[omgsean]

Good luck with that. There are basically two scenarios here to consider in a popular violent revolution:

1) The army sides with the people. In this case, the right to keep and bear arms is basically irrelevant as you have the backing of the world's most powerful army.

2) The army sides with the government. In this case, even the militia types with huge munitions caches don't stand a chance against the world's most powerful army. This is not 1776, it wouldn't be musket vs. musket.

[nthj]

3) The civilian force holds out long enough that a significant portion of the army becomes sympathetic towards the civilians and gradually switches sides.

Our armed forces are made of individuals. It would not be a boolean operation by any means.

[moocowduckquack]

4) n sided civil war unconstrained by old notions of geographically aligned forces.

[jivatmanx]

False dichotomy, it's not likely that every single regiment of every single branch of the armed forces and police are all going to choose a single side.

[ihsw]

Don't be so sure about that, the Federal government (or more specifically, the DHS) has been currying favor with local and state LEO orgs through funding and equipment distribution programs.

The relatively recent militarization of various police forces is evidence of that, and, much like the USG exerted pressure over west European allied countries to ground Bolivia's presidential plane, they will exert similar control over state and local police forces through "greater cooperation" policies.

[hga]

One thing that's quite unusual about our system is that policing power is smeared across the local, state and Federal levels, with the vast majority of it at the first. This imposes massive constraints on a would be Federal level tyranny.

[JohnnyBrown]

That's certainly one way to look at it. On the other hand, the same powerful army has struggled on several occasions recently to put down insurgencies from determined, armed local populations in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, and several other places. Of course, in a Civil War II situation, there might not be the same constraint to wrap up the operation before popular support dwindles.

Occupying a hostile United States could possibly be the quagmire to end all quagmires.

[hga]

Then again, in all those cases you cite they had a secure rear area, one reason I cite the "Amateurs discuss tactics, professionals discuss logistics" maxim. That's a much, much sticker proposition; as you posit, "the quagmire to end all quagmires", we're an ornery people.

[hga]

"Amateurs discuss tactics, professionals discuss logistics."

[pacmon]

If it helps - I happen to know two ex-Marines who believe most of the armed forces would never take up arms against American civilians.

[notahacker]

The other issue is the "rights to bear arms" has never been a factor in any civil rights dispute in the US, whether it was systematically oppressing black people for generations or one-off riots or strike-breaking in which cops fired on crowds without causing wider conflicts as a consequence.

(arguably the one area in which citizen-owned firearms have actively affected the history of US civil liberty is in carrying out the occasional assassination of people adjudged to have been bit too keen on civil liberties)

[falk]

Yep. There's a great article by the Atlantic called The Secret History of Guns. [1] I'll go over a couple of interesting points.

- Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a concealed carry permit after his house was bombed in 1956. After that he had armed supporters stand guard outside his house. King's house was described as "an arsenal."

- The co-founder of the Black Panthers found a law on the books allowing them to open carry in California. Blacks were getting no protection by the police so this was pretty pivotal. The Panthers started arming themselves and had a picnic outside the State's Capital building. After this happened the racist California legislature pushed through a law banning open carry. It was signed into law by Ronald Reagan. Funny enough, he was the first president endorsed by the NRA.

- "After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities."

- "In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control"

[1] http://theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-h...

[hga]

Lots of liberals were famously armed when they went into the South, like Eleanor Roosevelt, many blacks kept themselves alive or less repressed with personal firearms, like Condoleezza Rice's father and his friends, and then there's the Deacons for Defense and Justice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacons_for_Defense_and_Justice . jivatmanx in the other reply right now covers a bit of what happened prior to and during the Civil War; I hail from the southern edge of what you might call Bleeding Missouri and have studied it a bit, guns were most certainly a very important factor.

As for strike-breaking and all that, while it's not an area I've studied, it's well established that both sides were armed and used their guns.

[jivatmanx]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_%28abolitionist%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Kansas

[JohnnyBrown]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Malcolmxm1carbine3gr.gif