Comment by afavour

Americans are much more comfy than Iranians are though. As much as Americans might dislike what's going on, they're not fighting got their own survival.

Democracy, authoritarianism are all abstract and vague concepts

The people who love the second amendment are the ones that support the president. Most of them would gladly shoot me or you if their president told them to. In fact, a significant portion fantasize about being able to shoot other Americans and get away with it. This is one half of the country holding the other half hostage. Despite what you think, there are many protests going on. But a lot of Americans simply agree with what is happening.

> So this was the whole point with the 2nd amendment right, that when/if the government repress you in that way, you have weapons to fight back?

Not as far as I understand. The 2nd amendment was from a time when we did not have much of a standing army and the country relied on militias for firepower. Some of the proposed language for the second amendment makes this clearer, but it was cut in the final version.

The tyranny bit was probably always someone's fantasy, and the self-defense aspect is basically a shift of interpretation that is much more recent.

(White) Americans of the center and left have long since lost the conviction that you may just need to bleed for your children’s freedom. It’ll come back, hopefully not too late.

Democracies are vulnerable to many things: populism, vote-rigging, importing migrants to vote for a given party, and much more. Without a reboot, many democracies slide into autocracy. First, the government bans weapons, then curtails civil rights under the guise of child protection, offending religious sensibilities, blocks websites, and gradually tightens penalties for free speech. It all happens gradually. And suddenly you can't write your opinion online without being arrested. The UK is a case in point. Unarmed people are doomed to change things not only in authoritarian countries, but even in nominally democratic ones. Examples include peaceful and not-so-peaceful protests in Iran, Belarus, and Russia in the struggle against the authorities. Peaceful protests without the support of the army and the elite always end in failure. Another example is the protests in the UK against the influx of Muslim migrants, where the authorities support the latter.

In Minneapolis and other cities, you do have protests, you have the people following ICE, and it's a valid discussion to have that without the protests and the "mostly peaceful" resistance from Minnesotans is helping the nation see what criminals ICE people are, and what an awful thing they're doing to the country.

Mass resistance movements tend to come at unpredictable moments. The killing or particularly well documented crime of a government, for example. Something acute will trigger it, like George Floyd or Renee Good (whose murder triggered widespread outrage, protests, and despite the bots on Twitter, some shift in the view on ICE from the middle and right).

If, for example, a brigade of soldiers or officers opened live fire on protesters, I think the country would shut down.

Another point, as others have mentioned: It's actually the massive amount of armament on both side of the equation that keeps people from taking the next step. The citizens of Minneapolis could probably take out a hundred ICE agents a day, but now we're in a civil war because the next steps are insurrection act, hundreds of people dead in days, potential of the MN state guard being activated to fight against national forces, and it's already three steps ahead of whatever would happen in Spain.

edit: There are some people already exercising their rights loudly. See: https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1qdnmh...

> So this was the whole point with the 2nd amendment right, that when/if the government repress you in that way, you have weapons to fight back?

The point of the second amendment was, in no small part, so that the central government wouldn't deny the states the means to commit genocide against the indigenous population on their own, because the states didn't trust he central government to be sufficiently enthusiastic about it. That was the major security concern alluded to by the “necessary to the security of a free state” bit.

I can mill a perfectly working firearm in any highly-restricted legal jurisdiction anywhere in the world and the "government can do nothing about it."

These devices are over a century old: the cat's out of the bag, manufacturing technology has only gotten better and easier.

Grandpa's 30-06 from WW2 from 200 yards will penetrate anything but trauma plates.

If it's a hand-carried firearm of any kind (including crew-served weapons like the M249, M240B, M60), it's not a "heavy weapon."

> The second amendment was written in a time when a firearm was a musket.

At the time the Second Amendment was written, there were entire private navies with actual cannons far more destructive than any man-portable firearm available today. No background checks on those ships or cannons, either, btw.

They didn't just have muskets at that time, repeating firearms were just too expensive to outfit entire armies with them. When you can supply 10 guys with muskets for the same cost as 1 guy with a repeating firearm, you pick the 10 men even if the 1 guy can fire just as fast.

Then it's useless and should be abroged.

> The second amendment was written in a time when a firearm was a musket.

Second amendment was written for children in schools.

Yeah, I think your last point is a good one and something to consider too. Large part of our perspectives are shaped by what we've experienced, and what our predecessors experienced, and if you don't have the experience of walking through mass-graves created by the government executing dissidents, you don't have a frame of reference for that being a possibility.

So, from my perspective, there were in fact a number of "religious wars", but the folks who lost all ended up on reservations or murdered and in mass graves. I mean 650K folks died in the mid 19th century in a single 5-year war. And that's not counting how we might code the Atlantic slave trade or the post-reconstruction violence, or labor violence into that history.

As a person who has been involved with an riot in a small town, I think that, in the deep unconscious of most folks in the US, is something structure:

"well, there wasn't violence in the 19th and early 20th and mid 20th and late 20thC century... well okay, there was violence but they put folks who were resisting into mass graves or incarceration and everyone was better off for it".

That is, consider that the obverse of your claim might be true:

the violence committed by the US has been so totalizing that it's victims have never even counted as victims and that holocaust so complete that it only exists in the subconscious of white US citizens.

I find that idea to be a very easy way to understand why white folks are so passive and pro-authority.

> My counter-hypothesis is that America has never really known authoritarianism

Funny, because the racist authoritarians most people point to as the canonical example were themselves directly inspired by the US example. I think a more realistic reason is that this particular brand of race-heirarchy-based authoritarianism that mostly only affects white folks if they are seen as challenging what it does to everyone else has been normalized in the US since before the founding, varying only in intensity and the degree to which its intent is overly stated.

TL;DR: https://x.com/i/status/1131996074011451392

This is NOT what America is about. America is about opens history book

uh oh

Frantically starts flipping though pages

uh oh. oh no. no no no. uh oh