MaGats"..... even the rhetoric is there in plain site.
Arm yourself. Train. Do not fall for the establishments "appeal to emotion propaganda." This is the same exact progression towards a cleansing of a minority political faction we have seen countless times. Arm yourself, train you children. Gun ownership is your American birthright no matter what political side you align with. The 2A was a gift from god. It was well thought out and made the second for a reason. It's been infringed upon enough. Never allow a government to take your firearms because if you do, say goodbye to your children, religion, culture next.
I have to admit that I find that estimate absurdly low, but I'm certainly willing to let the people who want to take them all away *think* it's that low...
Forget tyranny and genocide—the reason people are against guns is because they can’t imagine (or refuse to accept) that guns have any positive utility whatsoever. They see them as inherently evil, and therefore mortally fear them.
This isn’t a discussion that will ever be affected by reason, logic, facts or mathematics.
My current go-to is pivoting away even from the "guns to protect us from tyranny" argument and straight over "my guns are to protect me from YOU." An AR-15 is a good weapon to stage an insurgency with, but it is an ideal weapon to defend your home from getting firebombed by a woke mob, and we saw plenty of that in 2020.
Jun 2, 2022·edited Jun 2, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
How many other countries can be considered well-armed? Yemen? Serbia? Finland? Nobody with anything approaching half US gun density. Comparison is difficult when you have no peer states for the tested attribute.
Here's an interesting idea; Given that culture plays a far bigger role in gun deaths than gun ownership rates here in the U.S., it seems that it also plays a bigger role when it comes to genocides elsewhere.
While I agree with your conclusions on the merits and feasability of gun control, I'm not sure genocide is a fair comparison.
Europe is ~44 different countries with wildly different political situations and histories. If one of them (say Croatia) has a genocide, there's a legitimate option for other countries to ignore it. If one of the US states has a genocide... the federal government will intervene. If the entire US has a genocide... that's probably a lot more deaths than any of the individual genocides you list. I think you have a variance issue here.
A quick look makes it seem like most of these genocides happened during the WWII era. Considering that war was fought on European soil and had genocide as a key component, a lot of this data is really just because one world war happened to be in an area more prone to world wars than the US.
It could also be that your conclusion is true, but I don't think you have a good enough sample size to make that deduction.
It's a good point, but as I said in a script-flipping comment on another post here, and actually quite seriously, by the same token it makes Americans view Europeans talking about how *we* need to disarm somewhat skeptically. *Our* continent isn't the one with the "gun violence" problem.
Though I suppose Europe hasn't had nearly as much of a gun violence problem either since we imposed the Pax Americana.
Minor quibble about the Armenian Genocide - I'd count that as a West Asian/Middle Eastern genocide rather than as a European one.
It occurred on the Asian side of the Caucasus and in Asia Minor, and neither the Turks who perpetrated it, nor their Armenian victims, are European ethnicities.
I love my [relative] but she believes in your gun evaporation fairy theory. She doesn't think about paying people $300-500 per gun, then demanding at gun point that people turn in their weapons. She just believes "if we could get rid of the guns". But we cannot -- 300+ MILLION guns estimate in the U.S., and a population of about 350 million.
> Is the Europe – USA comparison correct from a population standpoint? Reasonably so. Europe has a current population of around 447 million people to the USA’s 330 million. In 1913 Europe had about 380 million to the USA’s 151 million. It’s not an exact map, but it’s close enough to discuss without getting too bogged down in the weeds by throwing a 1.7x correction factor into whatever comparisons we draw.
It's almost if the change in population disparity there from one measuring point to the other might have something to do with those genocides. Like, over the same time period, either we just mysteriously gained 110 million more people than all of Europe did, or they managed to run a whole god awful mess of them through a wood chipper.
The same growth rate we saw without the rivers of blood, carnage, and emigration to escape same would have seen Europe with 835 million people, not 447 million, by quick calculations. Though perhaps the densities would have slowed that some, regardless.
I would be hesitant to use part 2, for the following reasons:
1. The vast majority of the European genocides happened more than 50 years ago. The only one that happened fairly recently — the Bosnian Genocide — is a rounding error compared to even the second smallest one.
2. It’s unclear, at least to me, how gun regulation contributed to the genocides.
Suppose you're a Jew during WW2. Nazis took control of the region you lived in. You do have a gun for some reason. Nazis came to arrest you.
