I never sad anything about people making their own laws.

We have laws, most of which are decent laws, but with many exceptions.

Firearms are not about making our own laws. Firearms are for making a government think twice before they raise taxes to 90%, or start killing people for trying to feed their family, by hunting on the Kings land. That's when firearms are needed. Not when someone cuts you off in traffic.

Thanks for the discussion, but you just don't seem to grasp the meaning of individual liberty.

I always thought individual liberty meant I was free to do pretty much what I wanted, as long as I obeyed the law and that I might even try to change the law if I disagreed with it enough. I've never thought it included murdering govt workers if I couldn't change the law though, so I've never seen a need for a gun in that respect.

And thank you for the lively conversation, the exchange of ideas is always interesting

In that case, the ones benefiting from the government will likely be armed, anyway. An oppressive government fearing rebellion wants to disarm its opposition, not its supporters.

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If a neocon whines about big government wealth redistribution, just ask him what he thinks about the portion of that big government that sends aid to Israel.

The fact about Iraqis being heavily armed under Saddam is interesting. Obviously, if people are unwilling to overthrow a tyrant, their being armed -- even to a level comparable with the military -- doesn't matter. How about if the people ARE willing to overthrow the tyranny, but AREN'T armed?

Soviet Union, did anyone say? (Yep -- me!)

How many instances can anyone think of, in which a widely armed population overthrew a government by force? The only one that comes to mind is the American war of independence, but I am probably forgetting some. Even in that conflict, it wasn't the Minutemen who did the deed, but the Continental Army, which was laboriously trained as a regular military force, together with the French army, ditto. The Continental Army was armed and (poorly) supplied by the Congress, so the widespread possession of arms by Americans at the time was not a decisive factor. And that wasn't really a revolution, in that the internal government in the colonies wasn't overthrown. There are plenty of examples of insurgencies working in countries that were NOT widely armed -- e.g., in China, Chiang Kai-Shek's overthrow of the monarchy, and then the Communist overthrow of the Kuomintang. Or Castro's revolution in Cuba. Or the Viet Minh defeating the French in Vietnam. In all of these cases, the insurgents themselves were armed, but the people as a whole generally weren't.

And then of course there are examples of the nonviolent overthrow of a government, such as in the Soviet Union.

I'm going to state this as a principle which I believe history supports: The widespread possession of arms by a population is neither a hindrance to tyranny, nor a factor aiding in its overthrow.

Please feel free to present any counterexamples that I may have overlooked.

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is
wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts
they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions,
it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...
And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not
warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as
to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost
in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure."

-Thomas Jefferson :

November 13, 1787, letter to William S. Smith, quoted in Padover's Jefferson On Democracy, ed., 1939

James Madison "All men having power ought to be mistrusted. Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government. I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse. The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries."

"If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its patriots to its ruin." - Samuel Adams (1780)

"It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from the government."
- Thomas Paine

"If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin."
- Samuel Adams

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it."
- President Abraham Lincoln

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Gee, where is that last quote from?

It would help if someone would list all the nations where the citizens were all armed with firearms.

"[The Constitution preserves] the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation...(where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
---James Madison,The Federalist Papers, No. 46.

Here is one piece I found on firearms ownership worldwide.....

"There is roughly one firearm for every seven people worldwide. Without the United States, though, this drops to about one firearm per 10 people," it said.

India had the world's second-largest civilian gun arsenal, with an estimated 46 million firearms outside law enforcement and the military, though this represented just four guns per 100 people there. China, ranked third with 40 million privately held guns, had 3 firearms per 100 people.

Germany, France, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil and Russia were next in the ranking of country's overall civilian gun arsenals.

On a per-capita basis, Yemen had the second most heavily armed citizenry behind the United States, with 61 guns per 100 people, followed by Finland with 56, Switzerland with 46, Iraq with 39 and Serbia with 38.

France, Canada, Sweden, Austria and Germany were next, each with about 30 guns per 100 people, while many poorer countries often associated with violence ranked much lower. Nigeria, for instance, had just one gun per 100 people.

