Controlling firearms

[Golden Applesauce]

I think we can excuse from the second ammendment anything that *nations* aren't allowed to have, nuclear weapons, anthrax, fragmenting rounds, that kind of thing.

Don't we have all of those?

[Don Coyote]

Maybe you mean, don;t let citizens have arms that nations aren't supposed to be using?

[Requia ☣]

Yes but we convinced the rest of the world it should be disallowed for any new nations to join the nuclear club.

Do we still have bioweapons?  Not just the research to make them if we wanted too, but actual ready to deploy stuff.

[Triple Zero]

Do we still have bioweapons?  Not just the research to make them if we wanted too, but actual ready to deploy stuff.

I can't come up with any convincing reason why the US wouldn't have those.

Just to have them. After all, you never know.

[Requia ☣]

Apparently the last of the bioweapon material was destroyed in 73.  I wouldn't put it past the government to have kept a few missiles somewhere, but if they did I can't find anything about it.

[Dysfunctional Cunt]

Apparently the last of the bioweapon material was destroyed in 73.  I wouldn't put it past the government to have kept a few missiles somewhere, but if they did I can't find anything about it.

Oh they still have it, you can be sure of that.  My first thought of where....  Tennessee, Colorado, Nevada.  Those states have the three top security locations.  With the added advantage of 2 of them being underneath mountains.

[Adios]

Apparently the last of the bioweapon material was destroyed in 73.  I wouldn't put it past the government to have kept a few missiles somewhere, but if they did I can't find anything about it.

Oh they still have it, you can be sure of that.  My first thought of where....  Tennessee, Colorado, Nevada.  Those states have the three top security locations.  With the added advantage of 2 of them being underneath mountains.

Cheyenne Mountain is a very scary place to be. If you step over a red line armed guards will shoot you. No questions. If they decide to have a drill and the big door closes you are there for the duration of the drill.

[Precious Moments Zalgo]

Apparently the last of the bioweapon material was destroyed in 73.  I wouldn't put it past the government to have kept a few missiles somewhere, but if they did I can't find anything about it.

The "weaponized" (milled) anthrax spores that were sent through the mail back in 2001 came from an Army biodefense lab, didn't they?

[Adios]

Apparently the last of the bioweapon material was destroyed in 73.  I wouldn't put it past the government to have kept a few missiles somewhere, but if they did I can't find anything about it.

The "weaponized" (milled) anthrax spores that were sent through the mail back in 2001 came from an Army biodefense lab, didn't they?

Also see Plum Island.

[Dysfunctional Cunt]

Apparently the last of the bioweapon material was destroyed in 73.  I wouldn't put it past the government to have kept a few missiles somewhere, but if they did I can't find anything about it.

Oh they still have it, you can be sure of that.  My first thought of where....  Tennessee, Colorado, Nevada.  Those states have the three top security locations.  With the added advantage of 2 of them being underneath mountains.

Cheyenne Mountain is a very scary place to be. If you step over a red line armed guards will shoot you. No questions. If they decide to have a drill and the big door closes you are there for the duration of the drill.

Indian Springs/Creech AFB has areas like that.  There is a section of hangars on Nellis that will have you brought home dangling between two MP's if you get close enough to touch the wall....  they will chase you down if you run.  

[Cain]

I'm not sure your average citizen really needs to own any kind of heavy or auto/semi-auto weaponry.  I'm perfectly fine myself with bans on assault weapons, weaponry that goes above and beyond defending yourself and are designed to inflict harm on multiple targets and in quick fashion.  But I'm not too hot and bothered by it as it seems humans are pretty good at finding a way to kill someone they want to kill whether they have a gun or not. 

Except bans like that void the intent of the amendment which the people would at least have a decent chance of fighting tyrants on their own soil. Which is why I was thinking collective ownership of firearms or at least cleaning up the city park while you wait out your waiting periods.

The only problem with the "allow guns to allow fighting tyrants" approach to the 2nd amendment is that military hardware is so much more advanced compared to the 18th century.  If the available weapons are rifles and cannons, then I'd estimate that you'd need at least a third of the armed population in the area willing to fight against a tyrant and goodly number of cannons to have a fighting chance at a grass-roots succession.  There's an inherent stability there, because it takes more than a handful of paranoid crazy people to overthrow a perceived tyrant - if enough riflemen are willing to risk their lives fighting against a tyrant to have a chance of succeeding, then they probably have some legitimate grievances.

But today, if you wanted to really wage a war against, say, a corrupt US government from the continental US, you'd need a lot more than rifleman.  You need some way to counter ballistic missiles, stealth bombers, battleships, and chemical warfare.  If the government is determined, you'd need to break their military infrastructure to make them leave you alone for good, and that would require having bombers, cruise missiles, and other weapons that are effective against city-scale targets.  But then the numbers break down - you don't need a majority of citizens to agree that the government is tyrannical, you just need however many guys it takes to launch enough cruise missiles to obliterate Washington DC.  They're almost guaranteed not to succeed, but a lot of people would still be dead.  If the general public collectively had enough military hardware to stand a chance in open warfare against the US government, then the Birthers alone would control enough firepower to destroy a city of their choice.

I don't think the US government would use ballistic missiles and whatnot against an internal insurgency. 

lol, paid much attention to Israel lately?  Guess how many of their hawkish think tanks are staffed by Americans with lots of clout in US policy circles?  I'm certain the US would use everything up to and including tactical nuclear warheads to defeat an internal insurgency because, by their very nature, those are the most dangerous kinds.

Hell, they used death squads, torture chambers and white phosphorus in Iraq, I'd expect them do at least that much on home soil.  Civil wars are always the bloodiest.

[Cain]

No, I mean of course its a long and elaborate joke.

Primate social structure always has alphas, who make the rules and reap the benefits, betas, who enforce the rules due to fear of the alphas and minor perks, and everyone else, who sucks it up until they go "crazy" and stab an alpha through the eye with a sharpened piece of bone or something.  Which I generally approve of, though there are circumstances where other actions may be more prudent.

Any attempt at fairness is generally a cover for a more pernicious form of control, in that you think the system is generally alright and so put up with its excesses through rationalization of its actions or stressing their exceptionally, when they are in fact at the heart of the entire social system.  I mean, come on, George Washington's first act as President was to crush the Whiskey Rebellion which, IIRC, had something to do with taxes and Hamilton's power grab for the new Treasury.  Americans are allowed to keep their weapons insofar as they're never going to use them in a large scale manner to overthrow the Federal Government.  I'm just surprised Ratatosk hasn't figured that out already.

The Whiskey tax rebellion may have been defeated in the conventional military sense, but it succeeded in making the whiskey tax unenforceable.

So that would be in the only sense that it mattered, then, ie when Jefferson, the guy with the army that "only" defeated them in the "conventional military sense" wanted to repeal the tax, after the change in government.

[Cain]

I think we can excuse from the second ammendment anything that *nations* aren't allowed to have, nuclear weapons, anthrax, fragmenting rounds, that kind of thing.

Don't we have all of those?

Yes.  But only for defensive purposes, you see.  No nation in the world would ever run unorthodox weapons programs for defensive purposes, only to reverse engineer that technology a couple of decades later when it felt like it. 

[the last yatto]

Cheyenne Mountain Village


Its really only a mountain until you look inside.

[Dysfunctional Cunt]

Cheyenne Mountain Village


Its really only a mountain until you look inside.

Kind of like Nevada is a lot of desert until you look underneath