Time for gun law reforms in the USA?

[Mr Khan]

SamuelRSmith said:

Mr Khan said:

I've said again and again, you don't need guns to topple dictatorships, and when you do use guns to do so, things tend to wind up rather ugly. The "Free Syrian Army" doesn't seem like it's a very nice group of people, and although they've seen a fairly successful election, Libya is still run by leftover militias from the civil war, whereas all of the Eastern Bloc went down peacefully and never had to worry about anything quite like that.

America was a special case, because what we had really wasn't a "revolution" per se, but was basically a rebellion, of a local government forcibly severing ties between a global one.

And i don't know if you've been to American high school, but do you really want schoolteachers carrying firearms? No no no no no no no.

When you say that the American Revolution wasn't a revolution, but a rebellion... you're really just getting into symantics.

You don't need guns, no. But if you live in a tyrannical dictatorship, you might want one.

Do I want school teachers carrying guns? Not really. Do I want whole schools completely unarmed? Not really. Do I have the right to tell people that they can't hold guns to protect themselves, no matter what their occupation? Not really.

You might not like guns, but that does not give you the right to disarm everybody else.

It's not semantics, it's a very important distinction. The politics of a regional rebellion versus a revolution run completely differently, because in a regional rebellion, the majority of people living within a geographic area resolve to have their region break away, and this then is a decision often backed up by the local government, duly elected, or at least representative of the people's desire to break away from the national government. This means that if the rebellion succeeds, the new government already has structures in place, and can operate off of the old social contracts, just independently of the old overlords. This makes for a scenario much, much cleaner than a revolution. That's why there was never any real danger (despite what historical anecdotes may say) of George Washington becoming a military dictator, because he was appointed by the Continental Congress, who were appointed by Colonial Governments, duly elected by the colonial peoples: lots of structure and order in the whole affair

Compare that to, say, real revolutions: 1790s France or 1917 Russia. The dynamics are completely different, and in the case of a real revolution, gun ownership makes things much worse, because you have a breakdown of the state monopoly on use of force and armed groups running around, suddenly any guarantees for an orderly process or any attempts to preserve rights or liberties have gone out the window, entirely at the mercy of how well-organized the armed groups are, and whether they happen to believe in such things (because even if they are pro-liberty, like the leadership of the Libyan Transitional Council, if they don't have total control over their ranks, you end up with Libya as it is)

Really, the American Revolution should be called the "American War of Independence," as "Revolution" is the incorrect term.