[DanaC]

I guess.

I think, where I am coming from is that I generally trust my country's soldiers and police with guns marginally more than I trust my next door neighbour or my cousin's crazy ass husband with guns.

As cynical as I am about state and the sinews of power - I don't think I have anywhere near as much distrust and fear of them as you guys seem to. I cannot imagine stockpiling weapons for the day when they send in the troops. There are odd times, during periods of great upheaval and social unrest (like during the Vietnam War in America, and the poll tax demonstrations in the UK) where battle lines seem tobe drawn - and that's when you get incidents like Berkeley campus, or the army on standby, with rubber bullets at Downing Street.

But, whilst there are governments who can rely on their armies to quell the population through brute force, fire into crowds of of their own civilians, and uphold the rule of a dictator there are many governments whose armies would balk and desert in great numbers at the idea of such an attack. I think the US is in the latter camp.

To stay fully armed against the highly unlikely and wholly hypothetical possibility of the government going to war against its own people seems kind of bizarre to me. The logic of owning a gun in case I am threatened with volence by a nutjob rapist makes way more sense. The constitutional arguments just don't work for me. You can all have guns and the army would still be better armed. Unless you're also planning on getting kitted out with full kevlar body suits and anti-tank weaponry. And even then they would still be better armed. You would still have to rely on the notion that they would be unwilling to launch an all-out fucking napalm attack - you'd still be reliant on them observing some kind of self-imposed limit to the level of violence they're willing to mete out.

There are many kinds of freedom. Freedom from an armed populace and for the most part an armed police force is something I value.


[eta] I suspect a lot of that is down to a different history. Not least the history of law enforcement. The reason we only have specialist units of police that are armed, with the majority of police unarmed is something that comes from the way in which law enforcement developed here during the early days of police forces. We have as much of a cultural inclination towards unarmed police as you have a cultural inclination to armed police. That's one of the civil freedoms that characterises british culture - for the same reason we have, for most of the early modern and modern periods, had relatively small standing armies except in times of war. Because standing armies swore their loyalty to the monarch, we have always tended to have quite a large 'militia' component to our land forces.