Shared this video with a friend. Here's his response:

"These simplistic ideas which are correct in principle are ideals which in practice require trusted third parties to apply, since all is subject to interpretation. The point of the Constitution was to create a government, of the people, by the people, and for the people. These principles, marvelous ideals, were to be embodied in the Constitution. This video suggests that apparently the government is somehow separate from the people, and exists on its own like a monarchy or a dictatorship. This is not correct. If it were, then there would be no need for the ruse of elections. China doesn't have this problem. The idealist fantasy in the video exists only in the mind of these people, not in the real world."

This is something truly scary. People willing to do something like this will be the ones supporting a dictatorship.

I'd upvote more if I could. Normally I want to add a bunch, but he really more or less hit the high points right on through. Well done.

Because I can't resist adding though, the 'unusual' nature of Egypt's military owning and running most land, industry and business in the nation is more unusual to us than to other regions. Pretty much ALL military dictatorships are exactly like this. It's regrettably not nearly as rare as it should be.

Sure, there is no need to speak in terms of civil war. Unless you're one of these guntoting, armed to the teeth nutjobs who think it would be a good idea. You know, the kind of people who buy an *assault rifle* for self defense.
However, no matter how well trained your riot police is, their less than lethal tactics are only useful up to a certain amount of people, they can become rather useless if the crowds get too big to contain or simply too violent themselves. That's when it gets interesting, that is when protest can turn into riots.
When the cops face huge, somewhat peacful crowds, they might enter Tiananmen Square. At what point would american cops or military personnel start thinking that it's unwise or inhuman to start firing into the crowd? Before the first shot? After the second magazine? On day three?
It's not the 1960s anymore but the sixties are not forgotten. Not by those who faced police officers willing to fire into the crowd. You know, black people. The kind of people whose parents and grandparents are still alive to tell them about their fight against oppression. This is still alive in the american concious, it shaped your country and it won't go away soon. Just ask Barak about his birth certificate.
Civil unrest is part of your recent history, the seed is there. Even under a President Stalin all you'd need go from isolated, contained riots to complete and irreversible shitstorm is a Martyr, a Neda Agha Soltan or a Treyvon Martin. No matter what ethnicity (although african american would be nice), that would present a tipping point.
Your police can bring out the tanks on Times Square if they want but if half of NY shows up, these guys inside the tanks might want to get out ASAP.
The Erich Honecker regime of the German Democratic Republic was basically brought down by somewhat peaceful demonstrations of people shouting "I'm mad as hell and I won't take it anymore" in east german accents.
The StaSi, the Ministry of State Security, who was efficient enough to make *every* citizen a potential informant in the eyes of their opposition, ran from the protesters like little girls. They used to imprison and torture people who spoke up.
The east german border used to be the most secure in the entire world. It was protected by minefields and guards who shot and killed anyone who tried to cross it. Before David Hasselhoff even had a chance to put on his illuminated leather jacket the government caved and just fucking opened it. People just strolled through Checkpoint Charlie and bought Bananas as if it was Christmas.
This was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. You know, the guys who lost over 20 Million people in WW2 and still kicked the Nazis in the nuts.
Nobody brought a gun. All the east germans had was shitty cars and lots of anger. They tore down not just a dictatorship, they tore down the iron curtain.
And they didn't even have a Nelson Mandela. Or Lech Walesa.
I still stand by my point: strength in numbers, not caliber.

It could possibly be a state specific requirement I have not bought firearms in another state. NJ has VERY heavily regulated gun laws.

If they wanted to implement some of the laws we have in NJ in other states, again, I'm fine with that. Just not citizen to citizen. They should have to own a Firearms ID card before you can sell it.

I want to believe there are ways to defeat it democratically but the only way to get enough power in the system in my opinion is to already be wealthy. Perfect Timing is this video: http://videosift.com/video/Wall-Street-Deregulation-Coming-Soon-TYT

Democratically elected democrats voting AGAINST banking regulation? What the what?

Also about the "war" that's exactly the point I'm making. There wouldnt' be any "army" for America to defeat. It would just be it's citizens. There doesn't have to be a "military victory" for the insurgents. My point was that insurgents on their own preventing people from going to work, causing problems with the nations banking systems, whatever, would be enough to make all the wealthy people who run things much worse off. Then that would make the government much worse off because those wealthy people would simply relocate their businesses to more stable environments.

I don't think the US will become a dictatorship. It's going to be a plutocracy. That's all it is now and unfortunately the way it looks all it will be going forward for a very long time.

I hope I'm proven wrong I just don't see any hope anymore personally. I'm not going to rise up or whatever against the government because my life is pretty okay. But I also won't be fed garbage from the the world and told it's ice cream and be forced to look back at the world and say "GREAT ICE CREAM!"

