but instead going after their ability to function while sapping the morale of their fighters and citizens
Which we can fortunately do through peaceful means like open debate, moving the means of production out of their hands (gun companies
will inevitably tire of dealing with the BS out East and develop their facilities on more favorable ground), and ramming court decisions down their throat when all else fails
Also, the American Revolution was not just a glorious uprising. It was outright civil war in some places with old family feuds being savagely settled under the guise of a fight for liberty. It wasn't something that anyone with any sense would wish to repeat.
So true. Even with all the antebellum and post-WWI focus on how terrible war is compared to the old images of Chivalry, people fail to realize that conflicts before those eras were just as terrible (if not more so due to the numbers of soldiers and stupidity of tactics) and brutal. Hard for Americans to imagine entire cities being burned, but they certainly were back then.
I think Flintknapper is spot on in post #11. I don't think a lot of Americans who verbally support the 2a are willing to use the 2a for its intended use.
As with all military conflicts, I imagine a great majority of those people who
were prepared to take up arms (the active militiamen) never honestly believed they would have to come to blows. I do however believe that today's more fractured societal structure at the local level will make it very difficult to organize, let alone resist, if things get bad enough a govt clamps down things like the Internet (as they surely would.)
Do you know offhand who in your community would be a confidant, brother in arms, double agent, or traitor? With no one knowing their neighbors' names any more, it seems laughable that any uprising beyond mindless rioting could form spontaneously. The "founders" had cobbled together a cabal of some of the most talented, educated, resourceful, and intelligent individuals living at the time years before "things got bad," and many even had extensive government service backgrounds that made running the new country a shorter learning curve (compare this to say, Egypt or Afghanistan). Moreover, these guys were also fans of this cool thing going on called The Enlightenment, in which philosophy and the study of human nature were very hip topics among the cool kids; perfect recipe for a competent governing structure that isn't designed solely to keep itself in power. Fat chance finding much beyond variations on fascism in popular American political thought, these days :banghead:
TCB