You _don't_ know they would throw you into a concentration camp. Do you fight? You probably lose & die. Even if you don't lose, could you manage to actually flee? Big doubt.
Without hindsight, it would probably seem prudent to let them arrest you.
If they figure out there are lots of problems with handling Jews because they fight back, they'd just get more careful.
Also, wide availability of guns seem to give State the excuse to be fairly tyrannical. Pro-gun position is obviously correlated with right-wing. Right-wing cares less or not at all about 'police brutality'. That's pretty bad.
If you buy a gun to protect yourself at home from invaders - it's pretty bad that police could invade suddenly, at night, indistinguishably from <other invaders> - and if you try to actually use the weapon (after all, it's exactly the scenario you bought it for) - you're dead. And police isn't even incentivized to avoid these situations; they're allowed to kill perceived threats to themselves (citizens aren't).
I’m not sure what I would do as a single Jew with one gun. But if I were one of the 6 million victims but with 6.2 million guns between us, that’s a different thought experiment altogether
Ok, but the problem is that *now* they're trying to convince people who actually *have* the benefit of that hindsight that they should *preemptively* give up their guns to the government anyway.
I would imagine that an oppressive government would not be capable of being everywhere at once. Once communications established the government actions I might expect those concerned would take their weapons along with themselves elsewhere. It would take time to organize of course but governments are slow lumbering things. I don't think those expecting trouble would be around for the knock on the door.
Governments are *necessarily* slow things in some regards simply due to their size.
And I'm not referring to their generally lumbering nature.
TL;DR: Sometimes they're slow because they don't have *enough* people.
As is the theme 'round these parts, let's break out some math.
72 Million US Gun Owners, 130 Million US Households (total). 35% of the population, 40% of the households, as obviously some households have more than one person in them, and some don't, and some of the one person dwellings have firearms and some don't. Assuming I got this correct, that works out to ~52M US households with firearms.
Let's assume a "turn-em-in" order is *wildly* successful and achieves 97% compliance. That leaves us with 1.56 million US Households and perhaps 2.16 million individuals who are illegally retaining possession of a firearm. Not that there's actually a good record of who has what or which households that would still be. I would expect a fair number of people who were planning on disobeying to turn in *something* to lower the radar profile, and in a lot of places "I sold that a long time ago" is a perfectly legal reason to not have something or any record of where it is now.
But let's say that the people who had decided to not comply were known.
1,560,000 households.
~88,000 SWAT trained door-kickers in the US, including the FBI HRT.
If they use 4 man teams and do 3 raids every day, it takes 24 days to hit everyone.
Now, I know that the usual view of gun owners is that we're idiot hayseeds, but I think even the dumbest of us would have figured out what was going on by day #3, and would be making preparations to *not be there* when SWAT showed up.
I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to contemplate what course of action they might choose after having been driven from their homes for owning firearms.
I imagine the usual 30% will comply, 30% are clueless about anything and 30% are aware and will never comply. Leaves a lot to get done. SWAT trained door-kickers! not your typical census workers.
And certainly harder to rustle up on short order than census workers. Yes, yes, I know the theory is that they'd just use the Army and Marines to go... kick down the doors of their friends and relatives. For some reason, I am skeptical regarding the practicality of *that* plan.
Ask yourself as a SWAT team member if all those doors are ones you really want to go through. Especially when you've seen a few buddies drop beside you already.
I wouldn't necessarily say it's rock solid either, but without cloning Earth and running two different Americas under two different gun proliferation regimes side by side there's no great way to prove this in either direction.
It's worth noting that the USA did a lot of very awful genocidey smelling stuff in the 1800s and prior against our own disarmed sub-populations.
And armed ones. The Indian genocide happened in spite of varying levels of armed conflict. Sinity is right that if genocide were on the table, the first step would be isolating and villainizing the subgroup. You make it so that they look like the bad guy, you find reasons to confiscate their weapons if possible. Look at the Tulsa massacre, for example, where there were black people with guns. Weapons make it harder for a mob to go in and wipe out some people, but not impossible. In the Tulsa massacre, the local police force armed white people without guns. If automatic weapons are illegal, why wouldn't the local gun shop suddenly start arming a white - or whatever - mob with AR-15's to counter the ones the isolated group has? The point of genocide is that it is accepted by the population in power that the minority group HAS TO DIE. Any firepower that group can muster is going to be overwhelmed.
