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Caporegime
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Please use sarcasm tags for those of us watching at home.
Shooting at live Twitch Madden tournament - four reported to be dead
- Thread starter djcj
- Start date
Because it's part of the checks and balances that control the power in their Republic. It's the right of citizens to bear arms and form a militia. We don't know what the circumstances of the future will be, but it's better that civilians have the ability to resist tyranny than not, even if the US Airforce could carpet bomb their entire town with B-52 Stratofortresses.
If it's framed right, yes. Domestic terrorists threatening 'Murica etc.
You think civil war in the US is a realistic possibility?
I don't know what America will look like in 50 or 100 years, changes made won't be undone though.
see Roar87's post
I would also like to point out that if the USA started carpet bombing their own people other countries could probably go to war with them as well
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Soldato
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no having tanks, jet fighters, guided missiles, apc's and a professionally trained army gives the government a massive tactical advantage.
You are presuming the entire army would side with the government.
It's better to have something to defend yourself than nothing. This is not a good argument at all XD
If a government is willing to slaughter thousands or millions of civilians then all those things give them an advantage, more likely is that armed civilians protesting and refusing to adhere to tyrannical laws stops a government before it escalates to armed conflict.
depends how you look at it. armed citizens striking here and there and blending back in make fighting back very hard, unless you go hardcore and obliterate whole towns etc, at which point you lose probably at least 50% of the people who were sympathetic to you in the first place. look at all the urban combat issues they've had in the world wars and Iraq etc.
So they can't be forcibly imprisoned and the like
You're forgetting that 99% of those armed citizens are not even remotely trained for combat in any form whatsoever. It takes years of preparation before a soldier is ready and able to go out and kill people effectively. Untrained civilians are completely worthless against a professional army with overwhelming firepower. History bears this out.
In 1524, 300,000 German peasants took up arms and revolted against the ruling classes. They were opposed by the Swabian League, whose army consisted of just 8,000 men.
The war raged for just over a year, and the Swabian League was victorious. The peasants lost >100,000 men. Losses for the Swabian League were negligible.
Examples could be multiplied.
Assad has been doing exactly that for the past 7 years. Not only is he winning, but he still enjoys majority support.
Very different situations. In the case of the World Wars, urban combat was conducted by trained soldiers against trained soldiers. In Iraq, etc. it's a case of trained soldiers against trained soldiers, militias, and terrorists.
Soldato
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Not true, the military are hindered by rules of engagement, which means having those tanks, fighters, guided missiles and APC's is relatively worthless when a militia resorts guerilla warfare tactics and small well chosen skirmishes
Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam are all perfect examples where an inferior force can not only match but even defeat (in the case of Vietnam and to a lesser extent Somalia) a technologically superior force
No.
Firstly, a random bunch of untrained citizens is not capable of successful guerrilla warfare. Secondly, modern drones have proved extremely effective against even the most disciplined guerrilla force.
No.
The wars you've listed here all involved trained combatants, not merely armed civilians.
Vietnam merely proves that a technologically superior force can lose a war through the use of poor tactics, a failure to fully commit to the war effort, and the loss of public support.
America didn't abandon South Vietnam because the North Vietnamese were winning; America abandoned South Vietnam because the war was hopelessly mismanaged, had become deeply unpopular, and could no longer be sustained. This is not evidence of an inferior force matching or defeating a technologically superior force.
The USA easily won the war against Afghanistan. Since then, American troops have been providing military support to the Afghan government within the context of a nationwide civil war. This is not evidence of an inferior force matching or defeating a technologically superior force.
The USA easily won the war against Saddam Hussein, and Obama officially ended that war in 2011. The ensuing civil war has been waged by combatants with comparable technology (as is also the case in the Somali Civil War). This is not evidence of an inferior force matching or defeating a technologically superior force.
It is occasionally possible for an inferior force to match and defeat a technologically superior force, but this is typically achieved via sheer attrition (as in the case of the Iran/Iraq war, when Iran used human wave attacks to overwhelm Iraqi positions). However, in most cases it is simply impossible.
Just ask every nation successfully invaded and colonised by the British Empire.
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So the army never deploys 19 and 20 year old who have had multiple years of training to the front line.....
As an untrained citizen fighting a military force, would you rather have no gun at all or a gun? You can try and defend yourself or die. The gun massively improves your chances, so you just made a point for having guns
300,000 vs 8,000 with old 1500's weapons is totally different. They would have been fighting with sticks XD. And again when you have 300,000 people with stick vs 8000 with bigger sticks or 300,000 with no sticks vs 8000 people with bigger sticks, the 300,000 with the sticks still have a better chance than without.
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Sparky__H
Sparky__H
Not to mention that it's a massive assumption that if civil war broke out in America the ROE would be followed.
Power bases tend to take their gloves off when they are threatened.
Soldato
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America abandoned Vietnam because they knew it was a war they wouldn't win, the Northern Vietnamese will was far far stronger than the South and its US allies
Is that why they're still there, encountering Taliban - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/world/asia/afghanistan-taliban-ghazni.html and 16 years on are putting more troops back there - http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/03/12/16-years-on-us-military-presence-in-afghanistan-growing.html
They were there for 8 years, they pulled out having not gotten full control of the country and as soon as they pulled out ISIS took over large parts
World War 2 lasted less time than these supposedly "won" wars
It's clear your sense of victory is incredibly warped if you think any of those wars were actually won
i wasn't talking about an uprising. and nobody needs "years of training" to pick up a guna nd kill people, i think that's been adequately demonstrated multiple times this year alone. odd that you quote something that took professionally trained soldiers over a year to win :-/
I imagine if the all the shooters in the past year had even a a few months intensive range shooting and semi-realistic urban training, the death count would be a magnitude higher.
Though again most of them are spur of the moment, and there's little thought going into it anyway, unlike the Las Vegas guy who knew exactly what he was doing.