Can Gun Nuts Please Stop Saying You Need Guns to Protect Yourself From A Potential Tyrannical Government!!!

[westwall]

It's way more than that.

If the federal government knows where you live?
All they have to do is fly an F-16 at 30,000 feet over your house.
Then drop a JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition) on your head.

You will not see or hear the plane.
Or hear the bomb until a few seconds before it hits.
A thousand guns and a million rounds of ammunition would do NOTHING to protect you from it.
And there are dozens of other ways the military could kill you - with ease - if it wanted to.

Anyone who says that guns can protect the masses from government tyranny are utterly and completely clueless about modern, weapons systems.

Where is that pilot going to sleep at night? How about his family?

You clearly havn't thought this through very much.

Typical of the braindead, progressive left.

 

[scruffy]

Where is that pilot going to sleep at night? How about his family?

You clearly havn't thought this through very much.

Typical of the braindead, progressive left.

Not sure this one's a leftie. I think it's just nuts. I've been following its posts for a while now. Out there. Twilight Zone.

 

[westwall]

" The argument has often been used to diminish the scale of slavery, reducing it to a crime committed by a few Southern planters, one that did not touch the rest of the United States. Slavery, the argument goes, was an inefficient system, and the labor of the enslaved was considered less productive than that of a "free worker" being paid a wage. The use of enslaved labor has been presented as premodern, a practice that had no ties to the capitalism that allowed America to become — and remain — a leading global economy.

But as with so many stories about slavery, this is untrue. Slavery, particularly the cotton slavery that existed from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the Civil War, was a thoroughly modern business, one that was continuously changing to maximize profits. To grow the cotton that would clothe the world and fuel global industrialization, thousands of young enslaved men and women, the children of stolen ancestors legally treated as property, were transported from Maryland and Virginia hundreds of miles south, and forcibly retrained to become America’s most efficient laborers. As they were pushed into the expanding territories of Mississippi and Louisiana, sold and bid on at auctions, and resettled onto forced labor camps, they were given a task: to plant and pick thousands of pounds of cotton.


The bodies of the enslaved served as America’s largest financial asset, and they were forced to maintain America’s most exported commodity. In 60 years, from 1801 to 1862, the amount of cotton picked daily by an enslaved person increased 400 percent. The profits from cotton propelled the US into a position as one of the leading economies in the world, and made the South its most prosperous region. The ownership of enslaved people increased wealth for Southern planters so much that by the dawn of the Civil War, the Mississippi River Valley had more millionaires per capita than any other region. "

Source:

How slavery became America’s first big business

Historian and author Edward E. Baptist explains how slavery helped the US go from a “colonial economy to the second biggest industrial power in the world.”

www.vox.com

The scholarship doesn't agree with your revisionist, KKK version of American slavery and its important contribution to our nation's rise to power. You can out of spite and racism, pretend otherwise, but only your fellow country bumpkins will agree with you. Believe whatever nonsense you want Bubba.

Slaves built nothing. They made a few plantation owners wealthy but that's it.

They built no capital, they did nothing that increased the productivity of the nation which allowed others to build wealth.

That onerous task was left to the Irish and the chinese.

 

[westwall]

When was the last time your employer held an election?

Who cares. If the employer is an asshole you leave. In a socialist shithole you go where they tell you to, or you die.

 

[Red Front]

Slaves built nothing. They made a few plantation owners wealthy but that's it.

They built no capital, they did nothing that increased the productivity of the nation which allowed others to build wealth.

That onerous task was left to the Irish and the chinese.

All of the scholarship disagrees with you.

 

[ThunderKiss1965]

It makes you sound mentally challenged.

Having guns is not going to protect you from the police or military. With normal police equipment, SWAT teams, police tactics and fire power etc, they can easily neutralize any armed threat or movement. They wouldn't even break a sweat. Not to mention, police surveillance tactics will make it impossible for an anti-government group to organize a big enough threat to the regime. You don't have a chance. And that is only the police. Your little AR-15 isn't going to do anything to a drone, tank, apache helicopter, fighter jet or combat unit (much less special forces). There is a reason you have not seen a people's uprising to over-throw a government even in Africa in decade. And really only Sudan has been overthrown by a military coup.

