What happened to...

[Bob Olhsson]

My wife is Jewish and feels the same way as John.

Myself, I know that if I'd had a gun at the time a mugger jumped me with one, I probably wouldn't be sitting here typing.

[weedywet]

My wife is Jewish as well and thinks guns are useless against armies.

The right wing lie that “Hitler disarmed the population “ to facilitate the rise of Nazism is just that, a lie.
Plenty of Jews in the ghetto were armed. They got shot while holding them.

If you’re talking about defending yourself against a tyrannical government, that’s delusional.
If you think you’re going to protect yourself against the random Nazi loony, that’s not quite as delusional, but close.




https://thedailybanter.com/.amp/2016/06 ... ssion=true

[keks]

The right wing lie that “Hitler disarmed the population “ to facilitate the rise of Nazism is just that, a lie.

In the Weimarer Republik gun laws were initially passed, because the Versaille Treaty required it. They were made stricter after the assault and murder of Walther Rathenau, a social democrat (SPD).
It is true though, that the Nazis made it illegal for jews to have and bear any kind of weapon in March 1938, which is far after the Machtergreifung, when they consolidated their power over the Deutsche Reich.
At this time jews would already have had a hard time to organize any kind of meaningful resistance.

[weedywet]

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/m ... ctionfront

[nobby]

I've never had a gun held to my head, thankfully.
My memorable gun experience was about talking a guy out of "comitting suicide by cop" and possibly killing or wounding a cop or two in the process.

It was about 25 years ago. As I walked down the street where I lived, I spotted Ed M. standing in the front yard of the house where he'd rented a room, holding a semi-automatic rifle. I had befriended him when he moved into the neighborhood. I think it took me at least a week to realize he was an intravenous heroin and cocaine user.

I walked up to him. "Hi, Ed. Nice carbine you've got there. What are you up to?"

He looked quite agitated and told me he was planning to shoot at police when they arrived. I had no reason to doubt that that was what he was going to do -- he clearly wasn't joking. He had mentioned that he hated cops.

It was a Ruger 10/22, the most popular gun in America, I think. I can't remember if it had an extended magazine, which was legal in NY back then. Vastly more people are killed with .22s than assault rifles -- it isn't a close contest. You don't read about it, because most of the tens of thousands of gun deaths in the US are strictly local news, dead boring compared to massacres.

"Can I see it?"
He handed me the rifle. I was not trained in these matters but I knew I had to get his mind off of his plan, somehow. I fired a shot into the lawn and handed the gun back to him.

"Let's smoke a joint" I suggested. He put the gun away and we went to my house and smoked a joint.

I found out later that a woman who was in the house across the street from where Ed lived called the cops after hearing the gunshot and maybe seeing us with the gun. But when they arrived, we were down the street, indoors. They didn't see anyone or know where to look and left.

Some days later, we packed his belongings into my van and went to move him into a bad neighborhood a couple of blocks from a Narcotics Anonymous center. I had a friend who was a Viet Nam veteran ex-marine who had seen combat come with us because I felt it was a kind of risky operation. None of us were armed.

A couple of years later, I saw Ed at the local library. I pretended not to recognize him and I don't think he recognized me. I wanted nothing to do with him. I hope the rehab went well.

So this is an extra tool that I think hostage negotiators should adopt. They sometimes bring the bad guy a pizza to establish rapport and buy time.

But what if the guy doesn't want pizza?

"I don't want pizza!"

"Okay, we'll send you a joint. Smoke the joint, and we'll call back in ten minutes and you can tell us what kind of toppings you want on your pizza."

[John Eppstein]

My wife is Jewish as well and thinks guns are useless against armies.

Many Jews in the USA have become complacent It's generally part of the quest for assimilation, to become just like everybody else. I( know the feeling. Oddly, it's more common in urban areas where there are large Jewish populations. I guess it's because discrimination and antisemitism are less obvious in those places. some even go so far as to support militant Arabs organizations such as Hamas, which are dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jewish people (This goes back to the alliance between Arabs led by The Grand Mufti and German Nazis before WWII. Before that there were generally good relations between the two brother cultures.)

I feel sorry for such Jews.

The right wing lie that “Hitler disarmed the population “ to facilitate the rise of Nazism is just that, a lie.
Plenty of Jews in the ghetto were armed. They got shot while holding them.

Armed with sticks and Molotov Cocktails, sure.

You're buying into Nazi propaganda. I know your not doing it intentionally, but the fact remains.

And I'd much rather go down with a chance of taking some of the bastards with me than be worked to death in a concentration camp making weapons for the enemy.

If you’re talking about defending yourself against a tyrannical government, that’s delusional.
If you think you’re going to protect yourself against the random Nazi loony, that’s not quite as delusional, but close.

