Comment by cutterl6
9 hours ago
You underestimate how little resistance it takes to make a difference. It's not about every free man in the country single-handedly holding off the might of the US military on his doorstep.
As soon as a single shot is fired in defence, every thug now has to think twice before busting down a door. The game changes. Tyranny becomes a whole lot less efficient.
You send an FBI task force or god forbid the military to interfere with the life of a peaceful stranger and now you've given every man in the country a damn good reason to get himself organised for when they come for his family.
It's clearly not about a flu, at that point.
If they shoot a federal agent that causes an escalation of violence, and future federal agents will be more brutal in response to anything. That loss in efficiency is partially regained by being more violent. That is, in my view, something inevitable when a power structure encroaches too far on those it has power over. But that inevitability doesn't mean you ignore the danger that comes with it.
What it comes down to is can you scare those within the power structure sufficiently enough that they back off before they escalate violence to the point of mass murder? In the U.S. I don't think that you can. It seems that a lot of other people don't either, which is what is delaying people from using violence. There are still enough incentives to be handed out that those capable of committing the harm will escape being harmed by the power structure. When the rewards run out and those who wield arms in service of power become no different from those being harmed, then it will change. The issue is that so much of the world is connected now that those rewards are at no risk of running out, because they can always be pulled from somewhere else.