>Alright that's a good example. Except:
>
>They only seem to have stood down because the amount in dispute was only $1M. The cost to recruit and certify a police officer and the amount they have to pay out in survivor benefits to spouse and children if a single one dies can add up to $2M+... not very likely this would work with anything higher stakes or easier to respond to (such as more urban where they could be affordably overwhelmed sufficiently to just give up with minimal risk)The guy was very obviously breaking the law and already received due process to that effect, so your example is pretty counterproductive to what your original argument was about standing up to tyranny. It being, instead, a criminal standing up to completely fair and resaonable treatment and avoiding paying what his own countrymen and peers voted for laws saying that he should pay... he stood up to the People, not to tyranny. So... the one clear successful example backfired actually...

So, the fear of the outcome of an armed attack stopped the government's actions?

Ah.

Also, all charges were dismissed with prejudice. That means no convictions. That means--at the end of the day--not a crime.

Ergo... not a backfire.

"Not being 100% active the entire time 24/7 is not "being stood down", and your own source summarizes them as being overall highly active, in fact too active."

LAPD literally bunkered down.

They put up barriers around precincts, stopped patrolling, and turned the city over to everyone else.

Then, later, the National Guard and the regular military (Army and Marines) came in and "showed the flag" with very limited access to more than small arms to avoid situations where the military shot up local buildings in the Detroit riots and others.

"You're "pretty sure" that an allegedly foundational principle of the country didn't need to be mentioned AT ALL in hundreds of pages of commentary about the foundational principles of the country. Despite even the fact that they DID take the time to write down thoughts at some length about the 2nd amendment specifically, but still mysteriously didn't have the time (?) to include the "actual" reasons for it. Lol alright dude."

I notice in all of our conversation so far, you haven't mentioned breathing, shitting, or eating.

Sort of a universal thing, those three.

Unless you're sick, have a fetish, or are looking for restaurant suggestions, those don't come up in typical conversations because they are assumed.

Likewise, we have basically nothing in the US Constitution about farming or the founding documents about farming except with regards to slavery, interstate commerce, and the like.

This isn't because farming isn't important. It's because everyone assumes farming will happen.

Why would you spend time discussing a right you just used to create your own government--a right assumed to be present in English common law to that time since at least the 1680's--other than the particulars regarding potential changes like the militia vs. standing army discussion?

You wouldn't. Just like you aren't going to talk about what your breath smells like or whether your bowel movements are firm or loose.

Other things not mentioned in the founding documents:

Sex.

What the definition of a woman is.

How marriage laws are constructed.

What the proper age of wine should be.

What language to use on most documents.

Etc.

All of which end up being important later, but are assumed and relevant to discussions in certain ways.

"Not peaceful protests anymore, because they started shooting back. I, and my source, were quite clear when I said no PEACEFUL protests greater than 3.5% have ever failed."

Exactly so!

They started peaceful.

Then people started dying.

Then they fought back.

Now there's an ongoing civil war.

The peaceful part depended on the actions of the government.

When the government decided to start killing people, they had a choice. Let the government kill all of them (or however many the government wanted to kill) or to shut up and go home.

Or are you suggesting you should continue to peacefully protest amidst incoming machine gun fire?

"Your own sources also confirm the same mechanism I described: when they got gunned down initially, it garnered massive local + international sympathy, which is what would have won it for them if they stayed peaceful. Numbers of involved protesters swell much faster than bodies piling up do (you kill one guy, his whole family and best friends join the protests), sanctions start raining down internationally, etc."

So, in the beginning, you suggested governments make economic decisions as part of this process...

...which implies the question of whether it's cheaper to simply keep shooting peaceful protestors with machine guns until they stop protesting (or being alive to protest) is a key element to this discussion.

And the answer is that it's probably cheaper--once you start shooting--to keep shooting until you win in many cases because you don't have to worry about "peaceful protestors" costing you more than money for bullets.

And--by the way--know what else swells when you kill people?

Their body, in the streets as they decompose once you've killed their entire family.

What's to stop you?

International sympathy?

International efforts to block you economically?

Like how it's working with Putin and the Chinese government who are "hosting" large numbers of ethnic minorities who would "peacefully protest" if they didn't expect to get killed anyway....

So, you either put up with things the way they are now or you "peacefully protest" and hope for sympathy while the government machine guns you and your friends and your family.

Sounds like a real winner.

Meanwhile, do you have any examples of a situation where a group of people brandished guns at police to try and scare them off and it WORKED?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots

Hmmm... 1992 LA Riots is an easy one. LAPD totally just bunkered down for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff

Here's one with a specific Federal involvement.

Those are the easy ones.

"The founders such as in the federalist papers made very clear they were talking about literal militias, to avoid the need for a standing army. Not anything to do with protesting or casual civilian affairs of any such sort. I have no idea where you got that idea from."

They had just finished forcing the British government to leave the country and let them start a new government about 100 years after their ancestors did essentially the same thing and killed a king (before letting a new king back to take over).

I'm pretty sure they didn't think the part of armed overthrow of an overreaching government was necessary to spell out again, especially after the Declaration of Independence and the common understanding of a right to arms at the time... minus the racist efforts at disarming black people and natives.

"I just gave you a source showing that it literally not once has ever failed in all of modern history, worldwide, any form of government, anywhere, with even just a measly 3.5% of the population protesting, or more."

https://www.britannica.com/event/Libya-Revolt-of-2011

Peaceful protests...

