House passes bill to expand background checks for gun sales

[JasonBlack]

(06-03-2022, 12:30 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: That depends on your definition of dictator. The USA has had continued slavery in all but name in many southern states, and racial profiling, red lining and discrimination in most states. Most people (including blacks, women, young people and poor people) not being allowed to vote until recently, and now efforts and supreme court decisions to restrict voting again, is not the definition of a free society. Arguably, Woodrow Wilson was a dictator and a racist during world war one. Lincoln and FDR did some questionable wartime restrictive measures. The Patriot Act, National Defense Acts and other policies put the USA on the path to dictatorship under W. Bush. Trump organized a coup and used his office to empower himself to cheat others. Guns did not prevent any of this. Citizens owning guns and weapons of war have nothing at all to do with whether our president is a dictator. You fail to make that connection historically. Arguments that dictators restrict gun ownership is often false, as the history of the Third Reich showed.

I agree with you this far, as I have said: I don't agree that juntas, dictators and thugs should have a monopoly on weapons, if people power does not work, which is the case today in a number of countries-- although the only alternative then is civil war/revolution and an alternative state, not anarchy and chaotic individual violence. But in the USA, those who want no restrictions on owning guns happen to be the thugs and would-be dictators themselves. Those who genuinely want more freedom and more justice in the USA, who are those on the left and not the right, have many means left to them yet that they can use to achieve political and social goals without forming armies or stockpiling weapons of war. People in many countries need to be careful that they don't vote themselves into dictatorship, which seems to be the case in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, The Phillipines, Nicaragua, Brazil, some African countries, arguably India, and possibly the USA.

Notice that even a militarized state oppressing another people like Israel strictly regulates citizen gun onwership. No country besides the United States of America holds this fantasy that individuals owning weapons of war without any restriction guarantees our freedom. And no other country suffers the inevitable results of this fantasy. And that's not the only fantasies that Americans hold these days, with also poor results.

My answer to this is quite simple: my definition of a dictator requires that they have the power and intention not to leave when voted out of office. Trump leaving after 4 years (and telling all the protestors to go home)? ....no, that's not a dictator. The only arguable case which could be made might be FDR, but he kicked the bucket in office, so we'll never know. Calling someone a dictator who voluntarily leaves when they're voted out is just...dramatic.