Side story on the recent gun spree

[carl]

This particular 'importance' is none. I'm not a particularly fearful guy, and I feel safe without a gun.
Besides, I CAN fight without a weapon. Not having a weapon and still being ready to fight means to have the advantage of surprise.

You miss the point about individuals having the recourse to arms, two points actually.

The first is a member of society in which the individual has recourse to arms, is a member of a society that recognizes the intrinsic rights of individuals. That is a society worthy.

The second is a person who has recourse to arms is a person who can effectively defend themselves. They are not a victim in waiting. That is hugely critical to individual morale.

Thirdly is, you, Fuchs, may be an entirely fearsome fellow able to take on all comers. But it isn't just about you. It is also about the petite 55 year old woman with a bad knee that I mentioned before. If you deny her recourse to arms, you deny her the right to self defense. You can't do that.

That was three points.

You didn't get what 'decisive' means.
Enough popular support for rebels = government is doomed, the means to complete its demise will be found.
Not enough popular support for insurgents = government will massacre the rebels, doesn't matter how well they're armed.
The armament of rebels is a superficiality.

I know perfectly well what decisive means. If you have arms, you can fight. If you don't, you can't. That is pretty decisive.

A sample without the agent cannot disprove the agent's effectiveness.
What you meant to say was that a police state does not needs high tech. Well, I agree, but what I really said was that a police state needs less support (by people) with labour-saving surveillance high tech.

You know there is a contradiction in what you say when you comment about police states and popular support. Police states exist because popular support isn't great enough to ensure their survival without police state measures.

Not "most", but too many, and they are loud. I barely hear the sensible majority across the pond any more.

See Steve Blair's comment. Listening to the BBC, watching CNN and reading the New York Times doesn't get you very close to understanding the US.

An optic for home defence? Tacticool has taken over.
Seriously, your reply was to a quote which spoke against weapons as insurance against evil government (context!). That is ridiculous.

Hardly. An optic greatly increase your ability to make hits in low light, when adopting awkward positions and it will allow you to make hits much faster. Most people who have used one will attest to that. Very handy for defending oneself and one's family.

That is the beauty of an AR-15 as I described, it is dual purpose. Good for tyrants and hoods.

[Fuchs]

The first is a member of society in which the individual has recourse to arms, is a member of a society that recognizes the intrinsic rights of individuals. That is a society worthy.

That's ideological blather, nothing you'll be able to prove with logic by providing conclusive evidence. In fact, it's easily falsified by mere pointing at countries such as Taliban Afghanistan and Saddam's Iraq.

The second is a person who has recourse to arms is a person who can effectively defend themselves.

This is factually wrong. That high profile guy who got shot yesterday was a trained soldier, had recourse to arms and was still unable to defend himself.
There's no defence against surprise attacks other than vigilance, and vigilance all life equals a horrible life.

Thirdly is, you, Fuchs, may be an entirely fearsome fellow able to take on all comers.

I'm not, albeit I have some martial arts background to exploit opportunities with a devastating surprise attack when I see them. Normal hostiles face resolution, while I let violent hostiles think they're safe, meanwhile being ready to strike.

Guess what? I had no fight in ages. People with enough self-confidence (and this includes curiously almost all martial arts practitioners) rarely get into fights involuntarily. There's experimental psychological research backing this up. Actual robbers on parole were used in an experiment to pick targets for assault, and they reliably picked people who signalled a victim attitude with certain gestures. (I doubt that such people could make good use of a gun.)

It is also about the petite 55 year old woman with a bad knee that I mentioned before. If you deny her recourse to arms, you deny her the right to self defense.

(1) The petite 55 year old woman with a bad knee would not be kept from buying a pistol by universal background checks (= you used a strawman),
(2) even a pistol would not ensure her safety (in fact, it would even add risks to her life due to accidents, illegal use by others and a mcuh higher lethality of suicide attempts)
(3) you badly distort the right to self defence here. The right to self defence does not entitle you to the possession of weapons of your choice. It entitles you to use weapons already at your disposal, within limits of proportionality.
A crazy neighbour who owns a Cessna may threaten to crash into you house with full gasoline tank - this does not entitle you to the possession of anti-air missiles. There are limits, and this talk about a at best misinterpreted "right" is again a mere propagandistic distortion. It's not about the actual right to self defence.