No, the only reason you want certain guns (such as a AR-15) is because you like to have them.

It is true the vast majority of gun owners are responsible and good people, including AR-15 owners. But that 1% or 0.05% that are not responsible can cause havoc, as we just saw in Highland park (an event I was on my way to attend and an event to which I know many people that were directly effected).

If you want to hunt, then a single shot hunting rifle will suffice. If it is about home defense, then handguns and shotguns (which as both short-range) would be sufficient.

There are many things that can be done, such as arm teachers, have cops in schools, secure soft targets, better mental health facilities, red flag rules and immunity for snitching, involuntary institutionalization, high standards for gun ownership, higher and minimum sentences for illegal gun possession, Federal no buy lists, vicarious liability for guns for the gun owner etc., but stop with the argument that you need guns for tyrannical governments! Because it is foolish.

There should be a ban on all guns other then single shot hunting rifles, handguns and shotguns.

Now I know handguns are by far the weapon of choice in the vast number of homicides, but so called "assault rifles" (yes I know that is a term the liberals made up) it by far a more sufficient weapon to commit mass murder then a handgun, even if they are semi-automatic (vs full).

Keep sticking to these stances that turn off the moderates (e.g. ban on abortion and do nothing on guns) and then cry about how Demorats can win with gas over $5-6, out of control inflation, major blunders in foreign policy and everyone hating woke politics. If the Demorats keep the House and pick up senate seats you are going to see the most radical changes to this country that we haver ever seen.

It's called asymmetric warfare and some examples of it being very effective is Afghanistan and Vietnam. Both held out against several technologically advanced countries.

The regular Military can not be used to enforce laws on US soil so you would have to rely on National Guard and police to kill those who will not give up their firearms some of whom will likely be family, friends and neighbors. I believe the likely outcome is that most Governors and local leaders will tell the Fed to go fuck themselves. So the only option is the illegal use of the US military and the tyrannical government that the 2nd Amendment was written for.

 

[westwall]

All of the scholarship disagrees with you.

No, it doesn't. Your howard zinn bullshit might, but legit scholars have known this to be a fact for over a century.

Simple minded fools love to spout bullshit but when asked to point out anything that a slave built, they can't

 

[Red Front]

Who cares. If the employer is an asshole you leave. In a socialist shithole you go where they tell you to, or you die.

Who cares? Workers care, their families care, that's who cares. The vast majority of people that have jobs care and employers should care too because if they hurt workers, they hurt themselves (workers are paying consumers). Workers have every right to organize and form unions to protect and advance their interests and rights. Leaving a job is not an option for most people, hence they remain working under abusive conditions. You might not care, but workers care and they will fight back and you can't stop them. Socialism is the future, prepare for it, it's coming.

 

[westwall]

Who cares? Workers care, their families care, that's who cares. The vast majority of people that have jobs care and employers should care too because if they hurt workers, they hurt themselves (workers are paying consumers). Workers have every right to organize and form unions to protect and advance their interests and rights. Leaving a job is not an option for most people, hence they remain working under abusive conditions. You might not care, but workers care and they will fight back and you can't stop them. Socialism is the future, prepare for it, it's coming.

So they LEAVE, dummy. They go get a better job elswhere.

Something that CAN'T be done in a socialist shithole.

 

[Red Front]

No, it doesn't. Your howard zinn bullshit might, but legit scholars have known this to be a fact for over a century.

Simple minded fools love to spout bullshit but when asked to point out anything that a slave built, they can't

Not Howard Zinn, practically everyone disagrees with you. Slavery in this country was the backbone of the economy for almost 250 years. It's well documented, but you can deny it all you want. All of your insults won't change that.

 

[Red Front]

So they LEAVE, dummy. They go get a better job elswhere.

Something that CAN'T be done in a socialist shithole.

In socialism there are many work and career paths and options, so you're just ignorant. This idea that you have that people can just leave their jobs at the drop of a hat, and find another one, is quite absurd. People's income, their medical insurance, everything is tied to employment. They might go months without finding another job, so you're quite naive.

