Would-be tyrants get power (and stay in power) by gaining the support of people capable of projecting force and power onto the populace. From the perspective of tyranny, it is irrelevant if their supporters are i.e. the military or a bunch of militia guys who have acquired their guns privately.
Source: Many, many civil wars across history.
Trying to guard against tyranny by increasing private gun ownership is dumb, because you are simply creating another group of people that would-be tyrants can use to gain and retain power.
Actualy tyranny-proofing a society involves building a strong network of institutions (as in laws, civil society, courts, legislative bodies, distributed wealth and sets of norms) that can effectively counteract the attempt of any one group or individual to centralize power.
Also: even if you completely disarm a society and armed resistance becomes necessary in the future (for example western and northern European countries under Nazi occupation during WWII), getting access to firearms is usually not the hardest, nor the most important part of building an effective resistance movement. The organizational part and effective operational security is much harder and more important.
All democracies before the current era began as revolutions. Roman plebeians were well armed enough that the state could never become too abusive towards them. English democracy, and the entire modern idea of constitutional democracy itself, came about because the British public happened to be well armed enough with longbows, originally intended for times of war, that they could resist the tyrannical acts of the state and the professional military that it commanded. Some of the most peaceful and healthiest democracies in the world are also the most heavily armed: look at Switzerland for an example. The entire point of widespread civilian ownership of military weapons is that they can serve as a deterrent so that no tyrants, whether in the government or another private faction, can ever wield unassailable power over the masses, and that the weapons themselves never have to be used. Civil institutions can be captured over time by corrupt interests, but it's quite difficult to capture an empowered public.
Your prior comment spoke of "deter and safeguard against tyrants". No you argue based on the "beginnings" of democracies. These are different things.
I'd continue to argue that widespread gun ownership within democratic societies is detrimental, not beneficial for their continued existence.
As for "starting" a democracy, there are certainly those that came about by violent means. But more often than not, the capacity for violence has nothing to do with the availability of arms in civilian hands. Much more relevant is the organizational capacity of revolutionaries and their support within the armed forces (or from actors that could provide well-trained and armed men prior to the widespread use of standing militaries).
>All democracies before the current era began as revolutions.
[citation needed]
>Roman plebeians were well armed enough that the state could never become too abusive towards them.
The plebeians certainly played a part, but probably not because they were "well armed". Legitimacy is a real and important thing in politics and it derives from the willing support of your constituencies.
I would also question that plebeians were particularly well armed. Plebeians were (for the most part) not allowed to serve in the army, while higher social classes were required to and also required to provide their own weapons. Therefore it is likely that the higher social classes were both quite well trained, had combat experience and weapons and armor at their disposal, while most plebs likely hat little in the way of arms and/or training and experience.
>the British public happened to be well armed enough with longbows, originally intended for times of war, that they could resist the tyrannical acts of the state and the professional military that it commanded.
Not sure where you draw the line for democracy being established in Britain, but it would be hard to argue that this was before the British civil war starting in 1642. By then longbows were mostly outdated military technology and battles were fought with "pike and shot", which required quite a lot of training and substantial capital to be effective (and adequately supplied). Neither pikes, nor matchlock firearms were particularly widespread in civilian hands.
>Some of the most peaceful and healthiest democracies in the world are also the most heavily armed: look at Switzerland for an example.
Swiss reservists haven't had their service rifles at home for a couple of decades now. The justification for the Swiss system was also always based on repelling outside threads. The practice of keeping service rifles at home produced significant problems (suicides and gun violence) so it was abolished.
>The entire point of widespread civilian ownership of military weapons is that they can serve as a deterrent so that no tyrants, whether in the government or another private faction, can ever wield unassailable power over the masses
Which is dumb, because tyrants don't care how many people they have to kill. And having a lot of weapons in civilian hands gives them one more lever to kill their internal enemies. Private militias are an essential aspect of most genocides in the modern era (see Rwanda, Serbia, etc.).
>Civil institutions can be captured over time by corrupt interests, but it's quite difficult to capture an empowered public.
It is very hard to corrupt well-established institutions (that is the whole point of institutions), while it can be quite easy (in the right circumstances) to get critical shares of a population to support a murderous ideology.
Great. Even accepting your case (I assume you mean the US revolutionary war, which, for the record, I don't think is that great of an example to begin with), you provide a n=1 in support of your argument.
