No, they couldn't shoot more than a few people before thousands of armed citizens made them stop.
To help clarify things: the city of LA has 10,000 police officers and 1,000,000+ armed citizens.
To help clarify things: the city of LA has 10,000 police officers and 1,000,000+ armed citizens.
The idea that in the US civil militias could really hold their own against the state is an absurd fiction.
Unless significant portions of the armed forces defected to join an uprising and managed to take their equipment with them, then it would be very one sided.
The militias will have hand guns and rifles, the state has everything up to and including nukes.
There is a probably apocryphal quote attributed to Isoroku Yamamoto, that if you tried to invade the mainland US, there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass. Isoroku Yamamoto was born in 1884.
War has progressed since then.
Satellites can look behind every blade of grass and let you know where the rifles are, then you can send in the drones while you sit back in your bunker and sip tea.
On home soil it may well do this, but equally it may go completely nuts if it feels subject to a genuine existential threat.
Look to the end of the Tamil Tigers for an example of what a modern military is capable of against insurgents when it pulls out all the stops. - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/17/death-of-the-ti...
And remember that the Tamil Tigers were one of the most experienced of the various guerrilla groups around the world.
Your mistaken notion that a rebellion can't fight a sophisticated military has been decisively disproved over the last decade in the middle east. Plausibly debated 15 years ago but now we know you're wrong.
ISIS took control of a large part of Iraq and Syria and they started with small arms. They took over army bases and stole gear (didn't think of that?). IDF has been throwing the best technology in the world at Hamas for decades. They're stronger than ever because they have popular support.
Suggesting that the U.S. military would fight against a popular uprising is beyond crazy and entirely ignorant. You can't know how our military works, or who it's made up of, and think that. This is crazier than any common conspiracy theory you can think of.
If it is more fragmented then it gets more complex as national solidarity breaks down at that point. Sure the army won't shoot Americans, but propaganda can start to redefine who counts as American.
ISIS did take over well equipped army bases with AK-47s, however only because the people with the equipment were not trained and ran away instead of using it.
And the IDF has only ever been in limited engagements against Hamas. They have never tried to completely destroy them militarily.
My point with the LTTE was never that a rebellion cannot fight a sophisticated military, just that if a sophisticated military uses total war tactics, they can utterly annihilate a foe.
What stops armies from doing this against a weaker enemy is not capability, but politics. The US could have nuked Vietnam for instance, but politically it would have been unjustifiable.
Ultimately, it is the attitude and makeup of your military that protects you from them, far more than the personal ownership of guns.
Edit - Regarding common conspiracies. My personal bet at the moment, ignorant and uninformed as I may be, is that there are a bunch of secessionists with power in Missouri and that this explains the bewildering actions of the Ferguson police.
It would seem a very good explanation for the actions of many of the authorities involved in the situation. Though, then again, so would complete incompetence, so in truth I am 50/50 on this.
And two days of American airstrikes was all it took to let the Kurdish militia make good headway into taking critical areas back.
> IDF has been throwing the best technology in the world at Hamas for decades. They're stronger than ever because they have popular support.
With Iron Dome, border fences, etc. their power to actually do anything to Israel has steadily decreased.
Most countries in the Middle East have mandatory military service. If they get invaded by a foreign force, they can raise local militias very quickly from people who not only already own guns, but also have received significant training in their usage and can get organized quickly due to the time they spent in military.
In contrast, most Americans don't know how to hold a gun, much less fire one. And even those who are serious about guns have not actually been part of any military, or even a militia. Frankly, they would get mowed down by any sort of organized force in very quick order.
The claim that Americans don't know how to use guns is in the laughable category.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_co...
Also, merely counting guns per capita tells you very little as some people have lots of guns. You have ~ 40% of households with a gun and ~ 70% of people between the ages of 15 and 64.
This translates to ~ 80 million people of military age with access to firearms, and assuming that most veterans are in the households that have guns, up to an eighth of them trained to a high standard.
Now this, if it rose up and could be commanded as a single force, would be the largest military in the world, in terms of forces. However the only circumstance that I could see that even partially happening would be in response to an external military invasion.
What is far more likely a scenario if the US becomes unstable is a complicated civil war started by a state attempting to secede, the federal government reacting, then more states getting involved. In that case you never get one big force, just lots of smaller state forces with the military not wanting to get involved at all, but at most trying to act in a peacekeeping role and making sure that the big guns stay locked up.
One thing to keep an eye out for, as I have said elsewhere, is that the military equipment given out is partly going to pro-secessionists in local and state police forces and it may be worth considering that the police in Missouri may not be merely incompetent in the way they are currently reacting to events.