U.S. most armed country with 90 guns per 100 people | Reuters

If these statistics are accurate, then very few countries have firearms ownership high enough to be able to pose a real threat to an established government.

Of course firearms ownership by itself is not enough. The people must be willing to fight and possibly die, in order to oppose tyranny.

Actually, for the point I was making, it would not. I was asking for instances in which a government had actually been overthrown by an armed populace. I do not know of any, but presenting an example should not require knowledge of gun ownership in every country in the world. Just find an example of a government that was overthrown by an armed popular uprising (as distinct from a disciplined insurgent army), and you've got it.

Edit: Even in the U.S., or in Canada which has an even higher rate of gun ownership than we do, it is not the case that the citizens are ALL armed with firearms. I am not, for example.

Wouldn't the American colonists classify as an armed populace who overthrew their government? Just asking....

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I am an American. That's the way most of us put it, just matter of factly. They are plain words, those four: you could write them on your thumbnail, or sweep them clear across this bright autumn sky. But remember too, that they are more than just words. They are a way of life. So whenever you speak them; speak them firmly, speak them proudly, speak them gratefully. I am an American. ...a tradition

I'd like to point out that America armed the insurgents TSG refers to in his post...

Seems funny that he celebrates smelly foreigners right to bear arms, when provided by the US Government, but has a problem with me supplying my own.

---

(now please try to get back on topic)

Why do liberals want to disarm law abiding citizens exercising their 2nd amendment rights?

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"Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves." ~ Lord Byron

Good question.

Maybe a liberal will answer it.

Getting an answer isn't difficult. Getting a rational one, on the other hand.....

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In case you were wondering, yes, there really ARE more idiots these days....technology has made natural selection obsolete.

I would have thought that the OKC bombing proved that firearms aren't the problem.

If the OKC bombing wasn't enough, 9/11 should have been.

How many firearms were used for those 2 tragedies?

You don't need firearms to kill.

I only wish everyone carried a gun. If that was the case, then there would never be another Columbine, or Virginia Tech.

No, because as I said, the victory in the misnamed Revolutionary War was actually achieved by the Continental Army aided by French troops and ships, not by the armed civilian populace, who in fact played no decisive role in the struggle.

OK, you did. It's completely irrelevant, but it is true.

Did I express any approval of either Chiang or Mao in that post? Odd, I thought I was just pointing out that neither one represented an armed populace.

As to why I have a problem with you arming yourself, it probably has something to do with your expression of approval of America's high murder rate. I am uneasy about anyone with views like that going about armed, as I would be around a mentally ill person with a gun.

Whether firearms are the problem or not is irrelevant to the question being considered.

What we are discussing is one interpretation of the Second Amendment in which the people retain the right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of being able to oppose their own government should it become a tyranny.

Against this, it has been observed that:

1) It is nonsensical that the founding fathers would have wanted government officials to be assassinated by any individual who disliked what they were doing, which is the practical consequence of the idea above; and

2) In actual history, no government has ever been successfully overthrown by an armed civilian populace. There have been coups d'etat, and there have been disciplined and well-armed insurgencies, that have accomplished this; also, governments have been overthrown by unarmed general uprisings in the form of a general strike and so on. But in all cases, whether the people have been armed has been irrelevant to the imposition of tyranny.

In fact, OKC and 9/11 argue in favor of that irrelevance, not against it.

I'll answer that question with a question. Why do you expect the entire populace to trust implicitly people they don't know and have never met with devices that enable anyone to kill massive numbers from great distances with little effort or skill. Especially when these same people also espouse their so called "right" to murder anyone they disagree with enough politically as a major motivation for having said devices, and espouse all these rights with a single minded obsession overriding practically any other issue the govt may be considering at the time.

.

If by that you mean they wouldn't be massacres you'd be right, they'd be shootouts, and the toll would be in the 100's rather than the 10's and we'd probably never know who started it.