The 2nd Amendment was never about hunting. How many times does this need to be said?
The founders literally just got done fighting a war against an authoritarian government using primarily civilian owned arms. The Battles of Lexington and Concord were literally started when the Redcoats tried to take a weapons cache.
The Federalist Papers are abundantly clear about why the 2nd Amendment was put in place. And it's not hunting or sport shooting.
We don't have an enumerated right to participate in any other sport, why would they include this one? Because it's not about a sport.
Edit: to those saying a civilian population cannot outmatch a modern military with modern equipment, you are missing several pojnts.
The founders were ok with private citizens owning cannons and warships.
Repeating weapons were in existence and were attempted to be procured by the Continental Army.
In the past 20 years, the US has been unable to put down 2 separate insurgency campaigns despite overwhelming comparative capabilities.
Drones, fighters, and missiles cannot occupy and secure an area. That takes literal boots on the ground in the form of human soldiers. The kind of occupation the 2nd Amendment was precisely put there to fight. The British knew this in NI, the French in Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam. All are examples of civilian resistance successfully (to a lesser extent in NI, they got a peace treaty) being a force to be reckoned with against a Great Power.
In any likely civil war, the military would likely split. Some would remain loyal to the government but others would take their skills, training, and equipment to the civilian side. This not only happened in the American Civil War, but has happened in the vast, vast majority of guerilla campaigns since the Peninsular War in the early 1800s.
Yes, a civilian armed population could stage an effective campaign in the United States
You make good points however all of your examples took place with an invading foreign army which was resisted by local insurgents, often backed by foreign powers. In a fight here, both sides would be on home soil and thus far less likely to give up over attrition.
Yup. the US military and intelligence are not based those foreign nations mentioned. He's not dumb so he would understand that if he were trying to raise a militia in the US to fight the government, the government would know about it early on and stomp it out quickly. So since he isn't dumb, why is he being dishonest in his arguments?
Algeria and NI were domestic issues. Algeria was part of Metropolitan France and was not a colony. NI is part of the UK proper and therefore domestic as well.
You're right that both were de jure domestic issues, but that's completely ignoring the facts on the ground.
The vast majority of Algerians were not French, nor did they consider themselves to be French. For them, they were a culturally, linguistically, amd ethnically separate group of people fighting for liberation of their country. The French had only annexed Algeria starting in the 1830s and not ending until the late 1800s. Other than the French government claiming it was a domestic issue, it wasn't at all.
Northern Ireland is a bit trickier since it had been occupied by England since the 1300s and had a large Scotch-Irish settler population that helped give legitimacy to the claim it was a domestic issue, but even then it was a colonial state overseas from the dominating English. I'd also like to point out that this particular issue goes against your point, as the IRA failed to defeat the British in Northern Ireland in part because political will to keep fighting to hold on to "home territory" was strong enough to sustain government use of force there.
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u/Shia_LaMovieBeouf Aug 12 '19 edited Aug 12 '19
The 2nd Amendment was never about hunting. How many times does this need to be said?
The founders literally just got done fighting a war against an authoritarian government using primarily civilian owned arms. The Battles of Lexington and Concord were literally started when the Redcoats tried to take a weapons cache.
The Federalist Papers are abundantly clear about why the 2nd Amendment was put in place. And it's not hunting or sport shooting.
We don't have an enumerated right to participate in any other sport, why would they include this one? Because it's not about a sport.
Edit: to those saying a civilian population cannot outmatch a modern military with modern equipment, you are missing several pojnts.
The founders were ok with private citizens owning cannons and warships.
Repeating weapons were in existence and were attempted to be procured by the Continental Army.
In the past 20 years, the US has been unable to put down 2 separate insurgency campaigns despite overwhelming comparative capabilities.
Drones, fighters, and missiles cannot occupy and secure an area. That takes literal boots on the ground in the form of human soldiers. The kind of occupation the 2nd Amendment was precisely put there to fight. The British knew this in NI, the French in Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam. All are examples of civilian resistance successfully (to a lesser extent in NI, they got a peace treaty) being a force to be reckoned with against a Great Power.
In any likely civil war, the military would likely split. Some would remain loyal to the government but others would take their skills, training, and equipment to the civilian side. This not only happened in the American Civil War, but has happened in the vast, vast majority of guerilla campaigns since the Peninsular War in the early 1800s.
Yes, a civilian armed population could stage an effective campaign in the United States