Hey,
sorry I didn't reply earlier, but I figured since you had gone to all that effort I actually wanted to read everything properly.

First up, that does seem like quite a reasonable level of control on handguns.

Is that a state specific requirement? Because looking at this page that doesn't seem the case for all states.

Personally I don't have a problem with making someone jump through a few hoops to get a gun.

As for the government trying to take over, surely the way to defeat these kinds of rights abuses are through the democratic system?

As for Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving the right or wrong of it aside, the "war" part went exceedingly well. The US rolled in and pretty much crushed any opposition. It's the "peace" they're having trouble with. But in real terms, the US military occupied those countries and despite the undoubted problems they're having with IEDs etc, no-one is really suggesting that the "insurgents" are anywhere even close to a military victory.

But ultimately I believe it is politics (for all it's evils) that will prevent the US becoming a dictatorship not arms.

I don't see it that way, in my opinion US citizens are quite capable of using their intellect. The big problem I see is that your government doesn't seem to care anymore what the populace is for or against. Recently there was a new gun law that should be passed by the congress, I think you know which one I am talking about. The one 80% of the people were for and more than half of the congressmen voted for, which still didn't pass. It shows perfectly that the people aren't to blame, it's your out of touch politicians. It seems like there only are 2 principles you can count on from US politicians (or at least these are the reasons they tell the public), one would be the war on terror and the other the economy.

If you are interested in german politics, we are fighting our criminal mastermind-politicians quite effectively. The Bundespräsident (obviously not the Bundeskanzlerin) resigned in 2012 for some minor favors he had (like not having to pay for a hotel he was staying in while he was president). There was a giant out leash from the public and he quickly had to go (http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/02/17/german-president-christian-wulff-resigns-amid-scandal/).

But even more interesting, just yesterday there was a ruling by the highest german court, if the new terror-file used by our intelligence agency and the police was constitutional. It wasn't, so the judges had to change it. And the decision wasn't driven by the need to stop terror, but by german history. You see the problem is, our police and our intelligence agency are separated for historical reasons. When Hitler was just made chancellor of germany he used the Gestapo as an agency that was police and intelligence in one, to get rid of his political enemies.

I know that was very long, I just wanted to make my point using my own country as the best (or worst, depends on the view ) example there is for the world. Cause the world could still learn a thing or two from us, since we learned a thing or two from our last dictatorship and how to avoid it happening again (at least I really hope so).

Uh and since I love quotes, just recently I read this one "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin.

I'm not sure you really understand the concept of a trend.

The figure were increasing before the gun laws. They increased AT THE SAME RATE after.

And @Jerykk, no-one is talking about banning guns. We're just suggesting that maybe there should be some reasonable controls on who should own them and how you should buy them.

And did you mean Boston? Can't find anything on google about Seattle bombings?

Seriously what is the issue here? Why are people so desperate to hang onto all kinds of firearms?

No-one is even vaguely suggesting that if you want to hunt or target shoot you shouldn't be able to.

There has never been and almost certainly never will be a dictatorship prevented by gun owning citizens in the modern age. Hell, you could argue that you've already failed in that regard in the US (not your government, the banks).

So that leaves what? Self defence? That just doesn't wash. This is not hollywood. You're not Clint or Arnold. There's ample evidence to suggest that gun owners are 4 times more likely to die by firearm (often with their own gun).

Meanwhile, the rest of the civilised world has reasonable gun legislation, and we just don't worry about it. I honestly do no understand what is so fucked up about american society that you feel you need guns.

Sorry, my children, but this is a dictatorship, not a negotiation. You don't get to decide how Mommy and Daddy discipline you. If you don't like how it makes you feel, do as you're told.

No, only when his guests refer to the leader of the world's most brutal and repressive dictatorship as their friend, a well respected and overall nice and likable person.

I think anyone's failure to see the importance of that comes from having lived to long in a bubble of safety and security where the severe suffering and horror faced by the slaves in North Korea isn't adequately appreciated.

You don't need high speed internet either, technically (I do, but I am a robot). Technically, you don't need a lot of things, it is all pretty much arbitrary when you talk in those terms. When you make people have to sign up for certain rights via some sort of process, it is the beginning of a real erosion of rights. I'll even meet people half way to say if you want to be in public areas with a gun, some kind of permit is needed like cars...I don't like it, but Ill give you that. But as long as I am not using it to commit crimes, your right to restrict my behavior is over...period. It might be that freedom comes with a hefty prices of dead people, innocent people, innocent people that we could of protected with ever increasing restrictions of social liberties. I mean, look at Saudi Arabia, lower murder rates than even some European countries of pretty good order. But they live in a totalitarian dictatorship, and I am not trying to make a scarecrow argument about totalitarian dictatorships and whatnot, what I am trying to say is people dying isn't the only important metric when talking about rights to do things.


