135
New Mexico officials call for governor’s impeachment after firearms restriction
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
135 points (96.6% liked)
News
23275 readers
3486 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
With respect this is a straw man argument. You don't address @BaroqueInMind's point- that 2A is designed to protect against government overreach by people who would ignore the Constitution, and for self-defense.
Nobody wants to fight the US army with a basement gun stash.
Is that not what opposing a tyrannical government ultimately comes down to?
Hopefully it never needs to get to that point because of the threat. But that’s literally what we did in the revolutionary war.
As far as I see it, @BaroqueInMind was trying to make two points:
So his points are that the 2A guarantee his right to assassinate the President, if he decides that he is a tyrant and for armed resistance againt an executive force of the government.
I argued that fighting the US government's forces with handguns and winning is a testosterone fantasy.
So where exactly is my Straw Man?
The 2A may have been meant to protect a "free state" but in today's reality, it fails to achieve this goal. On the other hand, the laws arguing from it, have lead to the greatest number of civilian gun deaths outside an active war zone.
al-Qaeda + isis held off multiple nations military for almost 20 years.
Why would a civil war where half of your military isn’t blindly loyal going to be any better? Killing your friends and neighbors for the state is a lot different than killing someone you’ve never met before.
I know you're not the original poster, but you are just confirming the argument wasn't a straw man. The belief is that basements full of guns will effectively combat the US military
Your straw man is that it's a testosterone fantasy, and that the idea is to fight off the US Army with someone's basement guns. I'm saying the straw many is largely your representation of attitude.
Look at Al-Qaeda and ISIS. They had little more than AKs, no electronics more than cell phones, and they managed to drive us out of Iraq and Afghanistan. So let's agree that it is POSSIBLE for a weaker force to defend against a stronger force, albeit with higher loss rates, especially if the weaker force blends in with a civilian population.
However Al-Qaeda is a bad example. A much better one is the Bundy standoff from 5ish years ago. And that shows a big part of the usefulness of guns- increasing the cost of using force.
Now for the record Bundy was an asshole so don't take this as me idolizing him. But the situation is a useful example.
Put simply- there was a dispute about whether Bundy was allowed to graze cattle on some public lands. Bundy claimed a legal ancestral right, government claimed ancestral rights were removed because endangered turtles lived on the lands, but the government would still allow him to graze the cattle for a steep fee. Bundy refused to pay, so the government sent in workers to seize his cattle.
Bundy and his followers then took up armed positions to defend the cattle. The message was simple- it will take a firefight to get you the cattle. Everybody (including Bundy and his followers) knew the government would probably win, a bunch of ranchers with guns isn't going to fight off the National Guard. BUT, it would also mean a lot of blood spilled on both sides. As in, 'think twice guys, is seizing a few cows worth another Ruby Ridge type fiasco?'
Fortunately cool heads prevailed, the government backed down and agreed to bring the issue back to the courts.
The lesson remains though. A bunch of armed ranchers 'defended' against the mighty US government without ever firing a shot, simply because them being armed raised the cost of using force against them. If they'd not been armed, the government would have sent in riot cops with batons to beat them all up and arrest them and that'd have been that.
And THAT is why I say that defending against tyrants is still a valid goal of 2A. Because defending against tyranny doesn't even necessarily mean killing tyrants, sometimes it just means making oneself a harder target to tyrannize.
(And once again, I should clarify I'm not necessarily siding with Bundy. I'm just pointing out that from his POV the government was being tyrannical, and his resistance against what he saw as tyranny WAS effective.)
Love how you tag on a deeply held constitutional right that didn't exist until 15 years ago. @BaroqueInMind@kbin.social's point explicitly does not reference that newly established right and the whole implication of "the real reason" is that self-defense is not actually what the 2nd is about.
The populace should have more mortars and RPGs and fewer handguns.