Assault Weapons Ban

[TNF]

Absolutely not. Under no circumstances should we allow ourselves to be deprived of arms by the state.

[TNF]

Yes, I think that private possession of "assault weapons" should be banned, along with most other guns and ammunition. If the Second Amendment is a problem, then so much the worse for the Second Amendment. It's probably well past time for that to go, too.

Atlas incarnate here. You can't be serious.

Why not? The original purpose of being able to create a people's militia to resist tyranny is no longer valid.

Sure, if you ignore the entire history of the United States.

[TNF]

I can give plenty of examples in American history where the threat of an armed uprising lead to a shift in government policy.

Since World War I?

The 1930s - The threat of (and actual) uprisings in the wake of the devastation of the Great Depression led Roosevelt to tack to the left and implement a reform program that opened up public life to the millions of workers who were otherwise out in the cold prior to it. This was done, of course, not because Roosevelt was committed to it (he ran as a conservative and governed as one from 1933 to 1935), but because his hand was time and time again forced by the sway of events.

The 1960s - Malcolm X seems to be the best example here. Had there not been someone out there calling for freedom 'by any means necessary' and encouraging self-defense, I highly doubt JFK or LBJ would have gone as far as they did on the issue of civil rights and on the war on poverty. Martin Luther King, Jr. might have made political space for liberals to sign onto what was originally a radical movement (it wasn't Democrats organizing the Alabama sharecroppers and other interracial unions in the '30s), but Malcolm X made that project possible because he and those who followed him scared the sh#t out of white America.

The 19th Century and early 20th Century are also obvious cases. Would there have been a 'Progressive Era' without the labor upheaval of the 1870s-1890s? I'd wager not. And of course, the greatest examples of the armed public forcing through real social reforms and securing their rights lie in the First (1775-83) and Second (1861-65) American revolutions. In the latter, it was the armed freedmen and their white allies that battled back the Klan and won radical democratic reforms at the state level.