I already wrote here about the distortion of actual rights for propaganda. It totally messes up thinking and yields stupid opinions.

I know perfectly well what decisive means. If you have arms, you can fight. If you don't, you can't. That is pretty decisive.

You don't get it. The gun fights are in such a case a mere confirmation of the decision, they aren't decisive. Rebels rarely employ much firepower.

The defence of Berlin in 1945 had hundreds of tanks, thousands of artillery pieces and mortars, hundreds of thousands of troops with guns. None of that had any influence on the decision, for the decision fell not in the fight, but prior to it.
The Red Army of June 1941 had many times as many tanks and guns as the Germans, but other factors decided that they would suffer millions of casualties in short order.
The Soviet coup d'tat ~1992 wasn't about tanks or AKMs or Frogfoots, for example; it was about the troops turning against the coup generals.

Likewise, rebels rarely win through battles, but through disruption of and by gaining of support. That's why they often win even in face of a lasting material superiority of government forces.

You know there is a contradiction in what you say when you comment about police states and popular support. Police states exist because popular support isn't great enough to ensure their survival without police state measures.

You insist on not getting it. The more effective the tools of a police state and the more tolerable it is, the less supporters (% population) the regime needs to maintain its grip. This may be as little as 5 or 15% support (probably even less; see Apartheid regimes, South Africa).
The police state may be so effective the rebels would probably need 80% instead of 40% support to overthrow the government (the remaining shares being neutral people). Numbers were made up to show the thought behind it, I suppose that's more readable than mathematic variables and formula.

Hardly. An optic greatly increase your ability to make hits in low light, when adopting awkward positions and it will allow you to make hits much faster. Most people who have used one will attest to that. Very handy for defending oneself and one's family.

For starters, defence is first and foremost about firing a warning shot which requires no aiming (and does not accidentally kill your daughter coming back from a date late at night).
Second, in the case when this doesn't suffice in one way or another, the combat range will still be less than 10 metres in almost all self defence scenarios. I'd rather want a handgun with a clean, long and straight upper side for natural aiming than any kind of reddot sight in such a situation.

That is the beauty of an AR-15 as I described, it is dual purpose. Good for tyrants and hoods.

It's good for or against neither. Someone who wants to kill you can kill you, and knowing you have an AR-15 will only tell him to attack you when you don't carry it.
If I wanted to kill somebody, I would spend 99% of my preparations on getting away with it, as the kill itself is quite simple (independent of the person being gun nut or not).
When on the other hand someone wants to steal from you, then he wants to steal and the proper defence is to scare him away, leaving him a route of escape.

In regard to "tyrants"; ridiculous. This is not the 18th century where army troops had inferior muskets while farmers had Pennsylvania rifles. Even then, the Whiskey tax revolt clearly showed what to think of people who believe that individual firearms give them the ability to resist the (then still weak) government; the rebels disappeared when Washington arrived with the well-regulated, musket-armed militia (which was used to oppress the tax revolt, not the other way!).


Those people who talk about AR-15s being an insurance against government overreach are either selling guns, nuts, loudmouths or simple fools.
Spend your energy better on pushing for good governance than dwelling in individual power fantasies.

[carl]

I just read Steve's post so I deleted everything I wrote. Thank you Steve for saying a good thing and I apologize for the part I had in making things less than they should be.

[J Wolfsberger]

I just read Steve's post so I deleted everything I wrote. Thank you Steve for saying a good thing.

Ditto.

[Fuchs]

This explains your comments about optics like Red Dot - you really don't have a clue about firearms, let alone using them in any sort of life or death situation. Now I'm actually surprissed you didn't make some equally silly comment about "shoot to wound" or "shoot the gun out of his hand."

And again you're living in fantasyland. I served in the military, "you really don't have a clue about firearms" is hardly a defensible statement.
You have no clue whatsoever about my firearms knowledge or experience, and still you blather on as if you weren't ignorant.

The latter part of your statement was of course a strawman, reinforcing the negative impression about the level of your contribution here (and about how much you're living in fantasyland; reality surprises you).

[Steve Blair]

I'm seriously considering locking this thread. Very little is occurring in terms of productive discourse, and I see no sign of that improving in the near future.