 

[westwall]

Not Howard Zinn, practically everyone disagrees with you. Slavery in this country was the backbone of the economy for almost 250 years. It's well documented, but you can deny it all you want. All of your insults won't change that.

Bullshit. Unlike you I am well read in history. Slavery as an institution was horrible, but 1.8% of whites owned slaves as opposed to the 13% of the black population that owned them.

The reason why the South lost the civil war is because they WERE a slave based economy and they were crushed by the economic and industrial might of the North.

Throughout the war the South produced less than 25,000 firearms. The North produced well over a million.

 

[westwall]

In socialism there are many work and career paths and options, so you're just ignorant. This idea that you have that people can just leave their jobs at the drop of a hat, and find another one, is quite absurd. People's income, their medical insurance, everything is tied to employment. They might go months without finding another job, so you're quite naive.

No, there aren't. There is the path the government puts you on. Fail it and they move you to a lessor position.

Fail there and it is off to the gulag with you.

There is a reason why stalin murdered over 65,000,000 of his own people.


Naive is the person who looks back at the multiple times socialism has been tried, only to watch it fail, yet again.

 

[Red Front]

Bullshit. Unlike you I am well read in history. Slavery as an institution was horrible, but 1.8% of whites owned slaves as opposed to the 13% of the black population that owned them.

The reason why the South lost the civil war is because they WERE a slave based economy and they were crushed by the economic and industrial might of the North.

Throughout the war the South produced less than 25,000 firearms. The North produced well over a million.

Bullshit. Unlike you I am well read in history. Slavery as an institution was horrible, but 1.8% of whites owned slaves as opposed to the 13% of the black population that owned them.

The reason why the South lost the civil war is because they WERE a slave based economy and they were crushed by the economic and industrial might of the North.

Throughout the war the South produced less than 25,000 firearms. The North produced well over a million.

Sven Beckert is a professor of American history at Harvard University. His latest book, “Empire of Cotton: A Global History,” has just been published by Alfred A. Knopf. The New York Times calls it “deeply researched and eminently readable,” and compares his cotton and capitalism narrative to Thomas Piketty’s tome on wealth inequality, although the Times’ reviewer, Thomas Bender, stresses that Beckert is more readable.

For the first half of the 19th century, slavery was central to the American economy. The South was an economically dynamic part of the nation (for its white citizens); its products not only established the United States’ position in the global economy but also created markets for agricultural and industrial goods grown and manufactured in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. More than half of the nation’s exports in the first six decades of the 19th century consisted of raw cotton, almost all of it grown by slaves. Though industry in the North expanded rapidly, especially after the 1830s, enslaved Americans continued to produce a significant share of the nation’s output. In an important book, “River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom,” Johnson observes that steam engines were more prevalent on the Mississippi River than in the New England countryside, a telling detail that testifies to the modernity of slavery. Johnson sees slavery not just as an integral part of American capitalism, but as its very essence. To slavery, a correspondent from Savannah noted in the publication Southern Cultivator, “does this country largely—very largely—owe its greatness in commerce, manufactures, and its general prosperity.”

Much of the recent work confirms that 1868 observation, taking us outside the major slaveholding areas themselves and insisting on the national importance of slavery, all the way up to its abolition in 1865. In these accounts, slavery was just as present in the counting houses of Lower Manhattan, the spinning mills of New England, and the workshops of budding manufacturers in the Blackstone Valley in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as on the plantations in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. The slave economy of the Southern states had ripple effects throughout the entire economy, not just shaping but dominating it.

Merchants in New York City, Boston, and elsewhere, like the Browns in cotton and the Taylors in sugar, organized the trade of slave-grown agricultural commodities, accumulating vast riches in the process. Sometimes the connections to slavery were indirect, but not always: By the 1840s, James Brown was sitting in his counting house in Lower Manhattan hiring overseers for the slave plantations that his defaulting creditors had left to him. Since planters needed ever more funds to invest in land and labor, they drew on global capital markets; without access to the resources of New York and London, the expansion of slave agriculture in the American South would have been all but impossible.

