- It is an illusion that widespread gun ownership offers any kind of protection against authoritarian governments. Show me one example where this has helped in any country in the last century or so.
Every armed population in the Middle East in the past decade. Relatively few armed ISIS fighters easily held hostage huge populations across Syria and parts of Iraq because those were unarmed, but Kurdish and Christian minority populations to the north and Lebanon (many civilian gun owners) to the south were safe. The Kurds had also been dealing with Turkey before that. Other countries like Turkey and Iran simply have enough centralized power to prevent terrorists from gaining territory, but they still have to fight tricky battles and kill many unarmed innocents taken hostage, which wouldn't happen in the first place if they were armed. Worse, the unarmed civilians being freed now from ISIS are falling back under Assad's or Putin's control, more dependent than ever.
Also, it's rare that you'll see an evil dictatorship stopped with guns, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Most authoritarian governments have already disarmed everyone beforehand, while anyone looking to turn evil has to take into account the armed population and won't do anything to provoke it. For example, any crackdown in Lebanon even on guns themselves would be met with so much resistance that it's not worth.
It is also an illusion that widespread gun ownership overs any significant safety to its owners (outside of very rural areas) [...]. Crime rates aren't higher in other rich countries with much more restrictive gun laws, in fact their number of gun deaths are lower by several multiples. Making gun laws more restrictive have for example in Switzerland noticeably reduced the number of gun-related deaths and injuries.
I don't doubt that restricting gun ownership decreases total homicides, but I'd have to see numbers. Saying that it decreases gun homicides is a silly argument. Of course with fewer guns, killers will use something else. There are gun attacks in the US and truck attacks in Europe. Americans also glorify guns to the point of weirdos feeling tempted to shoot things up for no good reason, so it's more of an issue here.
whatever safety it provides is more than compensated for by the harm widespread gun ownership causes even just in the form of accidents, suicides, domestic disputes etc. (ie, before easier access by criminals to guns is taken into account)
Nobody wants their right to self-protection limited because of the stupidest 1% of gun owners harming themselves, nor do they care. More people care to limit open carrying and such to reduce how many idiots are in close proximity with guns. But there's also the idealist argument that if nearly everyone has them and is trained properly, we'll be safer, like in Israel where people regularly carry AR-15s but also have all served in the IDF. Idk about the last one.
Trump is a dangerous leader, but to defeat him, public debate, the electoral system and the legal system have to be used. Arming the general population will do nothing (unless you advocate assassination).
I don't like him either, but comparing him to a bad dictator doesn't make sense and doesn't help defeat him. About half the Americans voted for him, he won a fair election, and he's not done anything to push large numbers of people to desperation. Some of the people who voted for him called Obama a Nazi but didn't really mean it; most of them have guns and could've taken him out if they really wanted.
