Look at how I mess people's feeds up. Land sakes.
"Ok, cool. Thank you for the Magpul background, I had none of the Colorado information.
So, I'll try to keep my response thoughts orderly but I will be long winded and I apologize...
Weaponry: I gotta go back to flashbangs. Or for hyperbole myself - I am not taking a ride in Air Force One any time soon, but in a literal sense you and I both own it. Sure, I could drop insane money and buy my own fancy plane, crew, and bodyguards, but not unrestricted secure communication, prioritized air space clearance, military fighter pilot escort, unrestricted landing clearance... the president is The President, but he's a citizen too. I'm not put off by any of that. His function and role is different than mine.
So to scale it back down to police - I am not doing what they are doing. I am not kicking in crack-house doors, or serving warrants to child prostitution ringleaders, or detaining a bank robber in LA wearing body armor. I don't have that beef. The only time I would legitimately need the muscle (because let's face it, MS13 don't give a crap about me and if enough of them did that I would need a full AR15 mag to balance the issue I would already have bigger problems than a rifle would be solving) is if my beef were with the police/feds. Besides "I enjoy having them" which is a fine consideration in a free society, I don't honestly see another driving reason for mass sale beyond the argument that is often brought up about keeping fascism back.
History: we have 200 years of that type of fascism pretty much not being how things are done here. I mean we brutalized the African and Island population we brought over, we cheated and murdered the Native Americans, Mexico? I mean hello. We wage financial and cultural fascism all over the place, but actual dictatorship? The Civil War was initiated by the states - not really citizen soldiers, but actual government against itself - essentially Sequestration with cannon fire by the people who liked living off free labor. I have said before but will again that if that type of dictatorship/fascism which proponents claim amassing guns would solve were to start, no number of private citizens would do anything here but get themselves killed in tank/jet/howitzer/drone blasts. Our culture is not the fragile banana republic type of culture in which the results of armed conflict would ever be in doubt. If there were division in the military, well, they'd already all have guns and I promise there would be an unequal access to firepower there too.
Now, I am passingly familiar with what a d-bag Castro, Raul, Ernesto and their buddies were/are. My real historical base is the internet trope of the Nazis, because I've studied it and have family members who lost staggering numbers of ancestors in camps.
I would never say it can't happen here.
In fact, it's very easy to happen (or something functionally identical as far as political control goes) here if there were any kind of gain by doing it, but it would be with the frog slowly brought to boil by changes in legal process, like extraordinary rendition, harsh legal penalties for whistle-blowers and cognitive dissidents, obfuscation and marginalization of political protest free speech, removal of habeas corpus, military strikes on US citizens, censorship and anonymous monitoring of communication...
Note that ALL of this has already happened and continues to at this moment. For me, lefty idealistic rationalist that I am, it's about corporate control. The occupy movement illustrated what many born of a certain color already knew from experience - that the police are not here to protect us in terms of life or liberty (court cases have ruled that explicitly, actually) - they are here to protect the societal norms and to protect industry and property.
So yes, Virginia, we're a nation that's owned, but the fascism comes in terms of capitalistic trade-off. Eli Lilly keeps my diabetic butt alive at the retail cost of $300 a month just in insulin, and that's criminal, but mostly because of how our political system is paid for by people working for Eli Lilly.
From my position the NRA is very similar, in that it's their paycheck to sell guns and to make gun sales more common. The only difference for me between the two is that Pharma pays dollars to keep their costs high because they're not able to increase market by convincing people to become diabetic (ambien/adderall different story), which causes people to die from financial hardship and lack of medication or care. The gun lobby pays dollars to keep their volume of transactions high and as unfettered as possible because hey - government might take you in the night, buy more guns.
I might think that the astoundingly high gun death rate the US enjoys compared to other industrialized nations is reason enough to do something (new law or just changes in existing practice) to curb that pattern. You should check out that slate.com crowd-sourced running tabulation of gun deaths in the US since sandyhook. The numbers are fantastic and the data is hard to compile by design.
To bottom line my position - if the reason for arguing equality in all gun type access is sport and a general argument for Constitution, I would not dismiss that out of hand, but I would strongly weigh the totality of gun violence which no other sport enjoys against specific subsections of the hobby if any strides could be made in curbing the death toll.
If the reason is tactical from a law and order position, I think the position is worse, perhaps more damaging than redundant.. I strongly believe that just as knowledge of language structurally changes our brains and modifies the way we literally think, there is a demonstrable effect of culture on a society's expression and even our understanding of possibilities. If we earnestly look at gun ownerships and accept increasing militarization as our option for political voice, then guns will ultimately become the only option we can imagine... and I think that if that were to happen, we'd have nothing left to fight for but real estate and empty slogan, because our sense of political, and cultural identity would already be forfeit. "
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