Libby has been watching too many movies.
A "Well Regulated Militia" .....
- Thread starter nhboy
- Start date
Libby has been watching too many movies.
:shrug: None even the sillier James Bond flicks had men with armies capable of handling even the military of smaller nations. The best they've ever been able to do is stage a coup by fomenting actual unrest.
Even then - such as with Allende - it was with U.S. assistance.
*WE* can well afford the hundreds of billions to train and support millions of men and women to remain on standby in the event of war - but a corporation cannot.
They do not have the resources to spend on a military that then just sits around waiting for action any more than a car company can make billions more cars than they can sell in the hopes that they might one day sell them.
Worse, we spend a lot of money maintaining equipment that IS mostly just sitting around - what company would foot the bill on that?
TheLibertonian
New Member
I suppose it is far fetched.
Not as much as neo-nazi's, soviets, and (race) supremacy groups deciding to blow up a city. But since they're americans they have full access to fire arms and nukes and tanks and we can do nothing about them.
Not as much as neo-nazi's, soviets, and (race) supremacy groups deciding to blow up a city. But since they're americans they have full access to fire arms and nukes and tanks and we can do nothing about them.
Really? So where do I go to buy a nuke?
I was looking at some of these the other day...but they're pretty expensive so I just bought some more beer instead.
http://www.apexgunparts.com/yugoslavian-mb82-81mm-mortar-set-choice-of-baseplate-matching-good.html
http://www.apexgunparts.com/featured-products/d44-n-divisional-field-artillery-cannon-85mm-good.html
Yep.
Bonehead
Well-Known Member
Interesting website.....dammit that's all I need another place to buy toys !
Check out the MIG and Hind auto-cannon they've got for sale. Muah ha ha haa...
http://www.apexgunparts.com/gsh-23-cannon.html
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nhboy
Ubi bene ibi patria
Be careful old fellow!
Make absolutely no sense much?
Speaking of privately owned military hardware....there will be a LOT of it here, this weekend:
https://www.armyheritage.org/news-events/army-heritage-days-2016
https://www.armyheritage.org/news-events/army-heritage-days-2016
Tilted
..
Thank you.
Yes, I agree that people tend to go the path of least resistance and when it comes to restrictions on carrying and possessing guns that has meant just passing laws rather than trying to amend the Constitution to make such restrictions proper. And certainly it's true that people on the various sides of the various ideological divides are guilty of doing things that way. I want to come back to that general idea in a minute.
I would also say that I think most people in favor of gun restrictions sincerely believe that those restrictions are allowed by the Constitution. I think they are just wrong and that so often we convince ourselves of things because it's what we need to be the case. People think that we need gun restrictions so they convince themselves (or just assume, earlier people having already convinced themselves) that it's okay - i.e., in this context, constitutional - to pass gun restrictions. I don't think most people are consciously lying to themselves and others when it comes to thinking that gun restrictions are constitutional.
Back to the idea of people on various sides of the ideological and political divides doing the same things: The older I've gotten and the more people talking about ideological and political issues that I've been exposed to, the more I've realized that we're all the same when it comes to our failings in considering and thinking about such things. Almost all of the things that conservatives or Republicans accuse liberals or Democrats of doing - e.g., being brain-dead drones, being dishonest, being hypocritical, spinning things, cherry picking facts to suit their preferred narrative, being too partisan, being poorly informed, acting as though anything done by anyone on the other side represents everyone on the other side, just plain being stupid - those same conservatives or Republicans are guilty of themselves. The same is true in reverse. We deride the other side for their perceived failings while seemingly being oblivious to the reality that we have those same failings ourselves. The lack of self-awareness is amazing - again, coming from all sides.
When I was younger I thought that we - the conservatives or Republicans or whatever the we was in a given context - were the honest and well considered and fair minded and so on ones. Then after some time I came to realize that we too did much of the stuff that we accused the others of doing. We were better, but it was a matter of degree more so than of kind. Within the last few years I've come to realize that even that is being too kind to my side. We are not even meaningfully better when it comes to degree. We are just as bad - just as dishonest, just as intellectually inconsistent, just as spin-able, just as poorly reasoned and so on as the other side is. Our positions may on the whole, in my view, be the better ones. But our tactics and rhetoric and situational understanding and such are just as bad. We defend in our own side that which we criticize in the other to just as great a degree as they do. And both we and they (whomever the we and they happen to be) seem just as oblivious to that reality. Perhaps the most essential thing that's universally missing in our ideological and political postures is self awareness. We seem completely incapable of being honest with ourselves about ourselves. And it is in that singular condition that the ball game is lost; it is that reality alone that assures the continuation of most of the problems with our political systems.
Tilted
..
Last point first: I think we could pass an amendment allowing for certain kinds of firearms restrictions, at least from the (for simplicity's sake I'll just call it the) pro Second Amendment side. But it wouldn't allow as many restrictions as many people would like there to be, so many on the other side wouldn't support it. In passing it we would in effect be acknowledging that as things are none of the restrictions we have are constitutional, that's why many on the pro Second Amendment side would support it. If it went too far in allowing restrictions they, of course, would not support it. So I guess you're right in the sense that what many on one side would support wouldn't get support from many on the other side and vice versa, so such an amendment is politically nearly undoable. But I would blame that on those who aren't willing to admit that as things are no restrictions are constitutional.
As for the spirt of what the Founders wanted, I think allowing citizens to posses (in so far as the federal government might otherwise restrict them) whatever firearms they want - to include anything the government might have - is in keeping with that spirit. That was much their point, the populace having the ability to fight the government such that government actors recognized a real and natural check on their tyrannical aspirations.