The profits accumulated through slave labor had a lasting impact. Both the Browns and the Taylors eventually moved out of the commodities trade and into banking. The Browns created an institution that partially survives to this day as Brown Brothers, Harriman & Co., while Moses Taylor took charge of the precursor of Citibank. Some of the 19th century’s most important financiers—including the Barings and Rothschilds—were deeply involved in the “Southern trade,” and the profits they accumulated were eventually reinvested in other sectors of the global economy.

As a group of freedmen in Virginia observed in 1867, “our wives, our children, our husbands, have been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locate upon. … And then didn’t we clear the land, and raise the crops of corn, of tobacco, of rice, of sugar, of every thing. And then didn’t the large cities in the North grow up on the cotton and the sugars and the rice that we made?” Slavery, they understood, was inscribed into the very fabric of the American economy.

Southern slavery was important to American capitalism in other ways as well. As management scholars and historians have discovered in recent years, innovations in tabulating the cost and productivity of labor derived from the world of plantations. They were unusual work sites in that owners enjoyed nearly complete control over their workers and were thus able to reinvent the labor process and the accounting for it—a power that no manufacturer enjoyed in the mid-19th century.

As management scholar Bill Cooke and historian Caitlin Rosenthal have shown, slave labor allowed the enslavers to experiment in novel ways with labor control. Edward E. Baptist, who has studied in great detail the work practices on plantations and emphasized their modernity in “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of Modern Capitalism,” has gone so far as to argue that as new methods of labor management entered the repertoire of plantation owners, torture became widely accepted. Slave plantations, not railroads, were in fact America’s first “big business.”

Moreover, as Seth Rockman has shown, the slave-dominated economy of the South also constituted an important market for goods produced by a wide variety of Northern manufacturers and artisans. Supplying plantations clothing and brooms, plows and fine furniture, Northern businesses dominated the large market in the South, which itself did not see significant industrialization before the end of the 19th century.

Further, as all of us learned in school, industrialization in the United States focused at first largely on cotton manufacturing: the spinning of cotton thread with newfangled machines and eventually the weaving of that thread with looms powered at first by water and then by steam. The raw material that went into the factories was grown almost exclusively by slaves. Indeed, the large factories emerging along the rivers of New England, with their increasing number of wage workers, cannot be imagined without reliable, ever-increasing supplies of ever-cheaper raw cotton. The Cabots, Lowells, and Slaters—whatever their opinions on slavery—all profited greatly from the availability of cheap, slave-grown cotton.

As profits accumulated in the cotton trade, in cotton manufacturing, in cotton growing, and in supplying Southern markets, many cultural, social, and educational institutions benefited: congregations, hospitals, universities. Craig Steven Wilder has shown in “Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities,” how Brown and Harvard Universities, among others, drew donations from merchants involved in the slave trade, had cotton manufacturers on their boards, trained generations of Southern elites who returned home to a life of violent mastery, and played central roles in creating the ideological underpinnings of slavery. Given that the United States in the first half of the 19th century was a society permeated by slavery and its earnings, it is hardly surprising that institutions that at first glance seem far removed from the violence of plantation life came to be implicated in slavery as well.

-------------------------

You're ignoring the facts and making irrelevant points that don't amount to anything.

 

[westwall]

Sven Beckert is a professor of American history at Harvard University. His latest book, “Empire of Cotton: A Global History,” has just been published by Alfred A. Knopf. The New York Times calls it “deeply researched and eminently readable,” and compares his cotton and capitalism narrative to Thomas Piketty’s tome on wealth inequality, although the Times’ reviewer, Thomas Bender, stresses that Beckert is more readable.