It's about RESISTANCE, Weedy. Maybe one isolated person has no chance, but when you've got a lot of them working in concert you do. It's been proved over and over again. The most massive, well armed military in the world cannot prevail against a dedicated resistance force fighting for their lives and freedom. It worked here in 1776. It worked in Vietnam in the '60s, It's worked countless times.

https://thedailybanter.com/.amp/2016/06 ... ssion=true

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty - Wendell Phillips (who incidentally was a LIBERAL abolitionist of the 1850s)

These days so-called "liberals" are all too eager to give that up in exchange for the illusion a safety and stability.

Unfortunately that's a dangerous delusion , fostered by the perception of a beneficent government. The truth is that it often takes very little for a beneficent government to turn into a repressive dictatorship in the seeming blink of an eye. It happened in Germany and it could easily happen here. It's happened many times throughout history.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

It happened in Germany in the '30s. I could happen (and may be happening) here, now. It's happened many times injh the past in many places.

Too many people are all too eager to surrender personal responsibility to Big Brother - it's always a bad idea because sooner or later someone's going to come along who's looking to take advantage of it.

OUR FOUNDING FATHERS KNEW THIS and set up an elaborate system, of checks and balances to guard against it - however they failed to foresee a situation where the same political party would control both houses of Congress, the Administration, and the majority of the Judiciary - and in which the representatives in Congress would so totally abdicate their responsibility to their own constituencies and in which corruption would become so pervasive (and the few who are not corrupt would be too timid to act.)

[John Eppstein]

...

[nobby]

It worked in Vietnam in the '60s

If you ignore the fact that the NVA was backed by China and the Soviet Union and was armed with heavy machine guns, mortars, artillery, RPGs, and Soviet Migs, things you are unlikely to find in your local sports shop.

I think the French Resistance got a bit of outside help getting rid of the Nazis also.

[John Eppstein]

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/m ... ctionfront

Not a bad article. Much more sympathetic than I would expect from NYT on this subject.

[John Eppstein]

It worked in Vietnam in the '60s

If you ignore the fact that the NVA was backed by China and the Soviet Union and was armed with heavy machine guns, mortars, artillery, RPGs, and Soviet Migs, things you are unlikely to find in your local sports shop.

I think the French Resistance got a bit of outside help getting rid of the Nazis also.

If there's a resistance others will almost always come to your aid, usually for their own nefarious reasons.

IF there's a resistance.

[nobby]

Re: 1776

The British had never engaged in "asymmetrical warfare" before. They were used to the conventional warfare of the time in which soldiers would square off against the enemy across a field, with both sides standing upright in formation at short range, since their smooth bore muskets had less effective range than a modern revolver. Dressed in bright red and white, they were perfect targets for Revolutionary snipers who were hiding in the woods and using rifles with a much greater effective range (though they took longer to reload than a brown bess).

If there's a resistance others will almost always come to your aid, usually for their own nefarious reasons.

IF there's a resistance.

You mean, the US or Europe will come to your aid? If you are going up against the US, which spends far more on its military than any other country, yer fucked.

I totally agree with your stance that it's better to put up a fight than to be hauled off to be worked/ starved/ tortured to death.

As a practical matter, a person on the ground with a rifle or RPG would be picked off by an aircraft that is out of your effective range and lights you up with heat vision, leaving you no place to hide, and fires an automatic cannon, smart bombs, rockets, etc.

I don't think the US can win in Afghanistan, but no outside force ever has. I don't think America is quite like Afghanistan, but you can imagine how utterly hellish it would become on the way to finding out.

The video below shows why "taking out a couple of the bastards before they kill you" is easier said than done. Substitute "resistance fighters" for "Taliban":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWuP6dmYOE0

[John Eppstein]

Re: 1776

The British had never engaged in "asymmetrical warfare" before. They were used to the conventional warfare of the time in which soldiers would square off against the enemy across a field, with both sides standing upright in formation at short range, since their smooth bore muskets had less effective range than a modern revolver. Dressed in bright red and white, they were perfect targets for Revolutionary snipers who were hiding in the woods and using rifles with a much greater effective range (though they took longer to reload than a brown bess).

If there's a resistance others will almost always come to your aid, usually for their own nefarious reasons.

IF there's a resistance.

You mean, the US or Europe will come to your aid? If you are going up against the US, which spends far more on its military than any other country, yer fucked.

I totally agree with your stance that it's better to put up a fight than to be hauled off to be worked/ starved/ tortured to death.

As a practical matter, a person on the ground with a rifle or RPG would be picked off by an aircraft that is out of your effective range and lights you up with heat vision, leaving you no place to hide, and fires an automatic cannon, smart bombs, rockets, etc.

I don't think the US can win in Afghanistan, but no outside force ever has. I don't think America is quite like Afghanistan, but you can imagine how utterly hellish it would become on the way to finding out.

The video below shows why "taking out a couple of the bastards before they kill you" is easier said than done. Substitute "resistance fighters" for "Taliban":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWuP6dmYOE0

Well, let's hope it never comes to that, but one shouldn't be willfully blind to the possibilities. At the age of 67 with heart trouble and arthritis in my hips I'm not likely to go traipsing about playing soldier, even if I were so inclined - which I'm not and never have been. But I'm even less inclined to be herded off to a uranium or coal mine where I'd be lucky to last a week or a munitions factory where I might last slightly longer. But I've never been inclined to be a sheep, either.

