I'd forgotten that April 19th was the anniversary of more than one revolution. Sixty-three years ago tomorrow, the doomed Jews in the Warsaw ghetto rose up against their Nazi oppressors. Unfortunately, their revolution wasn't successful, but at least they took many of the barbarians with them, and it once again displays the folly of disarming the citizenry.

> it once again displays the folly of disarming
> the citizenry.

I agree, but I don't have as much faith in the right to bear arms.

The Shiites and Kurds in Saddam's Iraq were armed to the teeth, far beyond even the average NRA member, but they didn't have freedom. When the government has helicopter gunships, artillery, tanks and poison gas - and the willingness to use them - those rifles and hand guns lose thier effectiveness.

Likewise, the kind of US government the NRA is protecting against, is the kind of government that would render rifles and hand guns ineffective.

As the US government racks up more knowledge and success fighting insurgents in Iraq, they gain more knowledge in how to fight them back home. Combined with US surveillance and database technology infrastructure - not to mention a government and police that hasn't been run into the ground the way Iraq's was - and I don't see an oppressive government caring much about handguns and rifles.

You're assuming that the military of that oppressive government (the one that swears to obey the Constitution) will follow orders to slaughter citizens.

Good point. The US military is better educated than most, especially in the last 25 years. They're more likely to think about what they've been ordered to do.

It used to be that courts often gave a young criminal the choice of going to jail or joining the military. While this was a great way to reform them (and probably cheaper than jail), I'm suddenly glad that this doesn't happen much any more.

ahh, yes but then there is group think and assorted other phenomena. Unless the military refused in droves in wouldn't matter.

Let's face it if the government is ordering the slaughtering of Americans then there is likely to be little to stop them from summary executions of soldiers refusing orders, lawful or not.

A few dead comrades can have an amazing effect on those left standing.

> there is likely to be little to stop them from
> summary executions of soldiers refusing orders,
> lawful or not.

That may have worked in WWI - here in Canada they executed soldiers for the most petty offenses back then. These days, US soldiers have a high school and often a college education, back then they had far less. Thanks to the schooling and the media, they're far less trusting of authority. Order the execution of soldiers for refusing to slaughter innocent civilians, and those giving the orders might find the guns pointed at them instead.

Of course, anyone resisting the government, especially while exercising thier right to bear arms, will be painted as criminals, not innocent civilians.

Bruno Bettelheim, concentration camp survivor and eminent psychiatrist, wrote an article many years ago titled, "The Real Tragedy of Anne Frank." I think that it appeared in Harper's. Bettleheim, who was castigated by the community for his views, said that, instead of hiding in attics as Anne Frank did, the Jews should have all fought back, as the Warsaw Jews did.

As I remember, it took the Nazis roughly 5 divisions to break the ghetto resistance. Even though German divisions are smaller than American divisions, it was still a bunch of Nazis who couldn't fight on other fronts.

Somebody like Hume said, "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing." I'm not sure that I have to guts to fight like the Jews and the Poles who supported them, but I try to do my part against what I perceive as today's wrongs.