Bronze Supporter
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Thanks for the thoughtful and well-reasoned response."And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
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I think you're right, and it's important for us to retain arms. The arguments over what kinds of weapons we might have are silly.
We can (hopefully) learn from history, and not allow ourselves to be disarmed.
But.. Simply being armed is not a complete answer to tyranny, or to the catastrophe that tyranny can bring upon a nation.
We need to be organizing ourselves as best we can, to form self-sufficient communities. The Amish seem to be pretty good at this, and if things truly go bad we too will need to be able to produce food, have a doctor in the group, etc.
At this point, I'm not sure we all get along with each other well enough to organize into self-sufficient communities. It looks more like an "every man for himself" setup, with a whole lot of guns in a whole lot of hands.
If an enemy were to completely shut down the supply chains we all rely on, the resulting fight over food and other necessities would make our lives... difficult, to say the least.
For discussion, I'd break your reply into parts and focus on this part:
" But.. Simply being armed is not a complete answer to tyranny, or to the catastrophe that tyranny can bring upon a nation....We need to be organizing ourselves as best we can, to form self-sufficient communities. The Amish seem to be pretty good at this, and if things truly go bad we too will need to be able to produce food, have a doctor in the group, etc."
IMO:
"Organizing" is a good idea. It should be unregulated.
Neither federal nor state government is empowered to regulate or restrict the right of law-abiding citizens to muster and train in the very manner that permitted the creation of this polity.
Overthrow of oppressive government was never something that the founders considered to be illegitimate.
But, in the context of advocating for preservation of constitutional protection of the citizen right to arms, I suggest that the focus should be on the right, not on how we use it.
What is important is the necessity of the right itself, not on how the right is exercised from time to time.
If a society in possession of the rkba attaches maintenance requirements to the right (like organizing and training), it doesn't improve protection of the right, it only provides ammunition for parties who are opposed to protection of the right.
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I agree with your suggestion that we don't presently seem to be in a condition where Americans will jump to help each other out if things get bad.
But, that is not a reason to devalue the citizen right to arms.
And, history suggests that Americans were not really disposed to help each other out if something bad happened in 1927, but we are somewhat famous for really helping each other out in 1930. So who knows?
Regardless of the present state of our society, it remains true that the rule of law alone has never preserved freedom or equality anywhere, and the 5000 year track record of societal governance has always been that defenseless people become subjects.
"Never" and "always" are big words. True in this instance.
Again, thanks for the discussion.