If you want to bring up other acts of abuse by governments on populations they'd previously disarmed, fire away.  They run all the way into the Jim Crow era.  It wont help you though, proves the point that governments are often dangerous, law ignoring entities that can and will stomp all over you.

We have no 'right to bear arms', whether rightly interpreted OR wrongly....

Psychoak...yes, I know there will be governments/entities that 'can and will stomp all over you', but the arming of society in 'defense' of such is a little bit 'Alices Restaurant.'...

there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into
the shrink wherever you are ,just walk in say "Shrink, You can get
anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.". And walk out. You know, if
one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and
they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony,
they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them.
And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in
singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an
organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said
fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and
walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement.

And that's what it is , the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement,

In other words ... an individual is powerless ....it still needs actual insurrection/revolution to execute change..... and an individual's gun ownership only facilitates 'accident' not Democracy.

Yes, I know...I'm a child of the 60's so have lived through the disillusionment of the Hippy Era.... burnt draft cards sat-in on Court action against Conscientious Objectors [would you belive that was part of our Sociology course]...known friends no longer with us - killed by indiscriminate use of Agent Orange [it got more than just its intended target]...and survived the posturing of BOTH 'sides' of the Cold War...

Yemen has a very well armed citizenry, too bad that hasn't made their government any less rotten and they have the added worry of needing to protect themselves from their fellow citizens with guns.

To say the least I'm skeptical that an armed citizenry would really help much in many cases. Many Native Americans in the U.S. had guns, if perhaps older ones, but that is not why they lost. They were simply not organized in a way that gave them any hope of dealing with an organized nation state.  One of the only armed Rebellions besides the Civil War I can think of in U.S. history is the Whiskey Rebellion, which didn't go very well for the armed citizenry either, despite the central government being much weaker than it is today (yes the government used state militia to scatter the rebels, but that was the closest thing to an army we had at the time). I imagine the result would be even more one sided today with technology being even more important. Mature political institutions, not guns, seem to be the important thing in keeping government honest (enough) to me.

How about we strip out the rhetoric of 'fighting the government', 'aboriginal decimation', and so forth?

While there *is* some justification in some of the interpretations of the 2nd amendment viewpoint of standing against an oppressive government, when you focus on the underlying reason for that right, it ultimately comes down to the idea that an individual has the right to defend themselves (and those around them) from those who would do them harm. And that right includes allowing them to use any method or weapon that is sufficient unto the cause.

As something of an extreme example, assume that you're in the position where you're faced with the choice of having your wife or daughter raped and murdered or picking up a gun and shooting the person who threatens to do so. Are you *really* going to stand by and allow the rape and murder to happen?

Ultimately, it's the right of self defense. Anyone who initiates violence against another is *always* in the wrong (pay attention to the word 'initiates' and what it means), and anyone who is targeted by that initiation of violence is entirely justified in using any and all means available to defend against that violence.

That said, it was clearly on the minds of the founding fathers that there was a very real possibility of overreach and oppression by the government. In exactly the same way they rebelled against king George, they laid the basis of the same kind of resistance to any other overarching ruling class.

The second amendment is not about any particular style of weapon. It's not about fighting for the state (though it presupposes the ability to do so, if needed). It is, entirely, about the right of the individual to have the means to defend themselves (and those close to them) from anyone attempting to do them harm, even if the entity attempting harm happens to be the government.

This isn't about the government axiomatically being the enemy, it's about having options if the government goes bad.

Ah, almost the second most guaranteed response to the concept of 'disarmament'.  I'd obviously already ruled the first-best one...[about banning cars too cos they can kill] but slap me down for being complacent and forgetting the 'imminent daughter-rape' one.

Yes....the solution is...even sans gun...you simply pick up that other oftly-proclaimed lethal weapon....your car....and you run him over.

See....argued both sides with the one comment....

No.  The reality is you do anything and everything 'possible' to either prevent it happening....or at worst you later hunt him down and kill him...his children and his parents and anyone  else who gets in the way.  Not having a 'gun' is just a mere hiccup in the procedure...

BTW....'when seconds count' the RESPONSIBLE gun owner locates his keys...unlocks the gunsafe .... loads the weapon and is still a wee too fay seconds-wise.  The irresponsible gunowner can't find it because it WAS in the bedside drawer however junior has taken it to school for 'show and tell'...

Over the past few years some particularly 'major' Hollywood movies have been made/filmed in Australia.  Stuff like The Matrix, etc.  Now these action movies required guns...and the quaint thing re firing blanks for realism is the guns need to be functional..  They aren't dummies.  That's why the credits list an armourer.