If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had the same guns per capita ratio that the current US population had, they wouldn't have had 100,000 armed resistance, they would have had 720,000 armed resistance, once those guns got distributed. You cannot tell me that wouldn't have played out differently, at least at a deterrent level.
Hard to discuss counterfactuals, but by the time they're in the ghetto, the number of weapons that had before becomes irrelevant: weapons are confiscated. They got their hands on smuggled and homemade weapons. Large military-grade weapons are harder to smuggle. So, we'd need to look at armed resistance BEFORE they wound up in the ghetto, and I'm finding it hard to find that. Also keep in mind that the majority population would be hostile and equally (or more) well-armed.
A case where well-armed (military-grade) citizens WOULD make a difference is with a foreign invasion (Finland, Ukraine, Red Dawn). I don't think anyone would argue that the U.S. requires that kind of defense, to the point of taking priority over other considerations.
Defending yourself against the tyranny of the government to me sounds like a wholly facetious point. The government has an equal (or greater, in that it represents the people) right to defend itself against insurrection, which means the government at all times must maintain military superiority for the good of the nation. This can only balance out when the government itself loses the support of its own military. Unfortunately, there's a chance this happens to follow a tyrannical leader (as often happens when dictatorships are installed), but then our only defense is the distillation of the principles of our democracy within the military and throughout the citizenry.
As a European and a descendant of survivors from Eastern Europe of WW 2, I am sorry to say that the argument is historically faulty on some levels.
For it ignores three things:
Firstly, the overwhelming approval of Europeans after WW 1, ie. in the 1920s to 1930s, to political systems that we would call "fascist tyrannies" today. That is, the political support and acceptance by the population of fascist dictatorships ("tyrannies") was very high. At the same time, the overal rejection of the Jews in Europe was also very high, antisemitism was common in probably all European countries in one way or another. Basically, most Germans and Europeans did not object to the Germans doing something against the Jews in one way or another, on the contrary, they even supported it directly or indirectly. It must be said clearly that the Germans only stopped supporting their Nazi regime when the war was lost for all to see. This means that even a well-armed population is not a threat to a government if that polulation approves and supports the policies of its government. From a perspective of Third Reich Germany, not the government commited genocide, the Germans did themselves: Tens of thousands freely and willingly joined the paramilitary "militias" SA and SS which were the backbone of the hidden and open terror against the Jews and others.
Secondly, it is simply wrong that the civilian population in Eastern European countries was generally unarmed. In Poland, after the rapid surrender of the army, until the end of the Second World War there was an armed resistance of several 100,000 fighters who took part, among other things, in the armed uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. The German Army and the German paramilitary units such as the SS was the best trained and most technically advanced army in Europe, with initially almost unlimited resources. Against a well equipped and well led army, even an armed civilian population has no real chance.
Thirdly, the genocide didn't take place in plain sight before the eyes of the public but was purposefully hidden from the population and the victims. We know from sources that many Jews deliberately did not leave Germany or Austria because they could not imagine what the German Nazis' plan was. The transports of Jews to Poland have been described as "resettlement" by the Nazis, which both the Jews and the other population believed. Even when they arrived at the concentration camps, many of the prisoners did not realise that it was all about killing them sooner or later. Since a lot of Germans and Austrians often profited from the "resettlements", no one gave it a second thought.
For me as a European, the US notion of an inherent antagonism between government and people is not really historically implementable in Europe's history. Genocides have never been a unilateral act of violence by a government against its population, but have happened either during a war or even a war of occupation by a foreign power (Nazi Germany), and/or as a brutal "discharge" of long tensions between population groups.
The idea that the genocides could have been prevented if the victims had all been armed ignores the diversity of the historical and cultural situations of the various genocides and can only be called naïve.
The USA is a fascist tyranny where the oligarchs are only held in check by their fear of the proletariat, prove me wrong. We have every single symptom of the Nazis or Communists here, are a mathematically provable oligarchy, and our behavior both domestically and abroad reinforces this, both historically with how we treated blacks, native Americans, and Asians, and how we currently treat Middle Easterners in their own countries. We have the nationalism, the huge army, the global empire, the history of atrocities, the deep connection between industry and the state, and the controlled populace without a true vote. Mussolini, were he alive today, would be very proud of what the USA has become. We couldn't have developed a better playbook to enact Mussolini style fascism, right down to the fake ballot box that keeps the people subjugated by a restoration of the illusion of choice every four years.