On the other hand, there are literally dozens of examples of civil society organizations organizations and protest movements successfully countering government overreach or military coup d'etats with peaceful means and bringing about profound political change:
While armed resistance against injustice can sometimes be effective (and certainly not all peaceful movements succeed), there is well established qualitative and quantitate research that violence comes at much higher cost (in terms of life lost) and risks (to subsequent democratic and evononomic development) than peaceful resistance. Erica Chenoweth is one particular scholar worth checking out in that regard: https://www.ericachenoweth.com
It makes sense if you think about it for a second: resisting violently against tyranny requires you to build up systems of violence (duh!). Those systems have the tendency to stick around, even if you are successful in removing or fending off tyranny.
You can see this live in the US, if you are willing to look: Tens of thousands of people die every year solely because the US treats firearms differently from the entirety of the rest of humanity. At the same time, the US does not seem to be uniquely resistant to the undermining of democratic institutions, as Trumps current antics demonstrate (this should hold true no matter which side of the Trump/Democrats divide you sit on. Both sides claim that the other is (successfully) undermining democracy).
Peaceful protests, even if they’re successful, have nothing to do with the discussion of “Trying to guard against tyranny by increasing private gun ownership is dumb“
The entire argument for private gun ownership to guard against tyranny is that it is effective and more so than other approaches. If private gun ownership is not more effective against tyranny than other approaches, why accept its considerable and provable downsides (gun crime, gun-assisted suicides, domestic violence, accidents, etc. etc.)?
But peaceful resistance (which goes beyond protests and can – depending on situation and definition – encompass everything from sabotage to strikes, espionage, boycotts and "Work to Rule") has been demonstrated to be more effective to both establish long-term democratic rule, as well as safeguard it against authoritarian rollback, when compared to violent means.
There simply is no actual argument based on historical facts that widespread civilian gun ownership is particularly effective at establishing democratic rule or deterring authoritarian tendencies. Which makes sense, because (again) guns are only good at projecting or threatening violence and authoritarian actors (in contrast to democratic ones) are quite comfortable with violence.
Trying to guard against tyranny by increasing private gun ownership is dumb, because you are simply creating another group of people that would-be tyrants can use to gain and retain power.
Is there any example of a widely armed society that nevertheless succumbed to classical authoritarianism from the inside?
AFAIK even the European societies that have a lot of guns in hands of civilians (hunting or others), such as the Swiss or Scandinavians, are mostly fairly free long-term.
They could be conquered by much stronger external foes such as the Nazis, but the theory that those guns would be a boon to a would-be internal tyrant does not seem to be borne out.
>Is there any example of a widely armed society that nevertheless succumbed to classical authoritarianism from the inside?
Plenty. The population of the Weimar Republic was pretty militarized (lots of WWI veterans with combat experience and plenty of activity of "Freikorps" militia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freikorps#Freikorps_involvemen...). These militant and armed forces largely threw in with the Nazi political movement and contributed to the collapse of the first German democracy and the institutionalization of the Nazi Reich. Just to make one very obvious example.
Driving 10 mph above the speed limit on a highway at every opportunity will only lead to a very limited reduction in travel time, because you spend a lot of time breaking (i.e. to avoid crashing into law-abiding drivers, reacting to speed controls, etc.).
At the same time it drastically increases both the risk of accidents, as well as the severity of accidents when they happen. You also endanger not only yourself but also everyone else on the road with you.
Sensible road design takes this into account and constructs roads in a way that disincentivizes speeding and is safer for everyone. One example would be "lazily" meandering highways instead of perfectly straight ones. The broken sightline is a great incentive to keep your foot off the gas, most people do it instinctively.
"Ongoing driver training" on the other hand is burdensome and expensive for the individual drivers and will probably lead to little noticeable effect, as speeding is not related to "not knowing better", but to "feeling entitled to break the rules" (for whatever reason).
Failure to drive 70 mph on a highway posted at 60 will (very often, road depending) result in far more cars overpassing you. Each instance of passing carries a small but definite amount of risk; it is safer to match the speed of the other cars on the road than to obstinately stick to the limit and get passed hundreds of times in a single trip.
