On Guns, the 2nd amendment, and the militia

There is nobody to govern - and the Americans never even tried. The presence of civilians didn't stop the US army destroying the place twice, three time? Insurgents prevented nothing. Firing on a superior force D.E.T.E.R.S. it not at all from killing you.
And you never did say how could tell when a government is getting ready to become tyrannical. How do you know when to start blowing up the roads?

 

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There was, and they did try. But the only means they had was an army, and that's a poor tool for imposing and maintaining a tyranny.

They prevented a US takeover and the imposition of a client strongman government.

This is something all competent prospective tyrants know, which is why an armed population is a deterrent to them, and why the preparations for tyranny always involve disarming the general population.

 

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If you want your town mostly flat and gently smoking, with the odd tank trundling over it and mad sadists rampaging through every three weeks.... yea, sure.

 

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There are plenty of towns in Iraq not flat and smoking - and not governed by a strongman imposed by the US military, either. Whether the price was too high is something you'd have to ask the Iraqis who paid it.

The point remains: Imposing tyranny on an armed population is not easy, even with the world's most powerful army - and intelligent, wary, self-interested tyrants know this. Hence the deterrent. Even though the prospect of open war against the military of one's own country is a strawman in the first place, not at issue, it can be handled. A hostile armed population is in fact a deterrent to prospective tyrants, modern army or no modern army.

 

You never answered the question. What are the signs of intended tyranny by the government?

 

see:
John Locke

 

See John Locke about what? He's not an armed American proposing to fight his fellow Americans over a pile of rubble.
See, what iceaura wants to defend against ter is an army of his own countrymen, of his same mind-set, only better trained. An army of yahoos with invincible powers of self-delusion and justification, that has never been deterred by the presence of innocent civilians, or the illegitimacy or unwinnability of a conflict, or the ungovernability of occupied lands, or sense, or reason.
And he's never described the hypothetical "government", or what the limits of the government's should be and at what point, or by what action, it's considered tyrannical.

 

Why are you asking me?

Oh yeah, because of this:

No, that is not at all what I have been posting. That is your bullshit misrepresentation, and that kind of crap is what has deadlocked gun control in the US.

Crackpot inflammatory delusions, strawmen and dangerously naive presumptions, irrationality driven by emotion and paranoia, on both sides .

 

It would absolutely harm their image in the world to do so - just like it did the Soviets, and the Nazis before them. Other countries would feel pressure from their governments to supply the insurgents with arms so as to continue the resistance to unconscionable occupation. It would damage morale and undercut the desire to continue said occupation, particularly by the force doing the occupying. Now, if some proportion of the citizenry were in favour of said occupation - I give you ISIS, the Taliban, and some other terrorist organizations - then morale might be bolstered... to an extent. But if they randomly massacre civilians? No. Unless it's someone else's civilians.

That's a big assumption here: that the occupier would be as extreme as ISIS. The extremity of their response might mean the complete depopulation of some areas. And yet civilian militias - largely Christians and Kurds - continue their resistance in Syria and what was once Iraq.

Why do they always? Economy. They cannot remove huge sectors of their population from life for the reason that they must collect taxes from commerce. They cannot destroy their economic base. Not even ISIS does this.

And yet, Kurds in eastern Turkey continue to resist. Normally resistance does require some outside help - which is increasingly likely as the body count mounts. You'll note that rather than ISIS dominating Iraq completely, ISIS is in a low-intensity war. Frankly, the suggestion of an increasingly belligerent and violent occupation suggests increasingly to me the necessity of guarding such arms. I grant you though that there was little armed resistance to the Nazis in Germany, so that the conditions of armed resistance are context-dependent.

 

The American Declaration of Independence isn't a declaration of defeat or a declaration of hopelessness. Perhaps the take-away point here is that the "nation" shouldn't be conceived as being the government, rather the nation is the people.

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed -- That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government ... Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes and accordingly all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security."