You folks in Europe, if you had any sense, should be very thankful that the private gun owners in the USA are keeping our government in enough fear that they don't boot us into the ground, because *you'd* be next. Point blank. You live under an umbrella of US protection that's only provided because our government is scared to turn the fascist screw that very last click.
If the Jews ALONE of Warsaw had the same gun ownership rate that Americans have today, they would have had 780,000 guns to use to defend themselves, 7.8 times more than the number you quoted. That doesn't even include any gentiles they were working with.
You cannot in any way convince me that there is no difference between 100,000 resistance fighters and 780,000 resistance fighters.
Much as this idea appeals to me, it rests on a pretty big assumption. Firearms were far from the only difference between the US and Europe in the 20th century. Europe saw two world wars and the breakups of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, in an era when romantic ethno-nationalism wasn't yet considered outright evil. The danger of genocide seems greatest when Leviathan is weakest.
There would be no quicker way to a second US Civil War than some federal confiscation dictate. Tim Pool believes the fault lines are directly under the Abortion issue (just using him as an example of a dominant media personality. What is the US at now? Over 400 million guns circulating?
Hopefully it never gets there. Human nature has not changed much in the last 100 years and there is no reason to assume that genocidal incidents couldn't take place right here in the USA. Look at the political tensions. There are factions all over the country that would have no problem seeing the other side "cleansed"... Shit, just look at good old fashioned gang violence.
As long as there are humans, there will always be a left versus right, blue versus red, right versus wrong, black versus white paradigm. Look at all of the incidents listed here. It's all of the same ingredients time and time again. There is a wisdom in the 2A that most overlook.
It's beyond naive to believe that there could never be another ethnic cleansing event in our modern era. As long as we the people are armed, we at least have this invisible line in the sand to stave off any true push to "cleanse" any minority political faction. There still exist sociopaths in the US government and elsewhere.
Look at how much death was wrought across the Middle East over the last 20-30 years. Then, once the war was lost, the US was salivating for more... and now we find ourselves in Ukraine. If the US couldn't get away with its foreign adventures, where does anyone think that energy for war, for an adversary would manifest? The Neocon/neolib establishment is going to rule by force wherever it can. It's already been turned on US citizens. Think of the Trump era. Think of the "deplorables"... the Trump "rats" and "MaGats"..... even the rhetoric is there in plain site.
Arm yourself. Train. Do not fall for the establishments "appeal to emotion propaganda." This is the same exact progression towards a cleansing of a minority political faction we have seen countless times. Arm yourself, train you children. Gun ownership is your American birthright no matter what political side you align with. The 2A was a gift from god. It was well thought out and made the second for a reason. It's been infringed upon enough. Never allow a government to take your firearms because if you do, say goodbye to your children, religion, culture next.
Right at 400 million guns as of 2020. Best number I saw recently was 396.
I have to admit that I find that estimate absurdly low, but I'm certainly willing to let the people who want to take them all away *think* it's that low...
Forget tyranny and genocide—the reason people are against guns is because they can’t imagine (or refuse to accept) that guns have any positive utility whatsoever. They see them as inherently evil, and therefore mortally fear them.
This isn’t a discussion that will ever be affected by reason, logic, facts or mathematics.
My current go-to is pivoting away even from the "guns to protect us from tyranny" argument and straight over "my guns are to protect me from YOU." An AR-15 is a good weapon to stage an insurgency with, but it is an ideal weapon to defend your home from getting firebombed by a woke mob, and we saw plenty of that in 2020.
The question to ask is: How many genocides have occurred in countries/areas with a well-armed population?
How many other countries can be considered well-armed? Yemen? Serbia? Finland? Nobody with anything approaching half US gun density. Comparison is difficult when you have no peer states for the tested attribute.
Here's an interesting idea; Given that culture plays a far bigger role in gun deaths than gun ownership rates here in the U.S., it seems that it also plays a bigger role when it comes to genocides elsewhere.
While I agree with your conclusions on the merits and feasability of gun control, I'm not sure genocide is a fair comparison.
Europe is ~44 different countries with wildly different political situations and histories. If one of them (say Croatia) has a genocide, there's a legitimate option for other countries to ignore it. If one of the US states has a genocide... the federal government will intervene. If the entire US has a genocide... that's probably a lot more deaths than any of the individual genocides you list. I think you have a variance issue here.
