And I have never been in favor of bump-stocks.
As far as fighting the Army and Navy, yeah you’ll never win that fight. You’d be hard pressed to beat the local PD since so many of them have fucking tanks nowadays, you know in case your smoking pot in your basement and they need to no-knock your door at 3am and shoot your dog.
Yeah, I’m sorry man, I was replying to your post but wasn’t really directing all of that at you specifically, if that makes any sense?
“we’re pretty well fucked?”
Short of another Great Depression type situation I don’t see how we unite and fix things.
Or the government abusing their power so heavily that we start picking off politicians in retaliation.
Yeah, I get it and I get where you’re coming from.
This is a pipe-dream. Every other major country in the world has centralized power (other than Spain, apparently, but who would call them a major power?). How would this magical land of the free fair in a world with other major powers?
It’s easy to complain—Trump does this all day long. But as Trump has found, it’s one thing to criticize, it’s another to come up with a workable, much less improved, alternative.
You can’t just look back at the Founding Fathers and say, yup, they had it completely right, and ignore all the other factors that have changed in the last 250 years.
Because we’re totally going to start a land war with China?
I mean we might. But only because our military is so big that we can. Which is exactly the issue the Founders saw.
Of course we need a centralized government, we sorted that out in the 1860’s.
And there is no alternative, because alternatives would require an educated electorate. We just elected a racist game show host to be our leader and most of our representatives are actively trying to kill us so that their owners can get more money they’ll never spend.
This is why I prefaced my gun control wishlist with ‘ponyland.’
Fair.
Now we’re more getting into the whole idea of, “If you could start from scratch to make a perfect system how would you do it?”
The first standing army was organized in 1792 under President Washington. If the other founding fathers had a problem with that, they should have spoken up then.
Except for the part where they disbanded after 4 years.
Maybe the problem really is with the American military. Post WW2 is was just huge and instead of dismantling it we just let it go. Eisenhower saw this, as the leader of this ramped up military. He warned us of the effects of the military industrial complex. I mean, dude was the only 5 general and the war hero that won WW2. He chose to use his resignation speech to sternly, earnestly warn us about this. Maybe this standing army on our soil and everywhere else around the world has infected our society and the world at every level.
The world is way more socially and economically connected than it ever was before. The scenarios that would cause a WW3 seen less likely every year.
Thought experiment. How about we turn guardianship of US soil over to the National Guard? We eliminate the standing Department of The Army and Marines. But keep the Air Force and Navy to provide strategic power if needed. Of course we keep the nukes for now.
If we need an upswell of boots on the ground, we simply use selective service, the system is already in place. To keep the populace somewhat trained for draft purposes we do a lottery like the jury selection system and those selected (you can certainly volunteer too like now) and you go weekend warrior with the National Guard. Also If you are active duty in the National Guard you can have a few of these semi-auto assault rifles at home.
By jove, I like this idea. Someone poke some holes in it. No more giant standing army. How much money do we save? How does it positively or negatively effect gun culture?
There was a lot of demobilization after WW2, though, surely? Even today Wiki lists total active duty and reserve personnel as about 2 million, whereas at its peak during WW2 there were 16 million serving (again, source = Wiki), as against a population less than half what it is today.
Trump: “Hold my nonalcoholic beer.”
Well, those 16 million were drafted.
Look at spending. From Korea on it never goes really goes down. It spikes for wars, but the baseline stays consistent.
Before WW2 our spending was basically non-existent.
That’s a common misconception.
It was reorganized, and the Legion of the United States are now the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Infantry Regiments of the US Army.
For instance, note the official commission date of the 1st Infantry Regiment.
If warnerds need to fulfil the urge to spend a fuckton of money on violent, macho toys then I recommend https://www.forgeworld.co.uk/
They could have a demi-legion of Titans for the cost of one of their armouries.
or become a swordnerd and engage in wankery over 10 grand damascene blades
No argument there.
Sounds great and all but the money will keep us throwing billions away every year due to lobbyists and campaign donations.
It was totally unreasonable to suggest we should have disbanded our military after WWII though, given the stance the Soviets had taken in eastern Europe at the time.
It just wasn’t really an option.
Perhaps, perhaps not. The Soviets built 100,000! (I just researched that, holy crap!) T54/55 tanks since 1947, two years after the war.
We can debate the intent and strategy of this all you like, but let me propose this: After 1945 Germany was divided and the US kept an enormous Army and Air Force base there and had craptons of military there too, mostly as equipment like our own tanks, but also plenty of troops.
If WW2 had been fought in South America instead of Europe and Mexico got divided, and the Soviets left a big base and massed troops and equipment in Cancun, how do you think this may have affected our military?
I understand why these conditions existed historically, but the lesson of the last 2 generations of humans is that we are all connected now more than ever with labor, economies, and commerce intertwined.
We need to switch from the military to startups.