Why aren’t armed US citizens overthrowing the current government?
Let me preface with this: I know this is a hot topic, I’m not looking to have a fight about guns; I’m interested in discussing the practical aspect of the question in the current context. I hope we can have a discussion without dragging politics or name calling into it.
I’m not from the US so I don’t have a dog in that race. I’m very curious however about the perspective of people living there: ever since I can remember, one of the most common argument for the right to bear arms is that it keeps the government in check: if it ever oversteps its powers or becomes fascist/dictatorial then the people will have the means to defend themselves against it and overthrow it.
From abroad, it looks like the trump administration is pushing the limits further almost weekly, behaving in ways that are not democratic, enriching themselves personally through their government position/power, and dismantling the people’s rights.
There are so many guns in the US, kept by people to presumably prevent the above.
So what gives? Why aren’t people using these guns to take back control of the country when the man in charge looks (from my perspective abroad) like he is abusing his power like a despot would and breaking the social contract (if not the law)? And if not, what does it mean for the right to bear arms if they’re not being used to safeguard the people’s freedom given all the collateral damage they cause (regular school shootings, murders, etc)?
The shortest reason is that half of the country is on board with what is happening, or at least ambivalent about the state of the country. That half of the country is roughly twice as likely to own guns.
Yup. It’s not people vs oppressive government, it’d be full civil war with around half of the people fighting to defend the oppressive government. Just like it was the last time…
I don’t think the gun ownership breakdown even really comes into it: if we’re counting the relative strength of the two opposing sides at all, it’s pretty clear there’s no unified “we the people” to do the overthrowing.
I think that's it, in a nutshell.
Add in, the Democratic half seems less inclined to entertain such ideas, even when things go incredibly not their way. Which may in fact be the reason they own fewer guns.
Separately, it seems like there is a mood of fatalistic inevitability in the US, like everyone is just "going thru the motions" ... but that's just my impression.
Definitely, at both an individual and industry level. Companies in my area are buying materials for shorter runs, contracts are leaning toward 1-2 years of manufacture rather than 4-5, and everyone is trying to collect cash to sit on because of the impending feeling of doom.
The FBI spent the past century dismantling any organizations that don't ultimately depend on the consent of the federal government. Or just so happen to be aligned with the current administration.
American education is universally oriented toward conditioning its students into obedience and fear of uncertainty. Not to mention a holistic historical knowledge and understanding of how actual organization and change are undertaken being suppressed.
Most Americans are so repressed that they only maintain the will to live in the face of daily exploitation and alienation through pleasureseeking. As such, almost all of us are addicted to physical comfort, distraction, pharmaceuticals, and consumerism.
Normalized surveillance and antiintellectualism lead those who would act those ways despite the above to be shamed out of any degree of polite society. Like workplaces, where most people spend the bulk of their time around others. And where being shunned from would cause unemployment and, for most, homelessness. And then you're just another criminal.
The revolution will not be televized. We will not know what is happening until it is war. Instead, we'll just be reminded of all the horrible things caused by human frailty, and told that frailty is a sign of the viewer's superiority. Superior patience, superior foresight, superior anxiety and stasis.
Wow that’s bleak, and it’s not a world I recognize. In my perspective, a lot of Americans don’t interact with the federal government much at all on a day-to-day basis, other than the post office. Although we do pay income tax, and many millions of people (such as seniors) get government checks.
Also, Americans don’t form organizations as much as they used to, but I wouldn’t blame this on the FBI. If you want to start a club to read books or play sports or talk politics, the government isn’t going to care. This is not China.
Also, the failure and even backfiring of public health efforts to promote vaccines suggests that Americans are not very receptive to government messages? I don’t think this can be summed up as “obedient.” The people are often unruly, although that is selective.
Indeed, we're all taught from childhood to dismiss the signs of such things. The federal government does not directly interact with most people, but the state governments do, and they're held to a leash via funding incentives and their conditional authority. But roads, telecommunications, banking, medicine, and more are all contingent upon the direction and/or regulation of federal agencies. Keynes, anyone? Nudges in regulation effect large results.
I'm gonna have to direct you to COINTELPRO, and the antiterror squads more recently. Example: their infiltration and destruction of the Black Panther Party is often framed as motivated by racism or anticommunism, but the declassified documents reveal a much more procedural interest in enforced social cohesion. The idea being that splinters of society are opportunities for deeper fractures and antigovernmental action. That's the same logic they approached the mob and KKK with.
I'm free to start a club. I'm not free to advertise it, make public demonstrations about the ideas of my club, or operate financially in any way without their consent, or the consent of those who operate according to their demands.
Obedience is not binary, and a contingent of people who deny obvious costs because their propagandists of choice say so are still following a leader. That kind of polarization opens lots of doors to dehumanization of one another, which only reinforces endpoint ideology: trust nobody but authority, and work.
