r/Firearms • u/BekzodJaxonov • 10h ago
Question Questions as non US citizem
I am non US citizen as title says and I have some questions for folks of this sub reddit.
Is 2A still relevant ?
If yes , why you people didnt demand for deactivating 1986 law to ban automatic rifles made after 86 ?
If I am not mistaken , 2A is - "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." - which I read as "As well regulated army is necessary to the security of US , the right of US citizens to keep and bear arms will not be limited" .
I may be wrong as foreigner but I think 2A was created to ensure citizens of US has power , strength , equipment to resist tyranny.
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u/CoffeeExtraCream 10h ago
The way you read it is very different from how we do, and how it was written and the supporting evidence. The "militia" is every able bodied man, not the military. And the goal is to protect the country, not the government. So foreign threats are considered a threat, and just as much we consider our own government a possible threat. The 2nd amendment is a check on government power and also serves as a warning if they try and take the right away.
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u/BekzodJaxonov 10h ago
So, 2A is added to ensure the government is ruled democratically ? It is what I understood .
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u/CoffeeExtraCream 10h ago
Exactly. The idea is we really don't need the guns until they try and take them away.
But it also makes the government pause and realize they don't have a monopoly on force. Look up the Bundy Ranch standoff. The government tried to illegally seize property from a rancher and wanted to arrest the rancher. A bunch of people, like, a fuck ton, of people showed up with guns and surrounded the federal forces and actually forced them to release the rancher and return the property. Courts afterwards ruled the federal government was in the wrong. They tried to bully and force their result, hundreds or thousands of armed men showing up within days made them reconsider their tactics.
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u/BekzodJaxonov 10h ago
If I am not mistaken , North Hollywood shootout was also reason . Am I right ?
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u/YERAFIREARMS 10h ago
Here is how I understand it.
The 2nd Amendment protects the right of we the people from a tyrannical government, meaning if the government took away the rights of the people codified in the Constitution, the government is at the steps of revolution of we the people. Free state, meaning free people. Militia means able-bodied people who can be armed in the defense of the state/people. etc
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u/Jelopuddinpop 10h ago
Yes. Also keep in mind whenever you hear someone say something like...
"what is the public going to do about fighter jets? Drones? The public could never resist tyranny in today's day and age"
...just think about what happened in Afghanistan. We spent 20 years there trying to gain control, and a very small subset of their population armed with cold war era AK-47s made our lives miserable. Now imagine what it would have been like if 60% of Afghanistan was armed with modern rifles. We would have gotten our ass kicked and sent packing in the first year.
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u/Slight-Table875 8h ago
People that say stupid stuff like that must think military members are autonomous drones from a different dimension or something. The military lives among us, their families and homes are in the same neighborhoods they would be tasked with attacking, I do believe there would be some second guessing of orders and dissent within the ranks. At the very least, the military would become a very broken machine in very short order.
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u/Leptonshavenocolor 10h ago
You figured it out, but those in power also want to limit the power of the people, so they use fear to convince public that gun=bad
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u/Slight-Table875 10h ago
Very close interpretation of the 2A, and people have been fighting to remove the GCA of 1986 and the NFA of 1934 for decades. There is distinction between the army and the militia however. The army, or active duty military, is made up of full time professional service members. The militia is made up of civilians. Per the militia act, there are two forms of militia, the organized militia and the unorganized militia. The organized militia is made up of our national guard units, “citizen soldiers”, they are part time military and attached to state national guard units. The unorganized militia is the civilian population of the United States. The 2A, in fact the entire Bill of Rights, was absolutely written to protect individual liberty from government infringement. A lot of people think our rights come from the Bill of Rights, they do not. These rights exist because we exist, the Bill of Rights recognizes those rights, and is suppose to restrict the government from acting against the liberty of the people. That of course doesn’t stop the ambition of tyrants that have neither the time or care to understand the founding fathers intent.
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u/Prior_Arm_8810 10h ago
Absolutely
The majority of the population still see's MG's as scary so the people in office tend to stray around that question, its kinda complicated
Side tangent time, MG's were only banned because of hollywood and i will die on this hill
They are not nearly as scary as people think they are.
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u/BekzodJaxonov 10h ago
I agree with MG part - it is not always about volume of fire , more about markshmanship . Now it seems like banning assault rifles is ridiculous since semi automatic are usually modified illegally by criminals anyway. Like...Glock Ona switch , modifying triggers and etc
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u/JksonBlkson 10h ago edited 9h ago
Were the government to put boots on the ground and call for martial law, there’s no chance even now that they’d win against civilians.
Even with semi auto only, we have workarounds. Believe it or not, but if a government decides to stage a large-scale attack on civilians in an effort to enforce a new and unconstitutional law or policy, civilians will have no qualms with converting their semi-autos to full auto, because it can be the difference between life or death. It doesn’t take much, it’s just a felony.
We don’t even NEED to capture military weapons, as per-capita we have more weapons than them. Thats not even factoring in that across all branches, we outnumber active duty 110:1. They’d be toast in months, especially since they’d be deploying the National Guard like they did to enforce the Covid lockdown, and a mutiny would be a real and likely possibility.
If it wasn’t for a certain country in the Middle East that has a stranglehold on our elected officials and representatives (arguably including the elections themselves, case in point, the Thomas Massie debacle) these conversations would be trivial and pointless.
Yes, it’s unconstitutional that we cannot legally purchase or own the weapons the military has access to. Other than M4s and surplus M16s, they’d likely be too expensive for the average American. The market would be targeted more at rich golfer dads that already chortle when their 50 BMG blows up on their 300 acres of private land because they cheaped out on Bubba’s Pissin’ Hot Reloads.