But I do think that if those Founders were around now they would want to see that broad general rule changed. They'd recognize that weapons technology had come so far that that rule was no longer practical. So the spirit of what they wanted would mean no restrictions. But what they would want today, if they saw where we are today, would be different I suspect. The nature of rules is that the spirit of the rules they made is what should control until we decide to change those rules though. So if they were here today, I think they'd agree that we needed to change the rules they had given us and not just break them to the extent it now seemed (even to them) that we'd benefit from having different rules.
I'd also say that, as now, they weren't a mass of like-thinking people. What different ones would think today would likely differ just as it surely did then. That's why we have to go with what they were able to agree on. That's the rule which must be respected lest the notion of having rules becomes meaningless.
Lastly, I'd say that many - probably most - of those Founders would very much think that states not being able to restrict firearms was against the spirt of the rule they made. That is not what they would have wanted. But it was the framers in the mid 1800s that gave us that rule, not the Founders (and framers) in the late 1700s. So they would, I hope, respect that newer rule - that states couldn't restrict firearms possession - as they had expected latter generations to respect the rules they established. They had, after all, made rules that contemplated future generations making their own rules. But the idea that states were so heavily restricted in their own powers by the federal Constitution would have to many of them represented a great change in what the nation was and was to be. I think many of them would be like - oh, no, no, no... this is not what we created. And for some they probably wouldn't respect the changes as they would - after reading some intervening history - think that they were brought about improperly.
PsyOps
Pixelated
I’m trying to sort this out. If the founders wanted the people to be just as armed as our government, then how can you believe ‘if they were around today’ they might have made the rules differently; thus making the people less armed than the government – thus less trusted with those arms? And this assumes the founders didn’t have the foresight to know there would be technological advances in arms.
We’re already at a severe disadvantage to our government in being armed. All things being equal, I’d say they would like to change the rules that would allow things to be more equal; not the other way around.
That's my question too. The Founders wanting the people to be better armed overall than their government/government forces is pretty fundamental to the whole issue, it seems to me.
glhs837
Power with Control
Well, think of the advances in military tech during their lifetimes. Not a lot of changes. Slightly better accuracy, slight better reload times. Cannons were the top of the heap, as far as one weapons destructive power, and correct me if I'm wrong, but from say 1670-1770, not much change as far as the ability of any individual weapon being able to kill X number of people. One guy with one cannon, there was a pretty set limit on what sort of damage that guy could do. Give one guy an Abrams, what could they do before being taken down? Arm up that Harrier out at St Marys with a full load. I suppose that's what Tilted is getting at. Which of course doesn't touch on the WMD aspect of NBC stuff.
Tilted
..
I didn't suggest that they'd want to change the rules as we're interpreting them today to allow for more regulations of arms. We today allow more regulations than the rules, as they made them, would allow. I suggested that they'd (or that many of them would) think the rule that doesn't allow for any regulations of arms should be changed to allow for some. For instance, I suspect that most of them would think that some government should be allowed to prohibit private individuals from owning nuclear warheads. How far they'd think we should go in allowing such regulations would vary. They were different people with different views on such matters and different senses of balance as between individual liberty and collective security or idealism and practicality.
And nothing I said assumed that they didn't have foresight to know that there would be advances in arms. They surely understood that there would be. Would most of them have conceived that we'd someday be able to harness the power of atoms in the ways that we can today? That specifically, probably not. That was a few steps too far ahead of their understanding of the physical world to have been likely to have been contemplated by them. And to the extent they understood generally that eventually the capability of arms might advance by many orders of magnitude beyond where it was during their lives, they left open the possibility that in the future the general rule could be changed if it needed to be. In other words, to the extent they understood that we might one day be able to build things with the destructive capability of thermonuclear bombs, they wouldn't have thought they were forever foreclosing the possibility that the government would be allowed to restrict the private possession of such weapons. They left us an amendment process. So if some future weapon represented more risk in the hands of private actors than it did a benefit in discouraging tyranny, then future Americans could amend the Constitution to allow the government to prohibit the private possession of such a weapon.
Also, for the most part they didn't understand what they were doing as making it such that no government could restrict the private carrying or possession of arms. Many of them would not have wanted that to be the case, at least not as determined by the federal Constitution. They understood that, to the extent various concerns (e.g. public safety) dictated that there should be some restrictions on the private possession of arms, state governments could choose to impose them. Or they could themselves have rules in their own constitutions limiting their ability to do so. It was just that the federal government couldn't disarm the people. It was the preservation of the people's ability to resist the federal government that they were seeking.
EDIT: I forgot to add, only somewhat jokingly... I think they'd also figure, WTF good did it do for us to protect the rights to keep and bear arms? You still let government run roughshod over you. You still violated the Constitution in countless other ways. You still prioritized collective security and social convenience over individual liberty. You refused to use arms to resist to any meaningful degree, so the threat they might have posed was in practical effect lost. I guess life got too good and you thought you had too much to lose, so very few were wiling to fight for what this nation was supposed to be about even though we tried to make sure you'd always have the tools to do so? WTH, might as well let the government regulate arms and get whatever perceived safety benefits there are from doing so - it's pretty obvious that a heavily armed populace isn't having the primary effect (to discourage government overreach and protect freedom in general) that we intended it to have anyway.
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frankly I don't see people who can afford an M-1 or a Harrier going on a shooting rampage or the $ 50k for T-72
glhs837
Power with Control
Was not getting into the likelihood of that happening, like someone actually using fully auto weapons in the commission of a crime, I'm sure the numbers would be vanishingly small. Just talking to what sort of advances the founders might have imagined when thinking about civilian ownership of mil-spec weapons.
it has happened, North Hollywood .. police had to 'borrow' AR-15's from a nearby Gun Store
they were not legal Class III Firearms