...government attacks...

...civil war.

Eventually, they :"won" after a civil war and Qaddafi was gone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_civil_war

The Syrian Civil War started with peaceful protests.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI060eBm5xM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Syrian_Revolution

Massive protests, government crackdown killing thousands, and then an armed response which is ongoing at this point.

There are others.

Revolutions are violent. Most definitely, violence tends to promote violence.

Totally.

Also, you should read about Arab Summer.

Also, you should read about the history of the American South with regards to civil rights restrictions and the like.

Also, you should check out the history of "nonviolent protests" in China and the former Soviet Union, and a lot of other places because--again--nonviolent protests last only to the tolerance of the government.

Once more, the whole idea behind the American Second Amendment is the deterrence of needing violence again and the creation and maintenance of a government who would prefer nonviolent protesting to the application of violence.

The idea is to create a government who understands going to war against it's own constituents--unlike the Soviets, the Chinese Communist, the Cubans, the Libyans, etc., etc. etc.--is likely to cause them problems too. So, in the American scheme, government continues to listen instead of rounding people they don't like up into camps or reservations or whatnot (again) or tolerating the local governments beating people down and/or allowing them to be freely lynched (anymore) without a lot of risk to themselves.

So, so far, the insurance mostly works.

I mean, except black people getting machinegunned in the 1960's, and Kent State, of course, and probably the Democratic Convention riots in the 1960's.

Accurate reporter 252 is assuming less deaths than what typically happens when governments have a unilateral access to use of force, especially when outside agencies--like the US and possibly NATO or the UN--are willing to put boots on the ground to stop massive killing by government.

So, Bosnia... that was interfered with (late in the game) by NATO.

Most of the sub-Saharan African "culls" of citizens like Rwanda played themselves out without much outside interference.

The Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and others killed millions after disarming their countrymen.

As far as nonviolent protest...

Nonviolent protest is highly effective up to the point the government isn't willing to directly or indirectly use violence on people.

So, Chinese nonviolent protests haven't worked out for a long time. Likewise, Southern US efforts to stop Jim Crow didn't work for about a century until the rest of the country started seeing dead black men hung from trees in the news more often and made it a national issue instead of the state levels.

Until then, "nonviolent" protests by black people against being kept out of the ballot boxes usually resulted in a whole lot of violence done to them.

You should read a bit about the "Arab Summer" as well.

You play peace until it doesn't work, then you go to war.

Oh, and the Second Amendment?

That's insurance to try and keep the American government from using violence against non-violent protests. It's there to make the cost of violence against the people high enough to keep the government listening to non-violent complaints...

TLDR: Banning guns sounds easy, but you can't enforce it without trashing the other rights.

So, you ban guns.

There are over 400 million in circulation. These guns can last (effectively) over 100 years and people can make and do make them at home.

They also share how to make them with each other and that's protected under the 1st Amendment.

So, are you just going to leave 400 million guns out there with over 1/3 of the population who don't particularly care about gun laws?

No, you're going to have to go get them.

And then you're going to want to prosecute these people.

So, first you have to stop them from sharing information about guns, how to avoid getting caught, how to make guns, and how to hide them plus how to organize a resistance--violent or political--and that means chucking the right to free speech and privacy.

You're going to have to go into these people's homes and places of business to collect these guns.

There's no way in hell you're getting past all of the judges requiring definitive evidence to grant a warrant. There goes warrantless searches.

Oh, and once you have these people in hand, putting them in front of a jury to convict them when the odds are a good chunk of the jury isn't going to find them guilty is a massive waste of time, effort, and good will.

Beyond the fact you need at least 6 jurors typically and trying 100 million people for possession would require either career jury members or about 600 million people in a country with less than half of that in adults and--without knowing who is who--you're at risk of massive jury nullification.

Oh, and by convicting 1/3 of the population, who's going to grow the food and pay the taxes for the massive amount of new prisons?

You're probably going to need to bring back slavery to allow you to force them to grow food while in prison.

Finally, you can't take any new votes.

Once you piss off and alienate that many people, you're going to have an uphill battle every step of the way after that and it puts so many political hijinks on deck for the rest of the country's existence.

Imagine just losing enough of an election once to have people try to overturn such a policy?

Even if you stepped in militarily again, you start looking like Liberia in modern times: All the trappings of a good government and coup after coup with mock elections.

Dozens of countries that also include countries accounting for millions of civilian deaths post-gun control.

Nothing says "lack of massive complications" like mass graves and bulldozed bodies.

https://hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM

I'm not sure cheap is a term I would use with banning guns in the US.

First problem is that about 1/3 or more of the population disagrees and has the means--economic, hopefully--to make it very awkward to ban them and keep a government in power.

Additionally, the whole rest of the Bill of Rights would need to be tossed in order to succeed with banning guns in the US. No right to privacy (lest people get together to form resistance to the policy or make guns on their own), no right to assemble, no right to a jury trial (how do you convict people when a third or more of the jury agrees with the accused on these policies?), no right to a whole lot of other things.

And the black markets that will come up quick.

I mean, they banned alcohol for a decade or so and created organized crime families that lasted for decades beyond...

Ignoring, of course, the fact you'll likely have half the states in the country trying to start a Constitutional convention or secede or just stop listening to the Federal government.

Not sure cheap is the word I would use.

There are better predictors of homicide rates and gun homicide rates than gun ownership. It just gets awkward to talk about them.