A quick look makes it seem like most of these genocides happened during the WWII era. Considering that war was fought on European soil and had genocide as a key component, a lot of this data is really just because one world war happened to be in an area more prone to world wars than the US.
It could also be that your conclusion is true, but I don't think you have a good enough sample size to make that deduction.
I think your criticisms are legitimate, but I can't think of a better comp to use for the analysis.
It's a good point, but as I said in a script-flipping comment on another post here, and actually quite seriously, by the same token it makes Americans view Europeans talking about how *we* need to disarm somewhat skeptically. *Our* continent isn't the one with the "gun violence" problem.
Though I suppose Europe hasn't had nearly as much of a gun violence problem either since we imposed the Pax Americana.
Minor quibble about the Armenian Genocide - I'd count that as a West Asian/Middle Eastern genocide rather than as a European one.
It occurred on the Asian side of the Caucasus and in Asia Minor, and neither the Turks who perpetrated it, nor their Armenian victims, are European ethnicities.
Thanks for the correction. I don't think it changes the numbers much though.
I love my [relative] but she believes in your gun evaporation fairy theory. She doesn't think about paying people $300-500 per gun, then demanding at gun point that people turn in their weapons. She just believes "if we could get rid of the guns". But we cannot -- 300+ MILLION guns estimate in the U.S., and a population of about 350 million.
> Is the Europe – USA comparison correct from a population standpoint? Reasonably so. Europe has a current population of around 447 million people to the USA’s 330 million. In 1913 Europe had about 380 million to the USA’s 151 million. It’s not an exact map, but it’s close enough to discuss without getting too bogged down in the weeds by throwing a 1.7x correction factor into whatever comparisons we draw.
It's almost if the change in population disparity there from one measuring point to the other might have something to do with those genocides. Like, over the same time period, either we just mysteriously gained 110 million more people than all of Europe did, or they managed to run a whole god awful mess of them through a wood chipper.
The same growth rate we saw without the rivers of blood, carnage, and emigration to escape same would have seen Europe with 835 million people, not 447 million, by quick calculations. Though perhaps the densities would have slowed that some, regardless.
I would be hesitant to use part 2, for the following reasons:
1. The vast majority of the European genocides happened more than 50 years ago. The only one that happened fairly recently — the Bosnian Genocide — is a rounding error compared to even the second smallest one.
2. It’s unclear, at least to me, how gun regulation contributed to the genocides.
"Gun proliferation makes the government scared enough of the people that they don't misbehave too badly" is a common theme within the gun community.
It's common, but IDK if it makes much sense.
Suppose you're a Jew during WW2. Nazis took control of the region you lived in. You do have a gun for some reason. Nazis came to arrest you.
You _don't_ know they would throw you into a concentration camp. Do you fight? You probably lose & die. Even if you don't lose, could you manage to actually flee? Big doubt.
Without hindsight, it would probably seem prudent to let them arrest you.
If they figure out there are lots of problems with handling Jews because they fight back, they'd just get more careful.
Also, wide availability of guns seem to give State the excuse to be fairly tyrannical. Pro-gun position is obviously correlated with right-wing. Right-wing cares less or not at all about 'police brutality'. That's pretty bad.
If you buy a gun to protect yourself at home from invaders - it's pretty bad that police could invade suddenly, at night, indistinguishably from <other invaders> - and if you try to actually use the weapon (after all, it's exactly the scenario you bought it for) - you're dead. And police isn't even incentivized to avoid these situations; they're allowed to kill perceived threats to themselves (citizens aren't).
I’m not sure what I would do as a single Jew with one gun. But if I were one of the 6 million victims but with 6.2 million guns between us, that’s a different thought experiment altogether
Ok, but the problem is that *now* they're trying to convince people who actually *have* the benefit of that hindsight that they should *preemptively* give up their guns to the government anyway.
That seems... unlikely to bear fruit.
I would imagine that an oppressive government would not be capable of being everywhere at once. Once communications established the government actions I might expect those concerned would take their weapons along with themselves elsewhere. It would take time to organize of course but governments are slow lumbering things. I don't think those expecting trouble would be around for the knock on the door.
Governments are *necessarily* slow things in some regards simply due to their size.
And I'm not referring to their generally lumbering nature.
TL;DR: Sometimes they're slow because they don't have *enough* people.
As is the theme 'round these parts, let's break out some math.