(As for ripping up roads and relaying them so drivers intuitively find the safe speed to match the posted speed limit, it would be much cheaper to simply adjust the speed limit than establishing entirely new right of ways through existing neighborhoods, farms and industrial zones. That would be bonkers.)
It's a rare stretch of American interstate highway where the majority are sticking to the speed limit. On different roads the ratio of speeders to "speed limit doers" varies, but interstates have fairly consistent driving conditions and the safe speed for those conditions is consistently higher than the posted limit.
Usually traffic on American interstates is staying at the speed limit if: there is a fair amount of congestion, everybody is stuck behind somebody doing the limit, or there is rain/fog/snow/etc.
>and the safe speed for those conditions is consistently higher than the posted limit.
A cursory look at traffic safety statistics would seem to dispute this statement. The US consistently ranks quite high in traffic fatalities, which seems to indicate that you couldn't safely drive faster than the current speed limit in most circumstances. Of course you'd have to control for a lot of other factors for a definite conclusion, but conversely, I'd like to see an actual source for your theory.
Enforcing a speed limit is actually not that hard if you want to. You can of course put stationary or mobile speed cameras in place. But even better may be systems I've seen in some places in southern Europe: Cameras at the beginning and end of a stretch of highway that compare time stamps of your passing and calculate the average speed of your car in that stretch. If you've passed the stretch quicker than should be possible according to the speed limit you'll be fined. It's quite low tech, cameras are prevalent on the highway systems of many countries, anyway, and it solves the problem of people adhering only to the speed limit if they know they are being observed by law enforcement.
There are a number of interstates (and interstate like US highways) near me that have posted speed limits of 70MPH but any normal day you'll find traffic going 55mph or even less.
When everyone is driving beyond the speed limit, the ones actually obeying the speed limit are the dangerous drivers. It is unfortunate that speed limits in the US have not corresponded to how people actually drive since 1973.
How does this make sense? If I'm driving the speed limit and someone else is crashing into me from behind while speeding, they are the dangerous driver. No matter how many other people also ignore the speed limit.
Also, increasing the speed limit does nothing to make traffic safer. That doesn't make any sense at all, as increased speed is correlated very well with increased accident rates and severity of traffic-related injuries:
It should be obvious that driving substantially slower than everyone else would make you a danger to others. Try driving at the speed limit on a high way in southern NY, especially in the left lane. You will have many near accidents and the reality is that you would be the dangerous driver for not keeping pace with everyone else.
Increasing the speed limit to the 85th percentile so that you do not have the few people who actually obey it posing a hazard to others does make things safer.
Getting cars off the road sooner by reducing travel time, decreases the number of cars on the road. This increases the distance between cars and accidents only when the distance betweeen a vehicle and something else reaches 0. Forcing people to drive slower therefore causes collisions by bringing cars closer to one another.
The severity is a separate matter from whether there is a collision. As for severity, people drive much faster in Germany where there is no high way speed limit for much of the autobahn yet their autobahn network has half the fatalities that U.S. highways have. The safety data from 2012 shows this:
As for your link, it talks about pedestrian safety. As per the data there, pedestrians are unsafe on highways no matter what the speed limits are. There are also no pedestrians on highways. There is no point to setting highway speed limits based on studies showing the danger to non-existent pedestrians.
Did you post the first link that seemed to agree with your position as part of some fallacious appeal to authority because logic failed to agree with your preconceived notions that you were never equipped to defend? I suspect that is exactly what you just did.
>Increasing the speed limit to the 85th percentile so that you do not have the few people who actually obey it posing a hazard to others does make things safer.
[citation needed]
Seriously. That is a pretty bold claim that you should be able support with actual studies, if true. You have several things working against your hypothesis:
- While it may be true that driving at the legal speed limit might slightly increase the risk of accidents when many other drivers drive faster than the speed limit, a general increase of the speed limit might severly increase risk for everyone.
- Many people do not drive above the speed limit, because they have a "higher normal", but because they feel entitled to "drive faster". I.e. they claim that they are "better drivers", they have a superior need to arrive faster, etc. Those people will just adapt their behavior to the new, higher speed limit and again drive above that, making the entire exercise pointless and dangerous.
- A potential and less risky alternative would be improved enforcement of the current speed limit.
There are probably plenty of other arguments that actual experts in this field would bring up.