Yes, the FBI does keep watch over (potentially) terrorist organizations, but the idea that this extends to most organizations doesn't make a whole lot of sense. They don't have the manpower to waste on that. And if they watch but don't do anything, does that count as control at all? If you don't do anything illegal (and sometimes even if you do), you will get bored waiting for the FBI to show themselves.
Also, I don't see why you can't advertise your club. Meetup exists. You can post to social networks.
Yes, there are some organizations that have trouble getting banking or using payment networks. There are numerous less-convenient workarounds, used by people who sell drugs, etc, which still aren't legal federally. We have a whole cryptocurrency industry that the SEC clearly didn't like, but they couldn't shut it all down, and hardly try anymore. So to say that you can't "operate financially in any way" is an exaggeration.
To get an idea of the scale of effort needed to actually control US society, look at Trump's efforts to crack down on illegal immigrants. It's very much work in progress, and whatever success they have will be terrible for the people caught up in it, but still quite limited.
The FBI is not the repression. They just broke down the historical organizations, and continue to sew discord in groups with political intentions today.
Social media exists. Meetup exists. They exist to propagate the belief in liberty, while constantly censoring people and groups for opaque reasons. They exist to ensure that any groups rely on an authority rather than build their own infrastructure. Itch and Steam have deplatformed hundreds of games in the past month based solely on the whims of Visa and MasterCard.
The control is your reasonable skepticism. It's the inconvenience of developing communities that aren't centered around someone bilking everyone else. It's misinformation propagated across multiple dimensions of society and depths of understanding. It's believing that a criminal is a kind of person, all the while nearly every US citizen technically commits crimes weekly. It's the idea that any connecting of these dots is conspiratorial, and not founded in a deep understanding of power dynamics and history.
It's the fact that cryptocurrency does not allow for anonymity, yet people act like it does. That the SEC adopted it into their fold of regulations, and that anyone who tries to do anything on the blockchain that corresponds with material transactions is easily correlated by the dragnet surveillance systems. Selective enforcement is evidence for a distrust, not for reliability. Besides, the SEC only cares about financialization, why would they care about cryptocurrency once they understood how to trace it?
I'm framing this in ways that ring conspiracy theory bells because paranoid analysis allows for a simplified understanding of the ways we all oppress each other, repress ourselves, and pass it along, without having to get into the philosophical reasoning, historical evidence, and more nuanced models of these dynamics, while resisting the tendency toward depression that such ideas lead people to and the dehumanization of one another that typically manifests when people push past that demotivation. Its major fault is that one must be willing to go along with the logic, because no, it is not entirely true. These ideas are really about vague incentive structures and human errors compounding. I can offer the more concrete works of theory I'm riffing on, but knowing your ideological background, they're not the kind of thing that'd appeal. Let me know if you want them, but you'll have to tolerate and work with Marxist ideas to understand the reasoning, even if the conclusions are not often Marxist.
A few thoughts:
Defending against a tyrannical government is just another excuse in a long list of excuses that gun rights advocates have invoked over the decades and the real reason people want them is because they make them feel powerful, the specific threat is not important
Even if defending against a tyrannical government was truly high on your list of reasons, so long as the military obeys orders from that tyrannical government there is no hope any civilian with guns can stand against their technological superiority
Most of the people who are gun rights advocates happen to not have a problem with this particular tyrannical government and so even assuming the above two were not true, they have no desire to use their guns to overthrow anything
I don't think many people are interested in throwing their life away due to what they experience as, at worst, political disagreements.
Yeah, for the average American not all that much has changed. Disclaimer, average American has more privilege than certain minorities etc etc, but in the end that’s the end of it. Not all that much actually changed for your standard middle income white American, so they’re not about to rise up or whatever.
Always 3 missed meals from a revolution, they're definitely good at keeping us fat and happy here
Plus, football just started.
BREAD AND CIRCUSES, BABYYYYYY.
Correct. That is an argument that has been made repeatedly
Correct....ish? Depends on how you view what they're doing. Further it's worth noting that that people who disagree with the previous argument are the people who disagree with Trump (mostly).
I mean the VAST majority of guns are owned on some mix of "better to have it and not need it" and "well now that i've got one lets be a collector" range. Very very very few people buy guns planning to EVER use them against anyone, and frankly the people who do are dangerous.
Couple of reasons:
As mentioned, the people who hate Trump have always been pro gun control. The people who like Trump are the majority of gun owners (playing fast and loose with stats here but its close enough). So the people who might want to do that, can't do that, because they don't own weapons (and there might be trends showing that's changing).
People talk a lot of shit and don't do much. Human nature. People have been swearing they're going to leave the country or get ready for violent revolution, in my lifetime, every single president starting with Bush 2. I think you can objectively prove shit is a LOT worse, but I still know precious few people who are remotely serious about doing anything, let alone political revolution.
