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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.

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Jun 6, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

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.

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Jun 1, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

The question to ask is: How many genocides have occurred in countries/areas with a well-armed population?

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Jun 1, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

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.

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Jun 1, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

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.

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Jun 1, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

> 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.

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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.

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Jun 6, 2022·edited Jun 6, 2022

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.

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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.

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