72 Million US Gun Owners, 130 Million US Households (total). 35% of the population, 40% of the households, as obviously some households have more than one person in them, and some don't, and some of the one person dwellings have firearms and some don't. Assuming I got this correct, that works out to ~52M US households with firearms.
Let's assume a "turn-em-in" order is *wildly* successful and achieves 97% compliance. That leaves us with 1.56 million US Households and perhaps 2.16 million individuals who are illegally retaining possession of a firearm. Not that there's actually a good record of who has what or which households that would still be. I would expect a fair number of people who were planning on disobeying to turn in *something* to lower the radar profile, and in a lot of places "I sold that a long time ago" is a perfectly legal reason to not have something or any record of where it is now.
But let's say that the people who had decided to not comply were known.
1,560,000 households.
~88,000 SWAT trained door-kickers in the US, including the FBI HRT.
If they use 4 man teams and do 3 raids every day, it takes 24 days to hit everyone.
Now, I know that the usual view of gun owners is that we're idiot hayseeds, but I think even the dumbest of us would have figured out what was going on by day #3, and would be making preparations to *not be there* when SWAT showed up.
I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to contemplate what course of action they might choose after having been driven from their homes for owning firearms.
I imagine the usual 30% will comply, 30% are clueless about anything and 30% are aware and will never comply. Leaves a lot to get done. SWAT trained door-kickers! not your typical census workers.
And certainly harder to rustle up on short order than census workers. Yes, yes, I know the theory is that they'd just use the Army and Marines to go... kick down the doors of their friends and relatives. For some reason, I am skeptical regarding the practicality of *that* plan.
Ask yourself as a SWAT team member if all those doors are ones you really want to go through. Especially when you've seen a few buddies drop beside you already.
"Without hindsight, it would probably seem prudent to let them arrest you."
To me this certainly seems reasonable, however I am operating with hindsight.
Yeah, it seems plausible to me. I’m just not convinced that your genocide argument is solid evidence.
I wouldn't necessarily say it's rock solid either, but without cloning Earth and running two different Americas under two different gun proliferation regimes side by side there's no great way to prove this in either direction.
It's worth noting that the USA did a lot of very awful genocidey smelling stuff in the 1800s and prior against our own disarmed sub-populations.
After looking at those Europe numbers, how rock solid of an argument is it for disarming governments?
Lol
Who's going to disarm the government?
I might make the case of "I'll give my guns up the day after you do."
Probably the best route to take.
Until then, it’s a useful point to make: if you’re gonna be anti-gun, be consistent. The State is a way worse actor than anyone.
And armed ones. The Indian genocide happened in spite of varying levels of armed conflict. Sinity is right that if genocide were on the table, the first step would be isolating and villainizing the subgroup. You make it so that they look like the bad guy, you find reasons to confiscate their weapons if possible. Look at the Tulsa massacre, for example, where there were black people with guns. Weapons make it harder for a mob to go in and wipe out some people, but not impossible. In the Tulsa massacre, the local police force armed white people without guns. If automatic weapons are illegal, why wouldn't the local gun shop suddenly start arming a white - or whatever - mob with AR-15's to counter the ones the isolated group has? The point of genocide is that it is accepted by the population in power that the minority group HAS TO DIE. Any firepower that group can muster is going to be overwhelmed.
If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had the same guns per capita ratio that the current US population had, they wouldn't have had 100,000 armed resistance, they would have had 720,000 armed resistance, once those guns got distributed. You cannot tell me that wouldn't have played out differently, at least at a deterrent level.
Hard to discuss counterfactuals, but by the time they're in the ghetto, the number of weapons that had before becomes irrelevant: weapons are confiscated. They got their hands on smuggled and homemade weapons. Large military-grade weapons are harder to smuggle. So, we'd need to look at armed resistance BEFORE they wound up in the ghetto, and I'm finding it hard to find that. Also keep in mind that the majority population would be hostile and equally (or more) well-armed.
A case where well-armed (military-grade) citizens WOULD make a difference is with a foreign invasion (Finland, Ukraine, Red Dawn). I don't think anyone would argue that the U.S. requires that kind of defense, to the point of taking priority over other considerations.
Defending yourself against the tyranny of the government to me sounds like a wholly facetious point. The government has an equal (or greater, in that it represents the people) right to defend itself against insurrection, which means the government at all times must maintain military superiority for the good of the nation. This can only balance out when the government itself loses the support of its own military. Unfortunately, there's a chance this happens to follow a tyrannical leader (as often happens when dictatorships are installed), but then our only defense is the distillation of the principles of our democracy within the military and throughout the citizenry.
