On 2/5/2011 12:07 PM, Darren New wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> Then I must be missing it,
>
> You're conflating two problems. One concerns whether the kinds of
> firearms people own here today would be useful to resist the government.
> The other is whether the type of firearms people own today would be
> useful in other endeavors.
>
> For the latter, the answer, statistically, is yes - target shooting is
> safe, hunting is popular, and having a gun reduces your individual
> likelihood of being harmed in a violent crime. If you want to argue
> against that, you'll need to say more than "it's obvious".
>
> For the former, we have numerous examples throughout history where
> individual ownership of firearms has protected against violence by
> governments. While obviously there are also cases where the government
> has won, there are also cases where those being invaded have won, or at
> least put off for a long time their own demise. So it's not obvious that
> any government can squash any civilian resistance out of hand. If it
> were, we wouldn't really be still hunting terrorists, would we?
>
Ok, not going to really argue the former one, though I do think the jury 
is out on whether personal protection is useful (since the statistics 
show cooperation as about equal to resistance, there is a small margin 
of *maybe* useful, based on your own statistics, but it would be a lot 
clearer *if* the, "I gave him my wallet and got away alive", category 
had a major failure rate).

As for history... Sure, the problem is that you run into a version of 
the, "Atheists killed more people", argument. The argument, when used, 
goes like this: X wacko was one, and they killed a bigger percentage of 
people that Y non-atheist in the past, therefor religious wars where 
never as bad as what an atheist could do. The key problem with the 
argument has ***always*** been the same. It ignores the fact that a few 
hundred nuts on horseback couldn't kill tens of thousands of people in 
24 hours, as could bombs, or even machine guns.

The **exact same** problem exists when arguing, "Historically, there are 
a lot of examples of people resisting governments." Yes, there are, but 
most of them haven't been governments with access to nearly limitless 
high technology. Even the ones with high tech often tended to be several 
generations of tech "behind", bought from someone else, and limited in 
supply, so once you blew up the 10 planes they had, they didn't have any 
left to use against you. But, there is an added problem with this, which 
I pointed out before, after a fashion. Its fairly rare for *enlightened* 
people to be doing the resisting. What you get, in nearly all cases, is 
people attempting to impose their own status quo, or change it, or 
replace something they don't like, and most of the people that want to 
do so tend not to be someone who wants to create/defend a democracy. 
They tend to be people who want to undermine such things, replace them 
with theocracies, or monarchies, of one sort or another, or still 
believe in some sort of Maoist/Stalinist faux-communism, which is 
basically little more than an Oligarchy, with pretenses at universal 
distribution of goods and services. They don't have everyone's well 
being at heart, and in a lot of cases, the result is worse than the 
replacement. So much for resisting the predations of a bad government, 
if all you replace it with is a worse one.

Like I said, its not how well armed, or how well you resist, that 
changes things, its the inevitability that oppression doesn't work in 
the long run, and can't do so, except in a complete vacuum. Armed 
resistance may be useful, at the start, but only information will *win* 
the battle, create a sound foundation, and result in an improved 
government. And, what do we see as the first line of conflict with the 
nuts in the US - misinformation, attempts to deny/hide the real 
information, and denouncements of anyone that exposes it. The guns come 
later, when you already have people convinced you are right, and to win 
you have to get rid of the stubborn people, who still won't believe your 
bullshit.

The changes that are happening around the world right now are all, 
almost entirely, the same thing. Some armed conflict/resistance, but 
governments are winning or losing, based on control of information, and 
the spread of propaganda *not* how many people they arm, and resistance 
is happening in a thousand different ways, due to the spread of 
information, but guns and dead people are so much more interesting to 
talk about, unless the guy with the gun is also running an internet 
cafe. But, in the end, *winning* isn't about if you resisted with a gun, 
its if you changed the flow of the information, and the result made 
things better, instead of worse. Guns just make it easier, for both 
sides, to screw up this process imho.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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