But more to the point, I genuinely believe that weapons suppression is not the answer, unless one really likes the idea of potentially living in a dictatorship. I don't thing it's a proper or viable solution to the problem of violence.

People, even fairly crazy people, generally only become violent for a reason. We've been seeing an increase in high profile incidents of random violence for definite reasons in spite of the fact that overall violence, including that employing firearms, has been on the decline for the past couple of decades. We need to deal with the underlying causes, not the visible symptoms.

Happy, well adjusted people don't go engaging in acts of random violence.

This whole anti-gun movement is a big red herring, devised to distract the public from both the underlying social inequities that foster such severe disaffection and the many acts of malfeasance that the "powers that be" do not want the general public to focus on.

This is becoming increasingly obvious with the current administration, but previous administrations have also had plenty of things going on they don't want people examining too closely.

[John Eppstein]

Re: 1776

The British had never engaged in "asymmetrical warfare" before. They were used to the conventional warfare of the time in which soldiers would square off against the enemy across a field, with both sides standing upright in formation at short range, since their smooth bore muskets had less effective range than a modern revolver. Dressed in bright red and white, they were perfect targets for Revolutionary snipers who were hiding in the woods and using rifles with a much greater effective range (though they took longer to reload than a brown bess).

If there's a resistance others will almost always come to your aid, usually for their own nefarious reasons.

IF there's a resistance.

You mean, the US or Europe will come to your aid? If you are going up against the US, which spends far more on its military than any other country, yer fucked.

I totally agree with your stance that it's better to put up a fight than to be hauled off to be worked/ starved/ tortured to death.

As a practical matter, a person on the ground with a rifle or RPG would be picked off by an aircraft that is out of your effective range and lights you up with heat vision, leaving you no place to hide, and fires an automatic cannon, smart bombs, rockets, etc.

I don't think the US can win in Afghanistan, but no outside force ever has. I don't think America is quite like Afghanistan, but you can imagine how utterly hellish it would become on the way to finding out.

The video below shows why "taking out a couple of the bastards before they kill you" is easier said than done. Substitute "resistance fighters" for "Taliban":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWuP6dmYOE0

Well, let's hope it never comes to that, but one shouldn't be willfully blind to the possibilities. At the age of 67 with heart trouble and arthritis in my hips I'm not likely to go traipsing about playing soldier, even if I were so inclined - which I'm not and never have been. But I'm even less inclined to be herded off to a uranium or coal mine where I'd be lucky to last a week or a munitions factory where I might last slightly longer. But I've never been inclined to be a sheep, either.

But more to the point, I genuinely believe that weapons suppression is not the answer, unless one really likes the idea of potentially living in a dictatorship. I don't thing it's a proper or viable solution to the problem of violence.

People, even fairly crazy people, generally only become violent for a reason. We've been seeing an increase in high profile incidents of random violence for definite reasons in spite of the fact that overall violence, including that employing firearms, has been on the decline for the past couple of decades. We need to deal with the underlying causes, not the visible symptoms.

Happy, well adjusted people don't go engaging in acts of random violence.

This whole anti-gun movement is a big red herring, devised to distract the public from both the underlying social inequities that foster such severe disaffection and the many acts of malfeasance that the "powers that be" do not want the general public to focus on.

This is becoming increasingly obvious with the current administration, but previous administrations have also had plenty of things going on they don't want people examining too closely.

As far as America not quite being like Afghanistan, maybe not, maybe more than one would suspect. It would make a hell of a movie, what with the catacombs of various tunnels beneath most major US cites

[Bob Olhsson]

We're living in the era of suicide bombers and drones.

[weedywet]

we've also never been statistically SAFER

keeping you afraid is how the authoritarians keep power

I don't need a gun to feel safe.
And having one doesn't make you safer, whether you think you "need" one or not.

[Bob Olhsson]

True.

[John Eppstein]

we've also never been statistically SAFER

keeping you afraid is how the authoritarians keep power

Which tends to back up my assertion that the anti-gun hysteria is an artificial "issue" being whipped up for political reasons - either as a distraction from more weighty matters or as an excuse for not dealing with the underlying, more intractable issues that would require serious political will and might piss off those who promote the popular ideologies.

I don't need a gun to feel safe.
And having one doesn't make you safer, whether you think you "need" one or not.

I never said that having a gun makes you safer or makes you feel safer.

Unless you're a hunter, target shooter, or have a varmint problem, if things are at a point where owning a gun is really desirable, things have already gone tits-up in a seriously bad way.

Like having a wannabe Adolf Hitler who has systematically fired all the responsible members of government and law enforcement and has effectively compromised our election system with the assistance of an enemy power, in control of the country.

At that point things are already seriously unsafe, with no long term prospects of correction bny normal means.