Had a bit of an epiphany today. Every gun nut I know says that guns are for self defense or to help defend against the over-reach of government, which, ok, fine, I can buy that. But of them, I really wonder how many have ever taken any form of a self defense course or a martial art. Of the ones I know I can't think of a single one who has any sort of physical combat training. Hell most of them couldn't even jog a ten minute mile.
Having a gun is only a small part of a much larger equation for both self defense and military uses. There isn't a single military in the world that does not spend considerable effort training its troops in martial arts, or expecting physical conditioning. And many self defense situations are far better served by physical combat instead of gun combat. Only having training in one just seems...I dunno. Lazy? Or...inconsistent?
This is something that's always bothered me at gun ranges tbqh. I see so many guys that would have a hard time making it up 3 flights of stairs, and these guys think that they could fight the government? Or...even a home invader? This isn't true for all of them of course, but honestly anyone who doesn't do some form of physical conditioning who claims gun rights for self defense or government stuff is...well...totally full of crap.
Simply pulling out a weapon is enough to dissuade a home invader, who is basically fucked if they got hurt in any way during their robbery attempt. They can't risk having to explain away the injury at a hospital and not everyone has access to a back alley doctor. To put it lightly, there are very few stories of home invaders actually duking it out with armed defenders unless they had a gun too. So yes... range training is the most important part of home self defense because you really only get one shot.
I'd also like to point out that ISIL and other groups like them have managed to maintain control of vast parts of their countries by simply being the only guys in town with guns. Yes, they have terrible training and they get pushed out by US forces but they always come back once the US forces leave. This is why you can't WIN an engagement with indigenous forces: you have to leave sometime, but they LIVE there. It's why the Taliban is back. That's exactly how it would look in any long campaign against the government: the US Military doesn't have the numbers to control every fucking block of every little podunk in the US, so it really doesn't matter how well armed and trained they are... and they would be facing constant desertions from folks who want to check in on their families or just don't believe anymore.
So really... it doesn't matter if they are out of shape or poorly trained. There'd be more than enough people looking to fight it out with the US Military the moment they rolled into their town. All you need are bodies and guns to hold a town and all you need to do is wait for them to leave/reduce their numbers enough that they HAVE to leave. They only way to actually remove that kind of infestation would be to completely cleanse a town and if you thought our government was capable of that, we'd ALREADY be in the streets.
I mean... it's not like any militia would need to PUSH into another town on foot like World War 2. We're not talking a large scale campaign against another established military. We're talking a war of attrition against a force that can't replace it's numbers fast enough to counter it's losses. We can't even control our cities against the few criminals we have with 900,000 police in this country... sending 1.4 million soldiers in (even with 1.1 mil support personal), knowing that a fair number will desert the second they can, isn't going to be enough to control the country.
I guess what I'm saying is that gun ownership is probably the least of the reasons why we don't need to worry about the US Military actually trying to suppress the US population at a large scale.