Booze Zombie said:
Therumancer said:
Hmm, who has one of the biggest militant armies in the world... Oh, right. FUCKING NORTH KOREA!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_People%27s_Army
Arming yourself with a twelve gauge and thinking like a frontiersman won't stop a god damn missile.
"Ma, them KOREANS fire a dang missile! Get my gun!"
You have an ARMY for fighting wars with. Give a gun to a civilian and you've got the human equal of a bee. He doesn't quite know what he's doing, but he'll fucking
keel you!
Actually the right to bear arms is intended for use on our goverment as much as anything. The idea being that if somehow the goverment overcame the other safeguards inherant in the system and tried to oppress the people, by the time the smoke cleared, assuming the revolt failed, the US would be so devestated that it wouldn't wind up controlling anything close to what it wanted. It discourages oppression and is one of the things that keeps our society a free society. It should be noted that a lot of other nations like France that seem okay from the outside are NOT even close to America when it comes to freedom, although that gets into another whole debate.
The 12 gauge would be effective if say a group like China with a huge population overcame our army and navy and decided to invade the US with the intent of taking it over for living space and the resources here (we for example have a lot of farmland among other things. Just as the Iraqis and other peoples resist us, we could do the same thing to them, and be a serious pain in the nards. Again a deterrant for a very specific kind of situation.
You ARE correct that small arms in the hands of the people are ineffective against a WMD threat from someone who is simply out to destroy the US as opposed to occupy it. That is why we have interception systems/missle defense similar to the base we were building in Poland (not to mention the missles on planes, submarines, etc... which could be used the same way).
This is however a threat because such defenses could ultimatly fail, and once they have one working missle they can build more. This is why I have been advocating wasting North Korea. If we act now they probably are at best going to have half a dozen missles and I rate our chances of taking them out before they hit the US as being pretty bloody good. However if we just turn the other cheek later on they could build hundreds, or thousands of them, and the next thing we're looking at is a situation like Russia where they could swamp any anti-missle defenses we have.
What's more there is the whole issue of the fact that we told them not to do something, and they pretty much did it. If we let that go unchecked it means that other nations are going to be encouraged to do the same thing. If nobody takes the US seriously as a military threat we're in trouble. If we level North Korea (by this I mean bomb it out of existance, we won't need WMD, but could still flatten the place), and don't bother to occupy/police/rebuild/reform it, nations are going to talk a lot of crud about it, but ultimatly are going to think twice about messing with the US, or thumbing their nose at us if we tell them something.
At any rate, my pro-gun rant was something totally seperate from the North Korean issue. Maybe I wrote something badly, but I don't think I ever said that I somehow expected civilians with small arms to be a factor in North Korea's nuclear ICBM ambitions.
>>>----Therumancer--->