>Getting cars off the road sooner by reducing travel time, decreases the number of cars on the road. This increases the distance between cars and accidents only when the distance betweeen a vehicle and something else reaches 0.
That makes no sense at all. It has been proven in both theoretical and practical tests that driving "all out" does not decrease travel time drastically in almost all circumstances. But it substantially increase the risk of accidents. So any minuscule decrease in car density will be far outweighed by increased accident risk per kilometer driven.
>Forcing people to drive slower therefore causes collisions by bringing cars closer to one another.
It's actually the other way around: Forcing people to drive slower drastically reduced the risk of collisions because people are slower and have more time to react. It also reduces the incidence of traffic jams (because sharp braking prevalent with speeding drivers is a main contributor to traffic jams), which are in turn a major factor in collisions.
>As for severity, people drive much faster in Germany where there is no high way speed limit for much of the autobahn yet their autobahn network has half the fatalities that U.S. highways have.
You'll have to control for other factors, of course. Cars in the US are much larger and heavier than in Germany, for example. In statistics, you want to compare apples to apples, so you control for vehicle weight when trying to make observations about the impact of speed on accident severity.
>As for your link, it talks about pedestrian safety.
True. But the same holds true for vehicle collisions. It's really basic physics. All other things being equal, faster cars have more energy. More energy = more severe accident outcomes.
>Did you post the first link that seemed to agree with your position as part of some fallacious appeal to authority because logic failed to agree with your preconceived notions that you were never equipped to defend?
No. There are plenty of other sources that support my views, i.e.
> Seriously. That is a pretty bold claim that you should be able support with actual studies, if true
The 85th percentile rule/principle has been understood for decades. Just search for information on it. You will find tons of results. Calling it a bold claim is like claiming asymptotic complexity is a bold claim. It is something that is well known, just not to you.
> It has been proven in both theoretical and practical tests that driving "all out" does not decrease travel time drastically in almost all circumstances.
Those tests do not seem relevant to highways, where it is easy to measure differences in travel time between driving at the speed of traffic and driving at the speed limit. When traffic is at 70mph and the speed limit is 55mph, keeping pace with traffic results in a 21% reduction in highway travel time. How things go when someone is ‘driving "all out"’ is not relevant here.
> Forcing people to drive slower drastically reduced the risk of collisions because people are slower and have more time to react.
A highway is not a regular road where it is stop and go based on lights. The purpose of a highway is to have a free flow of traffic such that you do not need to be continuously reacting to others. You do need to maintain a certain distance between you and the car to react in emergencies, but these are supposed to be exceptional and plenty of collisions occur when changing lanes, which would be lessened with fewer cars on the road. Cases where everyone needs to stop would also be lessened.
> You'll have to control for other factors, of course. Cars in the US are much larger and heavier than in Germany, for example. In statistics, you want to compare apples to apples, so you control for vehicle weight when trying to make observations about the impact of speed on accident severity.
Those same vehicles are legal to drive in Germany as far as I know. There is a possibility that they are popular in the U.S. because of the speed limits such that they would be less popular if the highways did not have speed limits. After all, their acceleration, braking and fuel economy are terrible. They would only be worse at autobahn speeds. The knowledge that it is legal to drive at higher speeds tends to encourage people purchasing vehicles to purchase ones that can handle higher speeds well. We could see vehicles more similar to those driven in Germany become popular if there were no speed limits and then things would naturally become apples to apples.
> True. But the same holds true for vehicle collisions. It's really basic physics. All other things being equal, faster cars have more energy. More energy = more severe accident outcomes.
There is no law of physics that dictates that such things cannot be done with greater safety than we currently have. Germany is a fantastic example of this. Germany permits speeds that would be considered hazardous by the thinking behind motor vehicle rules in the US, yet is substantially safer.
> No. There are plenty of other sources that support my views, i.e.
If I tell you what is wrong with your sources one last time, I hope you will stop posting links under the misguided hope that some random thing superficially agrees with your claims sticks. Your first link involved studies in a country where speed limits should obey the 85th percentile. The findings are not relevant to the U.S. where the 85th percentile is ignored. Even without knowing about the 85th percentile, it is obvious the applicability to other countries would depend on how similar the process for establishing the speed limit is. Your second link is behind a paywall and cannot be scrutinized, but the German autobahn likely contradicts it. Problems only occur when the distance between a vehicle and another object reaches 0. If that is avoided, the speed does not matter.