Now, fancy fair-dinkum assault rifles are a prohibited import in Australia.  [I'm sure our SAS can get them any time they need].  To solve the issue there's now an actual factory in Melbourne making them locally - for the film industry.

They require a specific and controlled licence.  Australia has issued 22 licences.  Total.

In the US there are something around 10,000 of them in private hands...ostensibly to keep the kids safe.  Just one of them killed 13 children.

'strictly regulated'?

Assault rifles are typically select-fire and most people don't have them, and you have to go through a lengthy government process and a hefty amount of fees involved.

Your typical AR15 is not an assault rifle.

Of course....I'm only playing 'Devil's Advocate' here in the face of a predominance of American [pro gun] opinion.

As long as all my friends in America can survive with whatever control is, or isn't in place then that's all that really matters [to me] .... and I survive any future visits to the US without unwanted perforation.

Let's face it.  Religion and/or Evolution are easier subjects to 'debate' than the ethics of gun control ...

The responsible gun owner spends mere seconds to chamber or take it off safety before blowing the asshole away without warning.  Locking your guns up isn't being responsible, it's being irrational.

Sorry for being a cold bastard(I'm not actually sorry), but if your kids shoot themselves with your loaded gun, it's because you failed to teach them.  Accidents happen in uninformed households where the gun is hidden.  It's the same problem with alcoholism in the US.  In Europe, it's food and kids drink watered down wine.  In the US, we make it illegal until you turn 21 and half the bleeding country decides to go binge drinking as a result.  Kids don't accidentally shoot themselves with the loaded gun sitting in plain sight.  They kill themselves with the pistol hidden away in a shoebox they had to climb shelves to reach.

If I have people over, I show them my gun loaded with nice hollow points if they have an interest.  I wouldn't have anyone over that I don't trust to see it.  It's right next to the bed.  If someone comes over uninvited, I'll also be showing them my gun loaded with hollow points.  Briefly.

The Whiskey Rebellion went quite well for the people.  Few people joined it, the "army" dispersed without going to battle, people charged over it got presidential pardons, and the law was repealed by Jefferson a decade later.

The Civil War is a much better example though.  The majority imposed it's will on the minority, and the minority made them bleed for their convictions.  It rather limits what people are willing to do when they'll have to kill large quantities of people to accomplish their wishes.  After all, you can't make someone do what's best for them if you have to kill them instead.

Presidents don't repeal laws by themselves.  There was enough irritation over the law, made extremely public by open, if short lived, rebellion, that heads rolled, politically.  The tax itself adversely affected a small minority of the population, would the majority have cared enough to get it repealed otherwise?

The minority was the south.  Slaves weren't really people to them, so there weren't anywhere near as many southerners as there were northerners.

Without the civil war, how long would slavery have dragged on?

If the south had seceded, the US wouldn't have become a global power.  WWII would have gone very differently, with a wonderful chap by the name of Stalin holding sway over most of Europe, maybe all of it.  The UK would have fallen to Germany most likely, if a short lived defeat.  It would have been a rather dark last several decades I expect.  It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that most of the western world would be totalitarian dictatorships instead of democratic nations.

If they hadn't seceded and kept dragging along within the union as is, they'd have been slowly crushed.  How long though before it came to a close, another generation, maybe more?  They could never have gotten that amendment through the full congress at the time.  How long before additional states were added to the union to tip the scales?

Ignoring the morality, it was still a terrible thing to let continue.  Slavery was more stupid than evil.  That's not to say slavery was wonderful, just that it was an amazingly stupid way of doing things.  Economic productivity exploded in the agricultural sector, after slavery ended.  People stopped doing things with sheer manpower and started thinking about doing it smarter.  The south might have destroyed itself by the time slavery ended peacefully.  They'd already depleted the soil so severely that the only thing you could make a living growing on much of it was peanuts.

Some times people have to kill each other to get shit done.  The French needed their revolution to get out from under the aristocracy that had abused them for generations.  The rest of Europe needed to see the French murdering entire families in the wave of insanity that followed.  It finished the feudal system, and nothing short of slaughter was going to accomplish it before the civilizations collapsed.  People aren't rational.  It can take a great deal to break through the barrier of sheer stupidity that we convince ourselves of.

This thread is a glowing example of that.  The second amendment is plainly written with the reason spelled out, and we've still got most of the country believing the lie they tell themselves.  The founders meant for the people to be able to match and kick the crap out of the government that served them, yet we're reduced to arguing over how much you really need to defend yourself in a robbery.

Thick as a brick.