Comment on Would the United States actually risk a Tiananmen Square incident?
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days agoMy question is, why do authoritarians try so hard to disarm a populace then? It seems every person thinks we’ll have a large formation of troops fighting it out and not turn this into any number of guerilla resistance movements against the USA and other countries throughout time.
Fedizen@lemmy.world 4 days ago
There’s 1.5 guns per person in the USA, but we also have the largest prison population per capita in the world.
I can’t name an authoritarian that started by disarming people. My guess would be there comes a point where disarming the populace happens in authoritarian process as part of “disarming the enemy”. When the enemy is the public, you disarm all of them.
So succesful authoritarians eventually just reach the point where the public is the enemy. They either get there by killing people or imprisoning them or starving them.
In the US they’re making housing unaffordable. You sell your gun to pay rent, problem solved for the wealthy. There’s much higher death rates for homeless people. There have been a number of stats that say the US has similar death rates to societies in civil wars.
If guns were used as a solution I think we’d see more sherriffs and deputies being shot during evictions.