That said, it is impossible to prevent future Darwin Award recipients from earning their awards. If you insist on trying to stop them from earning rewards from motor vehicles, you might as well push for a complete ban on motor vehicles. That is the only thing that would eliminate motor vehicle fatalities.
China is only building enough nuclear capacity to roughly keep nuclear‘s share of overall electricity production stable at around 15%, if I remember correctly. And that’s probably mostly to keep the technology alive for military and strategic reasons. China’s actual energy demands will be met by Wind and Solar.
The EU mutual defense clause is even stronger than Article V of the NATO treaty:
Nato Treaty:
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area."
Translation: Every NATO member can bloody well decide for themselves ("as it deems necessary") how to help another member state.
Article 42/7 of the EU treaty:
"If a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power, in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter."
Translation: You got to give it everything you got ("all means in their power"). If Ukraine had been an EU member, the treaty would have required other EU member states to send ground troops.
Of course, international treaties can not be enforced, if the treaty parties don't want to comply. So in reality, both treaties rely on mutual accepted norms of behavior more than on the letter of the law. Which is why Trump's behavior has been so damaging to the NATO alliance, without any actual test of it. And while the EU's treaty is worded stronger than NATO's, it has never been formally used or tested.
Stable majorities rely on a country's political and media elite to behave somewhat responsibly. In the UK, the EU became a welcome punching bag that every negative domestic feeling and development could be pinned on. That's a quick way to destroy even the most positive of associations and is at the root of the Brexit disaster (and the anti-EU sentiment in other countries like Germany).
I am an „environmentalist“ and I’m in full and public Sport of the hundreds of windmills in clear view of my town and the solar on every new residential development, including my own house. As are all other „environmentalists“ I know.
You're looking at the nameplate capacity. However, for solar the actual capacity factor can be anywhere from 10-25% of that. So you're looking anywhere from ~25-70GW of the average capacity. Nuclear reactors can operate at 90-95% capacity factors.
And the unsolved problem is storage. Right now, solar can partially replace natural gas and, to a lesser extent, coal.
Even considering the capacity factor solar and wind still grows by 60x compared to nuclear. And storage is no longer an „unsolved problem“. You could manage the current grid with current chemical battery technology, levelized cost of electricity of that solution is cheaper than nuclear. And foreseeable technical advances will improve that while no comparable development is on the horizon for nuclear.
The real tricky thing will be stuff like chemical processes that depend on hydrocarbons, but nuclear is no help for that.
Nuclear didn’t deliver on an every revolution in the 50s and it won’t today. It’s nice for submarines and to have an industrial base to build bombs but it inherently can’t solve the world’s energy demands.
Yes, it is an unsolved problem. Even adding 8h backup battery puts solar on par with nuclear: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf (nuclear's capital costs are around $4000/kW).
And seasonal storage (enough energy to last for 2-3 weeks without sun/wind) does not even have a price tag, because it simply doesn't exist.
> And foreseeable technical advances will improve that while no comparable development is on the horizon for nuclear.
Nope. Renewables have comprehensively failed in providing a viable replacement for nuclear power. There is no reasonable pathway ahead with the current technologies for renewables to replace the reliable baseline generation.
It doesn't mean that solar/wind are useless, they work great in cases where the load can be shed, and in warm climates where electricity demand is not so critical.
BESS and solar are not on par with nuclear for several reasons: (1) there is a much faster construction pathway for solar+BESS than nuclear, (2) costs of both PV solar and BESS continue to go down every year, while nuclear doesn't have the same cost curve, (3) manufacturing capacity for solar and BESS continue to rise on the exponential piece of an S-curve (meaning, a consistent multiplicative increase every year) while nuclear construction rates don't look anything like that.
There is a root cause for this: both solar PV and battery storage can be mass-produced in factories, and current nuclear tech can't. If nuclear can get onto a similar growth trajectory, we'll be cooking.
>3. Germany will not be able to perform the EV or heatpump transition. It'll be quietly sabotaged by the government, because there's no way to provide enough generation.
There are dozens of similar studies from academics and think tanks across the political spectrum. Everyone who actually does more than "napkin math" and doesn't have a vested interest in fossil fuels making money comes to the same conclusion: 100% renewable energy is inherently possible for a country like Germany, especially embedded into a European grid.