For the first half of the 19th century, slavery was central to the American economy. The South was an economically dynamic part of the nation (for its white citizens); its products not only established the United States’ position in the global economy but also created markets for agricultural and industrial goods grown and manufactured in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. More than half of the nation’s exports in the first six decades of the 19th century consisted of raw cotton, almost all of it grown by slaves. Though industry in the North expanded rapidly, especially after the 1830s, enslaved Americans continued to produce a significant share of the nation’s output. In an important book, “River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom,” Johnson observes that steam engines were more prevalent on the Mississippi River than in the New England countryside, a telling detail that testifies to the modernity of slavery. Johnson sees slavery not just as an integral part of American capitalism, but as its very essence. To slavery, a correspondent from Savannah noted in the publication Southern Cultivator, “does this country largely—very largely—owe its greatness in commerce, manufactures, and its general prosperity.”

Much of the recent work confirms that 1868 observation, taking us outside the major slaveholding areas themselves and insisting on the national importance of slavery, all the way up to its abolition in 1865. In these accounts, slavery was just as present in the counting houses of Lower Manhattan, the spinning mills of New England, and the workshops of budding manufacturers in the Blackstone Valley in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as on the plantations in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. The slave economy of the Southern states had ripple effects throughout the entire economy, not just shaping but dominating it.

Merchants in New York City, Boston, and elsewhere, like the Browns in cotton and the Taylors in sugar, organized the trade of slave-grown agricultural commodities, accumulating vast riches in the process. Sometimes the connections to slavery were indirect, but not always: By the 1840s, James Brown was sitting in his counting house in Lower Manhattan hiring overseers for the slave plantations that his defaulting creditors had left to him. Since planters needed ever more funds to invest in land and labor, they drew on global capital markets; without access to the resources of New York and London, the expansion of slave agriculture in the American South would have been all but impossible.

The profits accumulated through slave labor had a lasting impact. Both the Browns and the Taylors eventually moved out of the commodities trade and into banking. The Browns created an institution that partially survives to this day as Brown Brothers, Harriman & Co., while Moses Taylor took charge of the precursor of Citibank. Some of the 19th century’s most important financiers—including the Barings and Rothschilds—were deeply involved in the “Southern trade,” and the profits they accumulated were eventually reinvested in other sectors of the global economy.

As a group of freedmen in Virginia observed in 1867, “our wives, our children, our husbands, have been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locate upon. … And then didn’t we clear the land, and raise the crops of corn, of tobacco, of rice, of sugar, of every thing. And then didn’t the large cities in the North grow up on the cotton and the sugars and the rice that we made?” Slavery, they understood, was inscribed into the very fabric of the American economy.

Southern slavery was important to American capitalism in other ways as well. As management scholars and historians have discovered in recent years, innovations in tabulating the cost and productivity of labor derived from the world of plantations. They were unusual work sites in that owners enjoyed nearly complete control over their workers and were thus able to reinvent the labor process and the accounting for it—a power that no manufacturer enjoyed in the mid-19th century.

As management scholar Bill Cooke and historian Caitlin Rosenthal have shown, slave labor allowed the enslavers to experiment in novel ways with labor control. Edward E. Baptist, who has studied in great detail the work practices on plantations and emphasized their modernity in “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of Modern Capitalism,” has gone so far as to argue that as new methods of labor management entered the repertoire of plantation owners, torture became widely accepted. Slave plantations, not railroads, were in fact America’s first “big business.”

Moreover, as Seth Rockman has shown, the slave-dominated economy of the South also constituted an important market for goods produced by a wide variety of Northern manufacturers and artisans. Supplying plantations clothing and brooms, plows and fine furniture, Northern businesses dominated the large market in the South, which itself did not see significant industrialization before the end of the 19th century.

Further, as all of us learned in school, industrialization in the United States focused at first largely on cotton manufacturing: the spinning of cotton thread with newfangled machines and eventually the weaving of that thread with looms powered at first by water and then by steam. The raw material that went into the factories was grown almost exclusively by slaves. Indeed, the large factories emerging along the rivers of New England, with their increasing number of wage workers, cannot be imagined without reliable, ever-increasing supplies of ever-cheaper raw cotton. The Cabots, Lowells, and Slaters—whatever their opinions on slavery—all profited greatly from the availability of cheap, slave-grown cotton.