How well armed were the Seminoles?
As a European and a descendant of survivors from Eastern Europe of WW 2, I am sorry to say that the argument is historically faulty on some levels.
For it ignores three things:
Firstly, the overwhelming approval of Europeans after WW 1, ie. in the 1920s to 1930s, to political systems that we would call "fascist tyrannies" today. That is, the political support and acceptance by the population of fascist dictatorships ("tyrannies") was very high. At the same time, the overal rejection of the Jews in Europe was also very high, antisemitism was common in probably all European countries in one way or another. Basically, most Germans and Europeans did not object to the Germans doing something against the Jews in one way or another, on the contrary, they even supported it directly or indirectly. It must be said clearly that the Germans only stopped supporting their Nazi regime when the war was lost for all to see. This means that even a well-armed population is not a threat to a government if that polulation approves and supports the policies of its government. From a perspective of Third Reich Germany, not the government commited genocide, the Germans did themselves: Tens of thousands freely and willingly joined the paramilitary "militias" SA and SS which were the backbone of the hidden and open terror against the Jews and others.
Secondly, it is simply wrong that the civilian population in Eastern European countries was generally unarmed. In Poland, after the rapid surrender of the army, until the end of the Second World War there was an armed resistance of several 100,000 fighters who took part, among other things, in the armed uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. The German Army and the German paramilitary units such as the SS was the best trained and most technically advanced army in Europe, with initially almost unlimited resources. Against a well equipped and well led army, even an armed civilian population has no real chance.
Thirdly, the genocide didn't take place in plain sight before the eyes of the public but was purposefully hidden from the population and the victims. We know from sources that many Jews deliberately did not leave Germany or Austria because they could not imagine what the German Nazis' plan was. The transports of Jews to Poland have been described as "resettlement" by the Nazis, which both the Jews and the other population believed. Even when they arrived at the concentration camps, many of the prisoners did not realise that it was all about killing them sooner or later. Since a lot of Germans and Austrians often profited from the "resettlements", no one gave it a second thought.
For me as a European, the US notion of an inherent antagonism between government and people is not really historically implementable in Europe's history. Genocides have never been a unilateral act of violence by a government against its population, but have happened either during a war or even a war of occupation by a foreign power (Nazi Germany), and/or as a brutal "discharge" of long tensions between population groups.
The idea that the genocides could have been prevented if the victims had all been armed ignores the diversity of the historical and cultural situations of the various genocides and can only be called naïve.
The USA is a fascist tyranny where the oligarchs are only held in check by their fear of the proletariat, prove me wrong. We have every single symptom of the Nazis or Communists here, are a mathematically provable oligarchy, and our behavior both domestically and abroad reinforces this, both historically with how we treated blacks, native Americans, and Asians, and how we currently treat Middle Easterners in their own countries. We have the nationalism, the huge army, the global empire, the history of atrocities, the deep connection between industry and the state, and the controlled populace without a true vote. Mussolini, were he alive today, would be very proud of what the USA has become. We couldn't have developed a better playbook to enact Mussolini style fascism, right down to the fake ballot box that keeps the people subjugated by a restoration of the illusion of choice every four years.
You folks in Europe, if you had any sense, should be very thankful that the private gun owners in the USA are keeping our government in enough fear that they don't boot us into the ground, because *you'd* be next. Point blank. You live under an umbrella of US protection that's only provided because our government is scared to turn the fascist screw that very last click.
If the Jews ALONE of Warsaw had the same gun ownership rate that Americans have today, they would have had 780,000 guns to use to defend themselves, 7.8 times more than the number you quoted. That doesn't even include any gentiles they were working with.
You cannot in any way convince me that there is no difference between 100,000 resistance fighters and 780,000 resistance fighters.
Being armed isn't sufficient. It's clearly a prerequisite.
"Being armed isn't sufficient. It's clearly a prerequisite."
I'm just repeating this because it bears repeating.
Much as this idea appeals to me, it rests on a pretty big assumption. Firearms were far from the only difference between the US and Europe in the 20th century. Europe saw two world wars and the breakups of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, in an era when romantic ethno-nationalism wasn't yet considered outright evil. The danger of genocide seems greatest when Leviathan is weakest.