[planetsprite]

>Hard to weld doors shut on peoples homes if they have shotguns.

This point is always brought up but is never argued to its natural conclusion.

On the surface it seems you are implying that citizens should have powerful guns so they can threaten and potentially kill police officers trying to do something despotic. However if someone did that, the police would just crack down 10x as hard on that individual with more powerful, government purchased guns and arrest them for life. No matter what guns people are allowed to have, it's not a deterrent against despotism on an individual level.

The argument that the point of the 2nd amendment is for the citizenry to defend against government power is ridiculous. Why would a blueprint for a government install protections to make sure it can be violently overthrown, when the rest of the constitution is entirely focused on ensuring the consent of the people is funneled up to government power in a non-violent matter? To argue that that's the point of the 2nd amendment implies the founders didn't believe that the Constitution would be effective in forming a representative democracy.

[jlawson]

>Why would a blueprint for a government install protections to make sure it can be violently overthrown, when the rest of the constitution is entirely focused on ensuring the consent of the people is funneled up to government power in a non-violent matter?

You're confused that the constitution has more than one kind of safeguard against tyranny?

"The idea that airbags are to prevent injuries is ridiculous. Why would a car have protections stop someone hitting the steering wheel, when there are also seatbelts entirely focused on ensuring that the driver doesn't hit the steering wheel?"

Also note that the guarantee of anti-tyranny violence makes it much less likely that someone's gonna try to do a tyranny in the first place. Compared to a disarmed and helpless population just waiting to be tyrannized.

A mugger is bound by law not to mug you. But he might do it anyway, regardless of what the paper says. However, if he knows you're armed, he's less likely to try. And if he does try, he's less likely to succeed.

[planetsprite]

The "defense against tyranny" argument for the 2nd amendment was borne out of individual regulated state militias defending against a federal army, not each individual being free to exercise their will as they see fit.

[kneebonian]

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

[KptMarchewa]

You can easily see this in US where police acts extremely tyrannically in everyday situation under premise that anyone can have a gun.

[scohesc]

Because given the chance, one person at the right place at the right time can make all the difference in the world. See _any_ political assassination attempt/success in recent history.

It's not to defend against the local police force that smashes your door down - it's not to defend against the military that wants to predator drone your hidden compound of Q-cultists in rural Montana because they've been popping shots at National Guard convoys.

It's to give anybody a chance (albeit an infinitesimally small one, with gigantic risks their own life) to immediately and permanently remove a government representative from office.

I personally don't agree with the premise or concept, but that's probably the most likely intention.

[shuntress]

This is completely delusional.

Enabling assassinations is not in any way a part of the intent of the second amendment.