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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (693515)	1/17/2013 10:11:28 PM
From: TopCat	3 Recommendations Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1575517

"But the idea that civilians with civilian arms and no training can go up against modern, well equipped and very well-trained troops......." You're making the assumption that the "troops" would remain loyal to a tyrannical government. I wouldn't count on that.

To: combjelly who wrote (693515)	1/18/2013 12:02:20 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1575517

I am not anti-gun. I don't own one, but I do enjoy learning about the technology behind them and their history. I do favor reasonable restrictions. I definitely don't think anyone needs a magazine that holds 100 rounds. I am ambivalent about semi-automatic rifles, but I tend to lean against them. I don't favor banning semi-automatic handguns. Shotguns are reasonably restricted. And yet, the NRA would consider all of your positions as onerous and very anti gun.

To: combjelly who wrote (693515)	1/19/2013 5:25:41 AM
From: Bilow	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575517

Hi combjelly; Re: "But the idea that civilians with civilian arms and no training can go up against modern, well equipped and very well-trained troops, and ours are hands down the best, is an adolescent fantasy that is so far from reality that is is jaw dropping." There are a lot of nations on this planet and during recorded history there's a lot of this sort of thing that has occurred in the past. That is, situations where civilians revolted against their own government. The usual situation is that the "civilians" are not so civilian. The United States military currently has 1.45 million active members and the same number of reservists. That's a total of 2.9 million people. But the US has 22 million veterans. More importantly, in every situation where a significant uprising occurred against a major country, there have been desertions from the armed forces in favor of the rebels. THIS IS UNIVERSAL HUMAN BEHAVIOR. Get used to the idea, if the US collapses into insurrection, the military will be fighting on both sides. And a lot of soldiers will quit when ordered to shoot at Americans and then simply go home. In modern times, we're used to the concept that when the US military goes against a foreign power, their soldiers desert while our soldiers do not. This is not because of some magic dust distributed by the officers. It's an accident of history. Our recent wars have been fought overseas. Soldiers almost never desert when they're fighting overseas. They desert quite frequently when they're fighting at home. This is true of the US military (in every campaign it's experienced in the US, i.e. in the 18th and 19th centuries) and it's true of every other military on the planet. THIS IS UNIVERSAL HUMAN BEHAVIOR. There's nothing special about the US military. The same human emotions apply. When you're 10,000 miles from home, deserting isn't an option. When you're fighting close enough to hitch-hike back home, desertion becomes a big problem. Re: "The very same loons claimed that if only the Chinese at Tienanmen [sic] Square had guns, things would have been different. Right. A rifle up against a T-72 tank would do what, exactly?" Interesting argument. To show that it's true, you need to do some quote mining. Certainly I've never said that the Chinese could have had a revolt. Their basic problem was that the support for a revolution was very very thin. Let me try and explain what happened from my point of view, Tiananmen Square is a good example of what I'm telling you in these posts. The Chinese military, like the US military, is very conservative. It's a right-wing organization. The students at Tiananmen Square were lefties. It would be unnatural for the military to switch to their side. The same thing will happen in the US. The right-wing US military is never going to fight on the side of lefty college students (who generally despise the military). It won't fight for a revolt led by gays and lesbians. And if the college professors decide to revolt, sorry, the US military is not going to be there for them. If a blue state decides it wants out of the union, too bad. That the (professional or volunteer) military is generally right of center is UNIVERSAL HUMAN BEHAVIOR. For that matter, it is also universal human behavior that rural people are more right wing than urban. And it is also universal human behavior that urban people spend more time hunting and their kids make better soldiers, on average. When urban organizations win against rural ones it's a matter of supplies or numbers, not the quality of the individual soldiers. Re: "I am ambivalent about semi-automatic rifles, but I tend to lean against them." You probably don't know that the current record for shooting 12 shots out of a 6-shot revolver is under 3 seconds. That means hitting the target with 6 rounds, reloading, and then hitting the target with 6 more shots. Here, watch it happen on youtube: youtube.com Reloading bolt action rifles is similar; it takes very little time. The reason the military uses fully automatic weapons is that they have the ability to resupply their soldiers with vast quantities of ammunition. So they spray it all over in order to keep the enemy's head down. This is important when you have fully equipped military forces going after each other for short periods of time. But in revolt situations, the problem is snipers. And snipers do just fine with bolt action rifles. Fully automatic weapons aren't a heck of a lot of good against snipers. Here's an interesting article in the NY Times on the situation in Afghanistan (where a civilian military force is in the process of driving our professional military out of the country): atwar.blogs.nytimes.com The bolt action rifles they're talking about are commonly available in the US for around $150 or less, depending on condition. They are all over our rural regions. Better made rifles are available for about $500. And these are quite effective as sniper rifles. One of my buddies (a civilian) has a .50 BMG sniper rifle. This is the type of rifle that has the world record for killing a man at long range. See the picture on the wikpedia page linked below. The .50BMG cartridge is on the left. The tiny little .22LR, which is the most common round you find in the ghetto (i.e the Saturday Night Special), is on the right. The US military fields the .223 or 5.56mm Nato, which is next to the .22LR: en.wikipedia.org My point here is that US civilians are not armed with crap that cannot be compared to the armaments of the US military. For an insurrection, US civilians are the best armed in the world. Re: "I don't favor banning semi-automatic handguns." Uh, you do realize that the vast majority of people murdered by firearms in the US are murdered by pistols, semi-automatic or otherwise? Very few people are killed by rifles, assault, bolt action, lever, or whatever. -- Carl