[axguscbklp]

Officials being democratically elected does not necessarily mean anything - in theory, a majority of the population could vote to literally enslave a minority of the population. I think that it is fair for a minority of the population to have some threshold beyond which they are willing to use force if necessary even if by doing so they are going against the wishes of the majority.

[TameAntelope]

51% of a population having a say over their own lives is better than any other system I know of, because every other system I know of ends up with substantially less than 51% of the population having a say over their own lives. It's far from perfect, but I do think we should realize the comparison is to other forms of government, not some abstract ideal.

And I'm not suggesting that there's never a reason to act violently towards a government, I'm suggesting the people who talk about guns in response to legislation don't understand what it is they're saying.

To use firearms against your government means killing patriots, definitionally. People need to realize this, because they generally don't.

[axguscbklp]

Yes, it likely means killing people who think of themselves as patriots. However, many people who work for oppressive governments genuinely think of themselves as patriots. I do not see why it matters whether using firearms against a government means killing patriots or not. Many of the people who worked for Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union to oppress their fellow citizens were patriots by the standard meaning of the word.