In the two hundred years before the American Civil War there were more than 250 slave revolts involving more than 50 slaves. Most involved between 50-150, but some we much larger.
So, Sean Paul, what does this have to do with the Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms?
Everything to do with slavery, and nothing to do with holding our government accountable. Seriously, do you honestly think a couple thousand Texans with AR-15s could out fight an armored brigade? GTFOH.
The Second Amendment was specifically designed so that white slave holders had enough firepower–not pitchforks–to put down any serious slave rebellion. Look what they did to Gabriel Prosser in 1800? Bet you never heard of him, have ya?
Here is another fun fact: I have one BA, one MS, and an MA for good measure, and no teacher or professor in any of my classes ever discussed slave revolts in the United States. Yes, François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture was lionized. But he was Haitian revolting against the French. I have 20 years of primary, secondary and tertiary education and no one, not even once, ever mentioned a slave revolt in the United States. They talked about how well slaves were treated–which is balderdash–but never mentioned slave revolts. Maybe that’s because I was mostly educated in Texas, a kind of sort of part of the South, but really just home to a bunch of loudmouth assholes and dipshits who think they are better than everyone else in the United States because Texas was its own country for nine years. What’s that joke about bullshit and Texans? Texas begged to be let into the Union every chance it got.
Last but not least, the stench of slavery lingers on in the institution of the Senate in general, which is first and foremost the most undemocratic insitution in the United States, and in particular the filibuster, which to this day is used the vast majority of the time by Southern Senators to derail any real progress in the United States.
So, now you know.
StewartM
SPK,
In part, that’s not just bias per se (though it played a part), it’s because researching antebellum slave revolts is a very hard thing. Southern newspapers rarely published anything about them (not an accident). I once had a post from us.civil.war usenet group discussing them that I now can’t find.
But you’re very correct about one thing–the militia was supposed to be an instrument of control directed by ‘legitimate authorities’. It wasn’t something to enable ordinary people to overthrow the authorities. The first use of it, in fact was none other by Washington himself to put down those angry commoners (The Whiskey Rebellion).
mago
Bang bang/he shot me down/bang bang I hit the ground/bang bang my master shot me down
Oakchair
There is an easy way to see if someone is being honest when they say we need guns to protect ourselves from a tyrannical government.
Do they oppose military funding?
Do they oppose the Patriot act?
Do they oppose “blue lives matter”?
Do they oppose the CIA?
If the answer is no they are lying
PonNeolib
Do I think several million RW fascist lunatics with bloodlust and revenge on their minds can take on an armored brigade? Yes, because it’s been done before with less. Clown take.
bruce wilder
Successor ideology?
Feral Finster
I heard plenty about slave revolts when I was a kitten.
And the Afghans seem to have resisted armored brigades and more rather successfully. Admittedly, the average frustrated Pashtun is far tougher, more determined, and more resourceful than his average frustrated lardass American counterpart.
Willy
But wolverines with drones can ground wraiths on wings, my precious, if we just strap AR15s on them.
That’s why I like this. We can follow the logic of the post to the obvious conclusion. What the gun nuts really want (them not to be confused with hunters, collectors or other sane hobbyists who understand the value of a civil society), is to have power over the authorities they have to deal with in their own little lives, as well as anybody else outside their personal tribal militia. Assuming they aren’t compensating for having units smaller than Gollums I suppose.
They know that a hundred good guys with guns will cower when confronted with a single crazed teenaged bad guy. But if they can keep the minds of the good and decent folks around them enslaved (or intimidated), while trying to compete in a world where they unconsciously know they’ve been consistently losing power over their own lives… well that’s another issue.
StewartM
Feral Finster
And the Afghans seem to have resisted armored brigades and more rather successfully.
Mostly because the US was stupidly trying to control a country the size of Texas with an occupation force of at maximum 17,000 (with NATO allies). By contrast, we had 250,000 in Germany post WWII (add to that British, French, and Soviet troops) and 1 million in Japan.
The neocons who wanted to do the ‘nation-building’ thing had also supported going to the Cap Weinberger low-manpower high-tech military in the 1980s, a military which was very unsuited to nation-building, because for that you need LOTS of boots on the ground carrying rifles.
Willy
Do I think several million RW fascist lunatics with bloodlust and revenge on their minds can take on an armored brigade? Yes, because it’s been done before with less. Clown take.
Any historic facts to back that up?
The Viet Cong and Mujahadeen were willing to sacrifice their lives against gunships because they had nothing else to lose. Not to mention, they also had powerful external allies and terrain they could take advantage of.
The doughy “patriots” I’m seeing have so much to lose that it’s hard to imagine it being little more than cosplay. They’d perform even worse than at Uvalde.
Soredemos
The problem with this type of narrative is that we know, often in great detail, why various amendments exist. We have lots of documentation of the debates involved. The second ammendment existed primarily out of skepticism of having a standing army. The idea was to outsource national defense to ad hoc militia raised on an as needed basis. This obviously didn’t last long in practice, but the amendment stuck around all the same.
Now implicit in this debate is ‘well what did they think the nation needed to defend against?’, and part of that answer might unspokenly be slave revolts. But that makes it one factor among many, not the primary driver.
Another bunk narrative is that modern policing emerged out of slave patrols. No, it emerged out of the needs of modern rapid urban development. Claiming it’s about slavery is a very American centric view that is unable to explain the contemporary development of police forces in places without slavery (or at least far less of it).
Nate Wilcox
As a Texan I have to admit you nailed it with this, SPK:
“Texas, a kind of sort of part of the South, but really just home to a bunch of loudmouth assholes and dipshits who think they are better than everyone else in the United States because Texas was its own country for nine years. Talk about bullshit.”
and re: “Everything to do with slavery, and nothing to do with holding our government accountable. Seriously, do you honestly think a couple thousand Texans with AR-15s could out fight an armored brigade? GTFOH.”