People aren't actually having their lives affected much. "Hey lets go use the threat of death to affect government" kinda requires a SERIOUS level of motivation, and quality of life wise, for 90% of the country, shit's basically the same. It very much might cross that threshold, but right now people aren't going to risk their, and their loved ones, lives over a news headline. Especially when most people who've been paying attention know that for every 5 terrible things that happen, 50 get reported.
All that said, a part of the argument of the people who own weapons, who are more sane, is that it's not about storming the military so much as the threat of it. The civilians will NEVER "win" by the standards many people imagine. They will however be a fucking nightmare. Millions of people, all armed, all in territory they know, all willing to kill/disrupt at any moment, anywhere in the country.
So yes, assuming the US military even agreed to fight, you're looking at the WORST possible conflict ever. They'll "win" just about every engagement that happens remotely on even terms, but there's so many of them, you can't identify them, and while you're doing all this, the economy of the country is going to fall the fuck apart and every single enemy and ally is going to be looking at all that land and those resources (and you know, the nukes), and wondering what they want to do about that.
In short:
No one is going to be violently revolting yet. Even if you flipped the script and the dems all owned the guns or whatever, you still wouldn't see violent revolution. It's ABSOLUTELY a last resort sort of thing, and as bad as things are, they're no where near the case where people are willing to risk literally everything over it. In just about every situation throughout history that's been FORCED, and people have lived in much much much worse conditions for much longer times before resorting to violence.
Your question assumes that politics is as deterministic as chess and that we have already reached checkmate for democracy here. I reject that premise. Inflation is going to hit hard because of tariffs and Congress could turn over with the Democrats taking control next year.
People in the US who partake in personal gun ownership (not related to military service or an armed occupation) do so for one of two reasons (or both): sport or self-defense/security. There's a lot I could say about my feelings on this, but I'll attempt to keep that out of it.
Gun owners, especially those who are proud NRA members, will use the phrase "the right to bear arms" frequently, but they have no intent to overthrow a government. On the more extremist level, some may take the "security" reason a step further, and say that applies to property invasion by a government entity. On a different level of extremism, "preppers" may believe guns are essential if we enter a post-apocalyptic world and they need to survive - but this is also "security" in the grand scheme of things.
The talk about resorting to guns to defy the government is mostly theoretical. In practice, most people are unwilling to defy the police (outside the ritual of nonviolent protest), or to become fugitives.
It would take more than guns to create an army.
Also, it’s a big country and Trump himself is far away and heavily guarded. Your beef is probably not with the local or state government. What are you going to do locally?
Sometimes people protest in front of local federal buildings, but the things they object to mostly aren’t happening in those buildings.
Even ignoring sound objections made in other comments, the likelihood of popular violent reactions against their own government is much lower than you think. You seem to believe that unbearable situations will inevitably lead to strong opposition. That is often not the case. And when violent opposition do take place it can take decades of abuse for that to occur. Specially if those in power have the world's most funded military under their control.
There’s no point in creating a vacuum when there is nothing to fill it.
Everything to the left of Republicans and MAGA is too busy tearing itself apart to form a cohesive plan for stabilizing our failing federal state. We are a shambles; we are unwilling to compromise within our own ranks enough to form a working coalition. We agree neither on goal nor enemy.
E: What would violence without a plan do other than further entrench this current administration’s power?
Part of the issue is that the right to bear arms isn’t really a good way to prevent government tyranny in a country with a military as advanced as the United States. This isn’t a developing nation where guys with automatic weapons and pickup trucks are anywhere close to being able to take on the military.
If there were anything that would happen, it would be more like what happened in Ireland where small groups conduct guerrilla warfare against the authorities and bomb civilians. Even that requires radicalization and strong leadership on the left which, no matter how much the media wants you to think it exists, does not exist on a wide scale in the US.
I'm also not American, but AFAICT the core problem is that not enough Americans actually recognize the problem, which is why there hasn't been a nonviolent ousting of Trump by the Dems - they're afraid that the Rs will frame it as the Dems pulling a partisan coup, and use it as an excuse to escalate, with the average American not backing the Dems or possibly slamming them for their 'partisanship'.
What would a nonviolent ousting of Trump by the Dems looks like?
I don't know.
The Dems have had so many windows of opportunities and they've let them pass by (the entire Biden presidency, refusing to accept various department heads, stonewalling bills in congress, declaring that Trump was an invalid presidential candidate as he refused to accept the results of the previous election), and Trump et al have been steadily working to close them. At this point, I think the only answer is for a massive national popular protest (realistically, probably caused by Trump ratfucking the economy and pissing everyone off), and for the Dems to leverage that mass popular support to take decisive action to take down Trump (yes, that's vague, I know).
