Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
Ah yes. That is a fine idea. Doesn't always work out in practice though. And it is those examples of it not working out in practice, and the tens of millions of people killed by governments in just Europe in the 20th century when it didn't work out, that make us...let's see if I can get all this in...dysfunctional, paranoid, backward Americans with a 200 year record of kind-of-democracy very suspicious of government.
Yeah, sure. Slavery, Native Americans, joining a World War needlessly after everyone else understood it's a folly, having had a messy civil war, torture, wars of aggression, oppressing Latin America for a century, propping up evil dictators abroad by the dozens ... all was fine in the U.S..


Look, the problem is the American society is simply not working well, and paranoia as well as a huge susceptibility to distraction from what's important why fantasy and unimportant stuff is part of the mess.
Keep your military from developing stuff like this, disband militarised SWAT teams, repeal the Patriot Act if you want to be cautious about the government.
Don't get locked into power fantasies like assault rifles being what keeps the government from turning to Stalinism.

Guns are not decisive against an evil government (if there's one). Relevant is whether this government has the required support and tolerance from the people. If it has not, soldiers will allow civilians to plunder weapons depots and there are the real guns. The Romanians and Syrians did not need lots of AR-15s under their beds to turn violent against their dictators.
The U.S. is pushing more than any other country the development of technology that lowers the threshold for required support (by making surveillance that much easier and more effective) and it's the world leader in pushing for acceptance (tolerance) of evil government practices, such as torture.

On top of this, it has developed the approach for how to capture a large share of a population in a bubble of fantasyland where the people don't listen to dissenting news sources any more, think their president is a foreigner, think Iraq had WMD and so on. Until this development, it was much harder if not unknown to create such an encompassing fantasyland without the propaganda means of a dictatorship.


Yeah, but you guys think having an AR-15 under your bed is an insurance. Ridiculous.