It might be true that more people will die with lacks gun laws, it might be true that more people die because of lacks drug lacks, lots of things might be true about how freedom serves to make economics weak, countries less secure, more prone to internal strife and faction, it might be true that the seeds of freedom and the ability to self regulate cause harms that extend beyond ones self. Even so, I still don't think a better framework exists for conducting ourselves that doesn't cripple and stifle people who have done no wrong. If the price for a drunk driver is abolition, the price of a murder disarmament, the price of wreck less driving horse drawn carriage, then we have failed to address the underlying problem and snub out freedoms ability to creatively deal with complex social challenges via the creative process of problem solving.

I think history has shown that any attempts to snub out action instead of guide it fail miserably. Gun control starts and ends with people, not laws, I suggest we start there. Starting neighborhood gun responsibility programs, safety education for youths, ect...whatever, I don't know, I can't pretend to know what is the best way to address the complex issue of gun control for every community, the point is that is their bag, it can be done without force given the context of the USA. Not every country has that luxury, children roaming the streets with AK-47s is not a real problem in this country, nor would it be if gun control laws were more lacks. We do have problems, I don't want there to be any mistake about that, but I don't think the solution is wholesale elimination of thing that only CAN be dangerous, I mean, anything can be dangerous, ask the folks in Oklahoma about ammonia nitrate...you don't even need a licence to buy that stuff.

Point is, the world is dangerous, and I think freedom allows for a certain amount of that danger to exist. It is the price we pay. We should look to the unwritten code that manages us, the code of culture and community.

"The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. But all this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens. Against this fear is our chief safeguard, teaching us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly such as regard the protection of the injured, whether they are actually on the statute book, or belong to that code which, although unwritten, yet cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace."

Pericles' Funeral Oration from the Peloponnesian War

???

This is appalling. So Gaddafi and Assad's brutal repression of their people had nothing to do with the uprisings. Naturally those uprisings were Israeli manipulation. Meanwhile, Egypt was recently liberated from Mubarak's dictatorship.

So, I guess the summary is that good dictators are those that support Russia or China, and bad dictators are connected with Israel and the west. Legitimate uprisings of the people are those against dictators supportive of the west, and staged 'uprisings' are those that unseat dictators connected to Russia and China.

This is sick minded thinking. I hope someday you look back in horror at the time when you supported Bashir al Assad and Gaddafi's brutal murderous campaigns against their own people.

I agree, and it goes beyond statistics and more to the core ideals that make a country. Fact is, even if I showed you clear evidence that soda pop basically kills people in the long run, that it has no redeemable value and is responsible for 10x the health related problems as guns, that still is absolutely no justification for passing laws about soda consumption.

The rule of law by statistical analysis and utopian/utilitarian calculus is very troubling to me. And while my personal decisions for my own well being use a form of this model, to start making laws based on this very relative and personal framework would be a travesty, and it is seemingly the only model I see used when talking about gun control both for and against.

It turns out, having the freest society might also be the most dangerous...but so the fuck what. What if it turned out that theocratic dictatorship results in the least amount of civilian deaths from guns, shall we burn down the vestibules of liberty and freedom for a single data point of valuation. Most arguments both for and against gun control come from this kind of marginal, statistical methodology that I find appalling in a discussion over laws.

My personal favourite bit was when he said that guns are needed to stop tyrannical government. And as an example, when Ferdinand Marcos took over the Philippines, he ordered the population to surrender their guns.

Hang on, am I the only one who sees the massive, glaring, written-in-10-meter-blinking-neon flaw in this argument?

If the Filipino populace were so armed that Marcos was afraid they would rise up against him, how did he get to be a dictator? Where was the massive populous uprising that prevented his dictatorship?

When a person says something like "they can defend themselves against oppressive government" as a reason for gun ownership, you know they're a nutter.

...As if some stay-puff monster with "Mr. government" is going to roll down the streets and you're going to spontaneously gather a makeshift dad's army of rednecks to thwart it.

fwiw, I also find it pretty amusing of the argument that americans should be so proud of the strength of their democracy, holding it up as the benchmark by which all others are to be judged, while at the same time so scared that their government might turn tin-despot dictatorship at any moment.

Also, do people not find the notion terrifying that its got to the point that an argument is being seriously tabled that the only way to stay safe is to have at least one person carrying a gun whenever people gather, just in case someone rolls in deciding to waste everyone in the place ? Isn't that the very definition of addressing the symptoms, not the cause ?

Lastly, as an aside. Yes, cars are dangerous and when you allow anyone to drive a lot of them drive like crap and think it's ok to drive high or drunk. It's almost as if we should work on removing humans from the equation. Oh, we are.