That's the thing, they do, and have in the past too. Some might even recall riots ~70 years ago that kind of spiraled out of control and led to a civil war.
Looking at what's happening in Iran as we speak might be a good idea as well, where they've had enough, know that there is a good chance of their regime literally executing them on the spot, yet they're brave enough to continue fighting, because they realize what's at stake, and have run out of other options.
> The ICE officers are armed and absolutely will use their weapons if given half a chance to
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? Or am I misunderstanding what that part is/was about?
But then I still hear people say that this is what the 2nd amendment is for... Meanwhile, to make sure they have the heavier weapons, law enforcement goes absolutely bananas on what they carry.
The second amendment was written in a time when a firearm was a musket.
Democracy, authoritarianism are all abstract and vague concepts
My counter-hypothesis is that America has never really known authoritarianism, religious wars, etc., so Americans are, on average, more supportive of Authority.
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.
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
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.
And unfortunately that probably won't change until ICE kills more of them and makes it their problem.
Have a good day!
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...
I didn't say the American and European experiences with authoritarianism were the same, or even similar, I said the American experience with a very specific orientation of authoritarianism, with a specific focus, is extremely deep and pervasive, and that that has explanatory power on the relatively mild reaction of the American public to a change in the intensity and overtness of that particular flavor of authoritarianism.
This is, in fact, very different from the European experience.
What kind of revisionist history is this?
The feds were telling the states "screw off, we do the negotiating" before the ink was even dry on that. Steamrolling the natives was never really a seriously contested job or a point of political contention, the feds were always gonna be the ones to do it.
It absolutely is at stake, they just haven’t realized it yet. (Insert obligatory “first they came for” quote.)
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.
ICE goons can shoot people because in America, law enforcement officers shooting citizens is thoroughly normalized. It's normalized because law enforcement officers getting shot is thoroughly normalized. It's normalized because the nation decided every village idiot can have a gun and the government can do nothing about it.
They are neither a reliable summary of the motivations for the provisions they support nor any kind of argument for the provisions in the Bill of Rights.
Second amendment was written for children in schools.
There is also the Cookson repeater available in the late 1600s. And in 1756 was advertised for sale in the Boston Gazette.
Multiple founding fathers, including George Washington, were also offered purchase of repeating firearms, some for use in the military, some for personal usage. But of course this is still before interchangeable parts so production is of course still expensive and repairs must be done be a highly skilled gunsmith and not just some apprentice blacksmith.
I'd take issue with that, because once it becomes an armed conflict then the full power of the state military will be deployed.
And modern nation-states of mid-size or above all have militaries than can crush any civilian armed resistance, simply because of the lethality and capability gap between civilian and military weapons.
The only winning move for a populace, then, is to try and keep resistance sub-armed conflict (and avoid being bated into armed resistance).
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.
"Trump won 15% of Black voters – up from 8% four years earlier. "
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/behind-trump...
That is not a civil war.
https://www.project2025.observer/en
The local and federal authorities are at a complete standoff right now. When's the last time you recall a local government essentially asking the court for permission to deploy its national guard to enforce a restraining order against the federal government? All while said federal government was openly conducting sloppy pseudo-urban-warfare in broad daylight?
I urge you to pay attention.
Won't happen.
The Bill of Rights was specifically designed to abrogate any possibility of infringement of those enumerated rights by an out of control State.
These devices are over a century old: the cat's out of the bag, manufacturing technology has only gotten better and easier.
You so much as walk around with your gun in the streets of Seoul, and you will very quickly find out that the government can, in fact, do something about it, it will do something about it, the general public will side with the government against you, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Gun ownership is a social construct. Where guns are banned, even criminals can't afford one, because there's no place to get these guns in the first place. Those who think they can outsmart the government will quickly find that guns out in the wild is considered a matter of national security and handled accordingly.
Only if you're caught - which requires more than magic. Shinzo Abe would disagree.
And it's not that "the administration as a whole" wants devastation, but study up on what Stephen Miller wants.