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Comment by James_K

9 days ago

It's really interesting to see America doing the same stuff as Weimar Germany. The institute for sexology was destroyed in 1933, so by my counting you've got about a year until you get your Führer.

30 comments

James_K

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ndsipa_pomu  9 days ago

What really bugs me as an onlooker is that I thought the constitution specified gun ownership precisely to prevent tyrannical governments (e.g. the English) and yet now there appears to be developing exactly that.

  • pjc50  9 days ago

    The gun owners are largely the ones supporting this, because they want it to be tyrannical against Americans they don't like.

  • mmaniac  9 days ago

    Those rights, like to bear arms and freely associate, only exist on paper. That they are in a state of nominal existence and practical abrogation serves to deradicalise and defuse resistance against the government, not encourage it.

  • zzgo  9 days ago

    As long as the tyrants hurt the right people, the gun owners will use their guns to protect the tyrants.

    [The revolution will be bloodless if the left allows it to be](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/04/leader-of-the-pro-t...).

    • aleph_minus_one  9 days ago

      > As long as the tyrants hurt the right people, the gun owners will use their guns to protect the tyrants.

      Thus, the liberal, woke people should change their stance on restricting gun ownership, and consider becoming gun owners, too. :-)

      1 reply →

  • jaredklewis  9 days ago

    At the time the constitution was written, guns were among the most lethal weaponry available.

    Not sure the same logic applies when the government has a monopoly on tanks, fighter jets, missiles and so on, which (despite the second amendment’s use of the broad term “arms”) citizens can neither keep nor bear.

    Obligatory side note that the actual text of the second amendment reads very different to me than the modern discourse about it. Perhaps the “well regulated militia” bit was just as important as the “keeping and bearing arms” bit, in terms of keeping tyranny in check.

  • foul  9 days ago

    At the moment conditions for a civil war (be it a real civil war or the historical USA civil war) aren't there, a lot of citizens entitled to 2nd amendment rights aren't exerting their right, a big lump of citizens are happy about the current state of affairs.

  • rich_sasha  9 days ago

    Trump is pretty popular right now, but ultimately his actions have not yet had any impact on his voters. They like his image.

    But the real world will keep on happening. There will be inflation, unemployment, cost of living etc. Ultimately, as the experience of various European Trumps shows, this is what prevails. It doesn't even have to be Trump's faults or successes that buoy or sink him. I'm sure part of the reason he lost his first reelection bid was that COVID happened (and in itself that wasn't his fault), likewise Biden lost because inflation (again, largely not his fault).

    Meanwhile, he doesn't strike me as someone who generally handles crises well. Problems will come, ones that materially affect his political base, and he will have to handle them well, or be serially lucky, or lose his power base.

    So in short, I wouldn't assume any particular group of people will like him long-term just because they like him a few weeks in. They might. They might not.

    EDIT to be clear, I don't wish Trump dead. I think that would be destructive to the US democracy and thus also bad for the world.

  • moomin  9 days ago

    The roots of the 2nd amendment are way murky. Two contributing factors: 1) Guns were essential for controlling slaves 2) No-one trusted the US Army (partly because it was heavily associated with Alexander Hamilton)

    • rich_sasha  9 days ago

      Isn't there also something about availability and quality of the guns back in the days if 2nd amendment? Eg. they were expensive, bulky and slow to fire, whereas now they are neither.

  • James_K  9 days ago

    Not really. The idea of the constitution is that the US government is elected and therefore can't be tyrannical. The purpose of the 2nd amendment is almost certainly to maintain a force for the defence of the country against invasion. It's entirely obsolete now that America has a standing army.

    • ndsipa_pomu  9 days ago

      Well, there's also the concept of owning guns to protect your liberty and there does seem to be a fair amount of liberty encroaching decisions going on (free speech seems to be taking a hammering).

      2 replies →

  • krapp  9 days ago

    Americans will (and often do) insist that their "well regulated militia" is an absolute bulwark against tyranny, because their government cowers in terror of the wrath of an armed populace. Mention school shootings, mass shootings or any other kind of gun violence stats and they'll lecture you on your naivety, because all of that is a price worth paying for liberty in the only truly free society on earth. They'll wax poetic about "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants," and state “when the people fear the government, that's tyranny; when the government fears the people, that's freedom."

    But Americans were more up in arms (literally) over the minor inconvenience of COVID restrictions than this. An imaginary communist plot to steal the election? Americans riot and try to burn down the Capitol. An actual authoritarian takeover of the executive branch takes place...

    Because of course the Second Amendment isn't about defending liberty against tyranny, and never was. It's about white supremacists defending their privilege and their franchise for violence against an increasingly progressive and multicultural society, and has been since the days when the "well regulated militias" were used to suppress slave revolts and Native American uprisings.

    And all of those guys with all of those guns will be just fine and dandy watching everything burn until the leopards-eating-your-face party finally turns on them as well.