It won’t be lardass militias that matter if there is some sort of civil implosion in the US.
These things always come down to intra-elite splits and/or intra-military splits.
There seems to be a split between the Trump-supporting majority of American police forces, most enlisted military personnel, some military officers & at least some FBI vs the Trump-hating “Deep State” CIA, NSA, Pentagon elite etc.
TX Gov Greg Abbott turning the Texas National Guard against the US Border Patrol was a very ominous signs.
Fl Gov Ron DeSantis’ creation of the Florida Guard outside federal control and his proposal to send them to the Texas border was another clown show that is also actually quite scary.
https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article285215567.html
GrimJim
The USA police state evolved completely separate from the constabulary/gendarmy of Europe and elsewhere.
As with modern USA management systems, which developed post ACW from slave-owners research into maximizing labor with minimal inputs, the USA police state evolved out of the slave patrol system, which was the ancestor of the whole chain gang police/prison system, which was the direct parent of the modern USA Slave Prison system.
The USA is indeed “special” in some regards, and our police state — where police violence against “suspects” is not merely allowed, but encouraged — is a direct result of the fact that the professional ancestors of USA police hunted slave who were not even considered human. This infected every aspect of policing that developed in the USA, from western marshalls and sheriffs to beat cops and prison guards.
The constabulary elsewhere developed to protect and serve the many; the USA police state developed to protect and serve the few, the wealthy, and originally, the white males.
As to 2A, it grew out of Washington’s gross dissatisfaction with the colonial militias, which were mostly, contrary to “history,” bumbling, useless fools who caused more harm than good. That’s one reason the Revolution took so long, is that it took years for Washington to build a professional army! And so he and his followers personally pushed for a “well-regulated militia,” referring with intent (but sadly, not with words) to the STATE RUN MILITIAS.
Which were also, very specifically, to deal with slave revolts, but also with the “Indian Problem,” as more than half of the new nation was still occupied by people who would very much resist being removed from their lands don’t could be sold to white colonists.
And then the NEA successfully pulled off the most villainous deconstruction of and amendment the world ever saw, by getting the portion referring to “well-regulated” snipped away as mere preamble. There was a quote back when that happened by a Justice who said something along the lines of how it was the greatest lie ever perpetrated on the American people, but my Google-Fu fails me…
StewartM
Willy
The Viet Cong and Mujahadeen were willing to sacrifice their lives against gunships because they had nothing else to lose. Not to mention, they also had powerful external allies and terrain they could take advantage of.
The way a resistance like that wins is:
a) terrain is on their side. Not just having rugged terrain helps, but lots of terrain even if it’s not that rugged.
b) related to this, their opponents haven’t committed and/or aren’t willing to commit enough forces to crush it
c) they have external support from foreign powers which cannot be cut off.
d) they either have the support or the acquiescence of the civilian population (support is great, but lacking that, if the civilians are more terrified of them than they are of their opponent, that works too).
e) and, as you said, they’re quite willing to “burn lives”. Rich countries’ armies burn munitions and equipment; poor ones burn bodies.
Examples not only include Afghanistan and Vietnam, but also the American Revolution.
However, the Soviet partisan experience is a wake-up call for this kind of resistance’s limitations. By guerrilla standards, the Soviet partisans were lavishly equipped–they even operated airfields! They usually had as their nuclei soldiers and officers with military training who had escaped the great encirclements of 1941 and 1942, so they weren’t just ‘guys with guns’. They could be effective in harassing German supply lines and in raids on German rear area stations. As a way of forcing Germans to divert manpower to police their rear, they were effective.
However, against even 2nd- or 3rd-rate German army troops, they couldn’t win in a stand-up fight. Despite all their advantages, no partisan force ever survived a determined attack by regular Wehrmacht troops. Left to themselves, they would have lost.
Carborundum
There’s also an interesting piece of analysis to be done looking at the extent to which industry has shaped legal and political perspectives around the Second Amendment to generate a more enabling business environment. I remember back when Beretta realized that the Army pistol contract for the 92F was less remunerative than selling a similar version on the civilian market. Similarly, the explosion of commercial activity around the AR-15 “platform” within my lifetime has been astonishing to watch.
somecomputerguy
The idea that unconventional forces need outside support was invented by conventional commanders so that they could pretend that there would be a straight-up conventional military solution; If insurgents need conventional lines of supply, those can be attacked by conventional means; artillery or airpower.
Every conventional commander tries this; cutting off the outside support. Besides almost never working, it is a giant waste of resources.
Sendero Luminoso actively rejected outside help as unpure. Who supplied the Algerians from outside?
Soviet partizans are a special case; they weren’t insurgents; they weren’t fighting for political power. Stalin wanted to keep them under control, and the Red Army had a higher priority for resources.
Not enough troops is another conventional dodge; if you don’t know what you are doing; keep asking for resources. Eventually, you won’t get them. There’s your excuse.
At one point we had 500k troops in Vietnam.
The U.S. Army used to brag that they never lost a single battle in Vietnam. Vietnam still isn’t the 51st state. The Peruvian Army declined from 80k to 75k in 1992, when Abimael Guzman was captured and imprisoned. Significantly, it was the National Police who did that.
How can number of troops matter, when those troops have no idea who the enemy is?
The only thing matters for genuine insurgents is popular support in some workable mix of numbers and commitment. As long as insurgents have that, you will never get rid of them. Of course, you can always dispense with the the population. But this is not as easy as it sounds as a sheer practical matter. On a lessor scale, it turns out that every tactic intended to make people afraid, unpredictably, makes them angry instead.