Is it expensive? Yes. More expensive than using increasingly expensive fossil fuels (the infrastructure for which also has to be renewed periodically) and the consequences of climate change? No, if you believe any serious study on the subject.
> Yep. I know that one. It misses a crucial requirement: tons of coke and LSD needed to drug the lawmakers to let it pass.
The price tag for the _lowest_ estimate is around $1T.
You write this in the same week that German lawmakers actually passed almost $1 Trillion in new debt allowances for infrastructure and defense.
> Yep. I know that one.
And you conveniently ignore the dozens of other that have been published since and came to the same conclusion: a transition to renewable energy is possible and the cheaper option.
> And yet, Germany is planning to rely on fossil natgas until at least 2040-s.
Yes, to a constantly decreasing amount. That is the point of a "transition".
> You write this in the same week that German lawmakers actually passed almost $1 Trillion in new debt allowances for infrastructure and defense.
Well, yes. I'm honestly surprised it passed. I guess a shadow of a new war can make even the German bureaucracy move.
> And you conveniently ignore the dozens of other that have been published since and came to the same conclusion: a transition to renewable energy is possible and the cheaper option.
Your own links provide $1T as the _lowest_ option. More realistic options are more expensive. And ALL of them require the development of new technologies, which is inherently risky.
Nuclear is literally cheaper, even if we assume no savings from large-scale production. But it's not being considered, because Greenpeace wants Germany to use coal and gas.
> Yes, to a constantly decreasing amount. That is the point of a "transition".
And that's the point. The transition could have been already over, if Germany had chosen nuclear in 2000-s.
> The transition could have been already over, if Germany had chosen nuclear in 2000-s.
The finish reactor OL3 came in at 11 billion Euros and produces up to 13 twh/year. Germany currently consumes 500 twh/year. So we'd have had to build close to 40 reactors at a cost of more than 400 Billion Euros to satisfy today's demand.
By 2050, Germany's electricity demand will be around 2,000 twh/year. For that we'd have to build more than 150 OL3s at a cost of 1.7 Trillion Euros. How's that cheaper than 1 Trillion Euro for renewables and batteries?
At the same time, renewables already provide more than 50% of electricity today and could have provided more, if the Merkel administration had not been actively hostile towards their buildout. And again: per kwh produced, any form of new solar and wind (yes, even including in combination with chemical batteries) is cheaper than new nuclear.
There are certainly some (very) niche use cases where you can make the case for nuclear. Grid-wide baseload at competitive prices in a country like Germany is not one of them.
You do realize that it is winter in much of the inhabited world? Temperatures still drop below 0°C every night where I live and day length is still ways away from summer months.
It is a great sign that we get negative electricity prices in these conditions quite regularly now. It means that we actually don't need nearly as much "seasonal" storage as many people seem to think. The capability to store for days and weeks is much more relevant than the capability to store for months.
It is cheaper to build out a large (continent wide) network of renewable energy generation with the necessary surplus production and storage than it is to build sufficient nuclear power to adequately provide power. Not to mention much faster and less political contentious (most people like nuclear power in the abstract but are vehemently opposed to power plants or long-term storage close to their home).
The UK's problem is not too much green energy. It is the insufficient integration of the European power grid and less than ideal investments into green energy on the part of other European governments.
Even if you ignore safety concerns and political resistance, nuclear will always loose on the economics.
Would-be tyrants get power (and stay in power) by gaining the support of people capable of projecting force and power onto the populace. From the perspective of tyranny, it is irrelevant if their supporters are i.e. the military or a bunch of militia guys who have acquired their guns privately.
Source: Many, many civil wars across history.
Trying to guard against tyranny by increasing private gun ownership is dumb, because you are simply creating another group of people that would-be tyrants can use to gain and retain power.
Actualy tyranny-proofing a society involves building a strong network of institutions (as in laws, civil society, courts, legislative bodies, distributed wealth and sets of norms) that can effectively counteract the attempt of any one group or individual to centralize power.
Also: even if you completely disarm a society and armed resistance becomes necessary in the future (for example western and northern European countries under Nazi occupation during WWII), getting access to firearms is usually not the hardest, nor the most important part of building an effective resistance movement. The organizational part and effective operational security is much harder and more important.
reply