Interesting thing about the 2nd amendment.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I'm pretty sure that number includes children.
You may just have more civilian owned guns than able bodied adults in your country.

But we've still managed to pedant my point to death.

[LMNO]

Details don't kill points; pedants with details do.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Details don't kill points; pedants with details do.

Oh, well, these things happen.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

This might have been covered already, but is there a possibility that the guns themselves create a general atmosphere of Fear and Paranoia which is then used as an excuse to limit freedoms?  So the tools given to protect our freedom actually serves to limit them.

Oh hell yes. "There's nothing to fear but fear itself", and fear is being used as the fulcrum for prying our rights away from us.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

As you know, I've agreed with your general point for quite a while.  As something of a student of irregular warfare, I know there is no force on the earth that is going to win against a government that wants to kill you.

Sri Lanka is my favourite example, mostly because people don't realise what happened there (or can find it on a map...).  Outside of Hezbollah and FARC, the Tigers had probably the word's best armed and trained irregular force, which used a mixture of terrorism and guerrilla warfare against the mostly Sinhalese government of Sri Lanka for decades.  They even had their own naval forces...nothing that could win against a real navy, mind you, but enough to do hit and run amphibious strikes, or intercept civilian shipping.

In 2009, the Tigers were almost entirely wiped out.  Why?  The Sri Lankan government essentially said "we're tired of your bullshit" and went on a campaign of ethnic cleansing and near genocide against the Tamil people.  Entire villages were burnt down because of suspected links to known Tigers (like a family member of said Tiger living there) and much of the remaining population were interred in concentration camps.  Torture and drug-enhanced interrogation were used to find the location of rebel bases and they were bombed from the air and hit by heavy artillery, before a ground campaign of total warfare was used to flush out the survivours.

If the insurgent is a fish that swims in the lake of the population, then one method of dealing with him is to drain the lake.  It works.  Popular fronts normally can't succeed against a ruthless government, because the insurgents' supporters are by definition cowards (or they themselves would be insurgents).

I can't help but notice that most people stockpiling arms for the NWO are not spies or military people (and when they are, they're usually undercover and going to snitch on all their buddies) and are usually white dudes who don't get on well with most people (see Sano's post for more).  Not exactly likely contenders.

Yep.  They don't need none of that there hippie-ass "diplomacy" or "social skills", because they have GUNS.  And as long as they have GUNS, they are John Wayne, Dirty Harry, Rambo, etc.  The silent psychopathic hero that kills everything that's bad, and is admired for it.

Well, admired for it by other bitter, alienated freaks, anyway.  And that has to count for something.

I heart this post!

[The Good Reverend Roger]

This might have been covered already, but is there a possibility that the guns themselves create a general atmosphere of Fear and Paranoia which is then used as an excuse to limit freedoms?  So the tools given to protect our freedom actually serves to limit them.

Oh hell yes. "There's nothing to fear but fear itself", and fear is being used as the fulcrum for prying our rights away from us.

And it WORKS because freedom means responsibility (actual responsibility, not the gabble mouthed by the libertarians), and that IS scary to a lot of people to begin with.  How hard, then, would it be to amplify those fears?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

This might have been covered already, but is there a possibility that the guns themselves create a general atmosphere of Fear and Paranoia which is then used as an excuse to limit freedoms?  So the tools given to protect our freedom actually serves to limit them.

Oh hell yes. "There's nothing to fear but fear itself", and fear is being used as the fulcrum for prying our rights away from us.

And it WORKS because freedom means responsibility (actual responsibility, not the gabble mouthed by the libertarians), and that IS scary to a lot of people to begin with.  How hard, then, would it be to amplify those fears?

Incredible easy... and it WORKS.