As profits accumulated in the cotton trade, in cotton manufacturing, in cotton growing, and in supplying Southern markets, many cultural, social, and educational institutions benefited: congregations, hospitals, universities. Craig Steven Wilder has shown in “Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities,” how Brown and Harvard Universities, among others, drew donations from merchants involved in the slave trade, had cotton manufacturers on their boards, trained generations of Southern elites who returned home to a life of violent mastery, and played central roles in creating the ideological underpinnings of slavery. Given that the United States in the first half of the 19th century was a society permeated by slavery and its earnings, it is hardly surprising that institutions that at first glance seem far removed from the violence of plantation life came to be implicated in slavery as well.

-------------------------

You're ignoring the facts and making irrelevant points that don't amount to anything.

No, I ignore nothing. One book does not a true story tell. We have him talking about cotton. Ok, up until the cotton gin cotton was a marginal product. Tobacco was superior, but the vast majority of slaves went to the sugar plantations where real profits were to be made.

His supposition is proven false by the rapid collapse of the South when the British refused to continue giving them free support.

That is called a fact

 

[Red Front]

No, there aren't. There is the path the government puts you on. Fail it and they move you to a lessor position.

Fail there and it is off to the gulag with you.

There is a reason why stalin murdered over 65,000,000 of his own people.


Naive is the person who looks back at the multiple times socialism has been tried, only to watch it fail, yet again.

Whenever socialism is tried it performs better than capitalism, across the board. Even in the case of the Soviet Union, where despite of the Wests invasion of Russia after WW1, sanctions, and four million Germans invading it, it became the second-largest economy in the world. The Soviets industrialized a poor, under-industrialized agrarian society in less than twenty years into an industrial juggernaut. It accomplished what took the US and Western Europe more than 140 years of industrialization, in just two decades. That's the power of socialism.

There is no path a socialist government puts you on by force as far as work or career, you're quite confused. You should read Marx and educate yourself. As far as the "gulag", the longest sentence was ten years and it was more of a work camp than anything else. There are prisons here in the US now that are worse than gulags and in this country you can get sentenced to as much as 1000 years.

Your death toll figures are groundless and amount to nothing more than capitalist cold-war propaganda.

 

[westwall]

Whenever socialism is tried it performs better than capitalism, across the board. Even in the case of the Soviet Union, where despite of the Wests invasion of Russia after WW1, sanctions, and four million Germans invading it, it became the second-largest economy in the world. The Soviets industrialized a poor, under-industrialized agrarian society in less than twenty years into an industrial juggernaut. It accomplished what took the US and Western Europe more than 140 years of industrialization, in just two decades. That's the power of socialism.

There is no path a socialist government puts you on by force as far as work or career, you're quite confused. You should read Marx and educate yourself. As far as the "gulag", the longest sentence was ten years and it was more of a work camp than anything else. There are prisons here in the US now that are worse than gulags and in this country you can get sentenced to as much as 1000 years.

Your death toll figures are groundless and amount to nothing more than capitalist cold-war propaganda.

Bullshit. Every socialist country throughout time has failed. And murdered well over 130 million people in the process.

The death toll figures are from the Soviet archives, moron.

Just how braindead are you?

 

[Red Front]

No, I ignore nothing. One book does not a true story tell. We have him talking about cotton. Ok, up until the cotton gin cotton was a marginal product. Tobacco was superior, but the vast majority of slaves went to the sugar plantations where real profits were to be made.

His supposition is proven false by the rapid collapse of the South when the British refused to continue giving them free support.

That is called a fact

The slaves weren't pursuing profits so you don't know what you're talking about, you're speaking gibberish. In the 1800s slave labor provided the United States with over 50% of its GDP, that's a fact.

 

[Red Front]

Bullshit. Every socialist country throughout time has failed. And murdered well over 130 million people in the process.

The death toll figures are from the Soviet archives, moron.

Just how braindead are you?

The Soviet archives actually falsify those figures.

 

[westwall]

The slaves weren't pursuing profits so you don't know what you're talking about, you're speaking gibberish. In the 1800s slave labor provided the United States with over 50% of its GDP, that's a fact.

No it isn't. Where the fuck do you come up with this bullshit.