Quote from Mamet:
What strikes me as strange is that you want a gun to protect yourself against the government. Most people want guns to protect themselves against thieves/intruders.
If the CIA decides to assassinate you, I'm sorry but a machine gun isn't going to make any difference. If you're talking about a massive citizen uprising against the government, it still wont make a difference. 100 million americans armed with machine guns vs a (relatively) small military armed with tanks, planes, and nuclear bombs? Our guns might be big, but theirs are bigger. I don't like the odds.
I'm definitely opposed to the banning of firearms, but the line needs to be drawn somewhere and for me the line is drawn at handguns.
I'm going home now, maybe I'll check the board later. Even if I don't agree with everything you say, you have interesting ideas and don't resort to wild punctuation and the caps lock, so I enjoy reading what you think.
The objective is not to make it as easy as possible for the government. You and the other people (some could be described as sheep) resign yourselves too easily to authoritarian governments. The objective isn't to provoke the government, the objective is to stay out of their way but take action if needed.
Your logic is like this: If the market is falling to 0 and you're long, just hold. Don't even make an attempt at throwing out a market order in hopes of a fill. Don't attempt going short. That kind of thinking doesn't make sense in terms of capital preservation. In the real world of protecting property, not having guns doesn't make sense in terms of property preservation.
It's also very irrational to think the markets would never crash. Likewise, it's irrational to think economic prosperity in your respective state will last.
I believe everyone should be armed to the teeth, with fully automatic weapons and more. Rights are not granted for free -- most of them were paid for in bloodshed. At some point somewhere, someone has to be willing to pay that price if there are too many transgressions by a tyrannical state.
Look at the global situation today. Mohammed Atta was wired $100,000 before 9/11 from Pakistan's ISI. We do nothing to Pakistan, and Pakistan has a nuke. Iran supposedly doesn't have a nuke, and they are maligned in the papers non-stop by the Israeli-war-state propaganda machine. Would they get this kind of treatment if they had nuclear weapons? We don't give this treatment to Pakistan. We reward them with F-16s. If anything, the world today lends credibility to my ideas. It is correct and appropriate for Iran to have nuclear weapons, given the vast difference in treatment states with nuclear weapons get versus non-nuclear states.
The fact of the matter is that what's occurring on the global scale gets mirrored on the interpersonal scale. Rights of nations and individuals are always trampled unless they are able to have a defense.
Essentially, guns are your only hedge against tyranny. You can trust historical data and not maintain any sort of hedge; however, when stability is gone, guns are the last thing between you and control under a state without your best interests at heart.