To be clear, nonviolent and legal are two different concepts. I suspect that the answer would be Dems doing all sorts of illegal things to remove Trump, on the basis that Trump et al has done all sorts of illegal things him/themselves and stripped out all the checks and balances that could stop him.
The key point here is that with sufficient popular backing, Trump et al would probably back down before the fight, to avoid reprisals for unnecessarily fighting a losing battle.
So, what things might the Dems do? Start with the obvious: Trump is repeatedly ignoring the supreme court, and preventing that is a good waypoint. However, he's stripped the supreme court of their ability to enforce anything against an executive that's in contempt of court. In other words, there isn't a viable method for Trump to be held accountable for his breaking the law - except impeachment.
Impeachment requires the support of Republicans in congress. That's not going to happen unless some Rs are pressured to flip, somehow.
The convenient magical solution is to vote out Republicans from congress, and push through an impeachment. Realistically, that won't happen. And at this point, I think too many Republicans are MAGAs to gain a majority in the senate.
So there's no legal option here to my knowledge (but there are probably a bunch of options that lawyers could suggest, the problem is that Trump is playing Legal Calvinball so the laws basically don't matter), the only option is to take direct action to block the executive with the legal basis that this is a constitutional crisis, and hope the executive doesn't successfully escalate to violence. So what would direct action look like?
Well, the best option would have been to shut down govt with a debt ceiling. But that window of opportunity is already closed. The second best option is probably a general strike, with a demand that Trump immediately resign.
If any of this is obviously likely to succeed, then Trump et al will pre-emptively save their own necks like rats on a sinking ship, and the problem will disappear. The only problem is that the prerequisites for success that I've described are best described as fiction.
Honestly, at this point I don't know if there is a nonviolent way to oust him. Even if he gets removed via impeachment (which is unlikely, since he already got impeached and acquitted twice), the backlash will be massive and has potential to spark a civil war. The only scenario I can see him being impeached peacefully is due to him doing something that's so awful, I can't even imagine because not even the insurrection was enough to turn opinion against him and his regime. I don't think even solid confirmation he was in the Epstein files and went to the island would be enough anymore.
Impeachment in the House and removal in the Senate.
Neither of which are things Democrats can do at the moment.
Yeah, the person I was responding to had asked what nonviolent removal would look like and I answered.
Well, I specified by the Dems for a reason because I wondered if the commenter had specifics in mind, which they answered for me already.
Thinking about it a bit more, the right answer is to fund (either privately, or by outright seizing money from other parts of the govt e.g. NASA could transfer $1B to the court or such) the supreme court enforcing the contempt of court against the US govt, on the basis that when the executive takes illegitimate actions they don't get to strip the funding of their own checks and balances. That's at least only a financial illegality, as opposed to an outright reach beyond their legal powers.
Edit: to be clear, this may involve police (sherriff, IIRC) action, but that doesn't count as violence IMO. Taking any sort of direct enforcement action requires either the consent of the criminal in yielding to the cop, or use of force to make the criminal yield. There's always a risk Trump will just blanket refuse to yield to the law, and in such a circumstance there's no option but some form of coercion. That or passive refusal to acknowledge their power, which to be fair is a common method of thwarting a coup, but is vulnerable to violence wielded to force submission.
The president has his own private military force with a budget of over 3B dollars. He also has the CIA and FBI more or less at his disposal, who are absolutely monitoring for threats on the president. Finally, the government spends nearly 1 trillion dollars on the military every year- the president is in direct control of the entire military force. In your hypothetical, can you explain to me how a private force of citizens with guns can actually overthrow the government?
I can’t, that’s why I’m asking about the perspective from people who live there and know more than I do. I’ve heard it many times as an argument for why it’s necessary to maintain the right to own guns so I’m as perplexed as you are.
Idk why you're all that "perplexed" about it. There's a lot of reasons to ban gun ownership. People who own guns would prefer to continue owning guns. In America, conveniently for them the second item of the Bill of Rights is
Therefore arguing that it is necessary for them to continue to own guns to overthrow the government is convenient for them, since any law that bans guns is superceded by the constitution (a higher authority), and changing the constitution is virtually impossible.
It's not more complicated than that. People who own guns want to keep owning guns. They make the easy and practically infallible legal argument to accomplish their goal of continuing to own guns. Because they want to keep owning guns.
It sounds like your question is much simpler - you're wondering how people can have a justification which is in conflict with reality. The answer is cognitive dissonance. Humans will make up any excuse that fits their world view.
I don’t think we’re at the level where a violent uprising is needed, but assuming the current trajectory is maintained it’s just exhibit A on why lax gun laws as a stated hedge against dictatorships is a bad argument.
It’s far too narrow and easily gamed around — it just requires some level of popular support and it now just makes the problem worse. Bonus points if you can make gun ownership a partisan issue favouring the regime.
I highly recommend the book How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter.