I'm going to take this gun control argument

[Ma'ake]

Originally Posted by Venkman

I don't know. I think the average U.S. soldier would be a little more hesitant to brutally put down a rebellion of his own people.

*If* the insurgents are able to portray themselves as just good old patriots, I agree. If they appear as domestic terrorists, they're done. If military moms from Texas & Florida & all other states start losing sons in a protracted insurgency, the odds are in favor of the military, politically & emotionally, it seems to me.

I certainly don't intend to compare anyone on this board - or really, 99% of American citizens as a whole - to Tim McVeigh, but he was certainly fighting governmental "tyranny". (That's one of the things to be expected in a culture where so many consider government to be *the* enemy.)

One thing that complicates the notion of Americans toppling their own government is that so many Americans - of so many diverse & contradictory persuasions - consider the government to be the enemy, that the likelihood of a unified force seems pretty small, to me.

It seems far more likely that we'd have some smaller group of non-mainstream patriots rise up & be crushed, forever dooming any futher insurrections to terrorist status.