Remember that quip you get from every bobbleheaded liberal when you remind them that the Second Amendment is supposed to be about defending freedom against tyranny?
“What?”, they inevitably respond, “you’re going to fight at tank with your AR15?” (No, I won’t have to, because if the government comes for the guns, it’ll be the AR15s and the tanks against the progressives with their protest signs. But I digress).
The question about whether tyranny in Venezuela will, to paraphrase Mick Jones, will stay or go, is partly about socialist power politics, partly about manipulation of mobs…
…and mostly about who’s got the guns.
Military defectors say it’s also all about guns. The military apparently doesn’t have any, or at least access to them, despite the massive arms sales from Russia that Venezuela’s socialist regime has spent its oil bounty on. [Former soldier] Hidalgo Azuaje added: “We’re not saying that we need only US support, but also Brazil, Colombia, Peru, all brother countries, that are against this dictatorship.”
The military men are pleading for arms. They’ll take care of the job, they say, if they have the tools to do it.
Recall that when Venezuelan soldiers mutinied in the area of Petare earlier this month, their priority also was seizing weapons.
It does suggest that a penurious armed force with no access to weapons is the problem. Apparently, not even the soldiers are trusted with guns by the dictatorship. The Maduro regime is starting to arm gangs as a means of checking the military. They trust gangs and thugs, but not responsible military men with guns, and seem to have disarmed them
It’s worth noting that Hugo Chavez – whose death let to Maduro and his clacque ineriting and extending their absolute power – got his start as a paratrooper in the Venezuelan army. So the regime knows what it needs to defend against.
When Brazil’s new government instituted a right to keep and bear arms for Brazilians, it wasn’t entirely about street crime.
Totalitarian dictatorship has been described as “a boot on your face, forever”. A monopoly on firepower is what makes it possible to keep that boot there, unmolested.
It seems to me that if a person were a minion in the single-party political machine intent on dominating the state by crushing deplorable old white men who are suspicious of the “other” and bitterly clinging to their religion, the “resisting tyranny” purpose of the Second Amendment would be a bug, not a feature. The more effectively you demonstrate to such a person how private arms could prevent his victory, the more ardently he would desire disarmament.
And lo, there’s Ron over there. And what does he desire?
Huh, off topic, one has to wonder if we know the opposition well enough to, you know, help them out a bit here. Things could blow up quickly if someone figured out how to do it right.