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Comment by christophilus | Hacker News Reader

I live in the southeast. There are pockets here that would be very tough to take. It would be a Vietnam situation. So, yes. The 2nd amendment still has deterrent power.

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Only if the government is stupid enough to take on them head-to-head. Any half-competent dictator will sell his vision first, saying how America is in danger and it's time for the freedom-loving patriots to take back their country...

...And then he can sit back and enjoy the fireworks from the safety of Washington DC, while his followers are doing the dirty work.

Those 2A arguments never really made sense to me: what makes you think your gun-toting neighbor (or even yourself) will be on the right side of freedom?

It wouldn't be a Vietnam situation, it would be an Iraq situation. Much more aerial surveillance and drone strikes.

I've no doubt that guerilla resistance would continue for years, but the imposition of petrol rationing alone would curtail almost all rebel attempts to hold anything of any importance within about two weeks.

If you can successfully blockade an interior group, sure. But that interior group has the ability to strike back and away from their interior that they want to hold. America's infrastructure is totally not hardened. The millions in prisons also make for a potential pool of manpower. All I'm really saying is any actual conflict would play out a lot different than the real civil war we had, or any of our foreign continent excursions where the enemy can't really strike back.

It is not a matter of hard or easy, is a matter of simple economics: 2nd amendment = high price to pay, no 2nd amendment = easy peasy.

This is a terrible form of romance America has adopted recently, and it's costing the country a lot. 2nd amendment proponents have been singing praises of it while the 1st amendment has continued to be curtailed. This decline started under clinton with restrictions on media revenue being lifted but it has gotten so much worse in the past year.

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