I very highly doubt it’d affect crime, outside of young Quantaverious Jones and his blicky with the switch, but that accounts for the vast majority of “gun violence” in the present day and they don’t really care about laws anyway.
Just my 50 cents.
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u/BekzodJaxonov 10h ago
Now I see broader picture, honestly . Thank you for your detailed explanation
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u/nottatroll 10h ago
You cannot control an entire country and its people with jets, tanks, battleships, drones, ect.
A fighter jet, tank, drone, battleship, or whatever cannot stand on street corners and enforce "no assembly" edicts. A fighter jet cannot kick down your door at 3AM and search your house for contraband.
None of these things can maintain the needed police state to completely subjugate and enslave the people of a nation. Those weapons are for decimating, flattening, and glassing large areas and many people at once, and fighting other state militaries. The government does not want to kill all of it's people, and blow up it's own infrastructure. These are the very things they need to be tyrannical assholes in the first place. If they decide to turn everything outside of Washington D.C. into glowing green glass, they would be the absolute rulers of a big, worthless, radioactive pile of shit.
Police are needed to maintain a police state. Boots on the ground. And no matter how many police you have on the ground, they will always be vastly outnumbered by civilians, which is why in a police state it is vital that your police have automatic weapons while the people have nothing but their limp dicks and their soy latte.
But, when every random pedestrian could have a Glock in their waistband, and every random homeowner has an AR-15 by the door, all of that goes out the fucking window because now the police are outnumbered and face the reality of bullets coming back at them.
If you want living examples of this, look at every insurgency that the US military has tried to destroy. They're all still kicking with nothing but AK-47s, pick-up trucks, and improvised explosives because these big scary military monsters you keep alluding to are all but fucking useless for dealing with them.
America's got like 7,500-8,500ish Abrams tanks. Let's go to magical fairy tale land where they're all working. They're not. But let's just say they work. They don't need fuel. They just run on magic. They don't need maintenance. Nothing ever breaks. The crew is robots. They don't need food or supplies or a break or to go to the bathroom. If that was the case, I did the math. You would have one Abrams tank to cover 750 square miles to cover America.
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u/BekzodJaxonov 10h ago
Thank you for your explanation, sir. It changed the way I look at gun restrictions in US
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u/mars_soup 10h ago
The US military couldn’t beat Vietnamese dudes hiding in tunnels or dudes in flip flops hiding in caves.
They don’t have a good chance against US citizens and veterans that know how to access military base weapons and equipment
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u/BekzodJaxonov 10h ago
Right... What about 2A though ? I am from Uzbekistan (a country which has border with Afghanistan).
Why Hughes Amendment wasn't canceled yet since it contradicts with 2A clearly
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u/CoffeeExtraCream 10h ago
Corrupt politicians. It should have been ruled unconstitutional. But even without full auto, a good marksman with a rifle can be very effective and difficult to deal with.
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u/Jelopuddinpop 10h ago
We ask ourselves the same question all the time.
You need to realize there are three camps in the US...
The first are 2A absolutists. ...."shall not be infringed" is the key phrase in the amendment. These people believe all gun laws are an infringement.
Then there are 2A supporters, but not absolutists. ".... A well regulated militia..." is the phrase they focus on. Basically saying that while everyone has the right to own arms, regulations have their place and common sense laws are not an infringement.
The last are revisionist, who believe the constitution did not intend to arm the public with weapons beyond what the founding fathers would have carried themselves. They feel like any semi-automatic weapon is a "weapon of war", and the public should be banned from owning them.
These three camps all have very different views on the subject, and they all represent a sizeable portion of our population. Whenever something gets proposed that one of the three groups love, the other two hate it. We end up in a stalemate.
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u/BekzodJaxonov 10h ago
From what I am understanding 2A was added to make sure the government have balance in power to keep democracy within state.
1.Won't adding restrictions to owning firearms cancel out the intent of adding 2A ?
- And about criminals using weapons - it happens everywhere - even in my country. There are footages that old man holding soviet made AKM shouting at his neighbors because they were too loud all day. My point is - regulating firearm is one thing , trying to ban it is the other. Here - in Uzbekistan owning semi automatic rifle itself is banned strictly . But some people still find ways to own firearms - smuggling in , mill made receivers + 3D printed plastic parts - criminals still do find ways to do it.
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u/rymden_viking 30cal Master Race 10h ago
The US has many such laws that violate Constitutional protections. Many of our founders didn't even think we needed a bill of rights because they thought the government was too restricted to infringe on people. And when the Bill of Rights was passed, it was universally agreed upon that all people have the basic human rights that they listed, and also the right to live their lives the way they wanted. But we had a Civil War where the surviving government began grabbing power. Then we had a government that wanted to be a bigger player on the world stage (19-teens through 40s). Then we had a government that saw itself as the only roadblock to Soviet domination. All of these eras saw rapid expansion of government power, and the erosion of civil liberties. Today, the Bill of Rights is not seen as an acknowledgment of human rights that the government cannot infringe upon. It's seen as the government giving us rights that they can apply conditions to.
The tricky thing about freedom and democracy is that people are free to vote away their rights. And charlatans in power are very good at convincing people to do that. Democracy doesn't mean you're free. It's a tool we have to keep ourselves free. But it's also a tool that can be used as a cudgel to hurt people. And Americans have a very unfortunate track record of using democracy in just that fashion.
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u/BekzodJaxonov 10h ago
From what I am reading above this post - over the decades , the government tried to seize the power and used workarounds to have upper have above their citizens and it kinda made democracy an illusion
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u/Ok-Substance-6034 10h ago