[LeslieBates]

Once upon a time ago during a discussion on gun control someone asked the following question:

If the majority wants a certain government, how is the minority going to defeat them with guns? The majority will have more guns.

That’s a good question.

If all it took to construct a building was to stack stones upon each other there would be no science of architecture and no point in writing The Fountainhead. If all it took to fight a war was to use brute force without rational input there would be no science of warfare or a military organization. If all factors were equal in warfare then a simple majority of combatants would win every time. But in reality all factors are never equal. Thus the purpose of military science is to identify the factors that favor one side or the other and use or negate those factors to one’s advantage.

A work of history that covers this process is The Myth Of The Great War by John Mosier. In this work Mosier explains how the Central Powers managed to avoid defeat until the American entry into the WW I even though they were outnumbered by the Allies.

Mosier also illuminates the role of the active mind in warfare:

Over at Pershing’s headquarters, young ex-cotton dealer turned intelligence officer, Samuel Hubbard, looked at all the available information and concluded that the Germans were going to turn south, and launch an offensive across the Chemin des Dames at the end of May. Despite the fact that the Allied intelligence estimates had been continuously wrong for the last forty-five months of the war, Hubbard’s analysis was disregarded. How could the Americans, who had just arrived on the scene, be better then the French and the British, who had been doing for it for years?

Mosier, who up to this point had been cataloging the effects of the unconscious approach to war as practiced by the Allied powers, would say this:

On 27 May 1918, The Germans, to the consternation and surprise of everyone except Captain Hubbard, smashed across the ridge.

In order to succeed in business one has to possess valid knowledge and use an active mind. The same in true in the practice of warfare as demonstrated by Captain Hubbard. In warfare the active mind with valid knowledge will prevail over the practice of blind obedience. I must also point out that as long as one free to communicate then one is free to persuade members of a political majority that they have made an error.

And not everyone who votes for a state of tyranny, especially if they’ve been bribed into it, will place their own lives on the line for it.

[StephenGrossman]

>In warfare the active mind with valid knowledge will prevail over the practice of blind obedience.

Within a limit. Even Special Forces can be defeated by a sufficiently large enemy. On the other hand, the US Rangers who defended Bastogne in WW2 successfully held off a German force 17 times larger! Accepted military doctrine, successfully used in the Pacific island-hopping strategy, held that defenders would be overwhelmed by four times the number of attackers. 

[CedarBristol]

We have a right to guns because the presumption of innocence applies to all of us and my desire to collect and play with guns is no threat to anyone unless I show evidence otherwise.  This is the #1 reason why the 2nd amendment matters.  

#2 is that I also have a right to insure against violence in cases where the police can’t protect me which happens all the time, but is unlikely to happen to any one of us especially if we don’t live in south Chicago. Our right to insure against this possibility does matter, but it is a distant second to the former point.

The examples of military organization trumping numbers cited here are all examples of why overthrowing the government with personally owned weapons is a fantasy.  You have no chance with rifles against a government in possession of a functioning military organization with aircraft, tanks and artillery or any one of those things.  The idea of personal gun ownership as a backstop against tyranny holds no water and needs to be abandoned by 2a defenders.

The Warsaw ghetto uprising is my favorite counter example.  That is a group of people with small arms holding some ground against the most modern military force in the world much longer than the state of Poland did.  They didn’t win that fight, and they never could have, and they knew it.  It was never the less better to resist than to comply as compliance would have put all of them into concentration camps where there chances of living to see 1945 would have been worse.  Some of them did survive.  What this example and others like it tell us is that although there is no substitute for victory, there can be objectives that are worth fighting for even in the absence of any hope of winning.  My conclusion from this is that there is a tiny grain of validity to the idea of guns as insurance against tyranny, but it is microscopic and really doesn’t merit a place alongside #1 and #2.

A minor point:  It was the 101st Airborne, not the Rangers who held Bastogne in WWII.

A not so minor point:  Ask a Korean, one of the best weblogs out there tells the story of how the South Korean town of Kwangju tried an armed uprising with plenty of small arms and a population with plenty of training and how that failed.

To wander a bit off of this topic, the Korean is one of my favorite bloggers.  He is a Christian leftist and has read and rejected Ayn Rand, but he is one of the most thoughtful writers out there.  Read his posts on Culturalism and plane crashes, Confucianism, and just browse his archives.  You will be glad you did.  

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