Feel like I'm probably waltzin' into a trollin' here, but for starters, I'd say the fantasy that the government would show up to every house in the country and forcibly take everyone's guns? Like, some Imperial-style commander orders that the US military go door to door?

Or like the grandma telling the current generation that everyone needs to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and lead a second American revolution

Or like the sith senator talking about how he's going to introduce "a little chaos" to collapse the government and make way for the Biblically-prophesied One World Government

Perhaps this seems normal to you? I know you work at the VA, so presumably some of this pants on head crazy nonsense has bleed into your psyche. Unavoidable job hazard, I suppose.

Like this one. Guns are our only protection against tyranny. Cowboy Bob learned that lesson the hard way. Go vote up that DefendYourBase clip in the hopper. There's a few lines at the end that really sum the whole thing up in a way I never could.

because it's bullshit

Not a troll, just curious to hear what people's values are and what they are or are not willing to accept. The world is not divided neatly into two well-defined camps, For and Against, so when disparate groups of individuals come together to agree on hating one specific thing, very important details always get fudged out.

For example, in regards to tyranny, Mr Kabbage is of the mind that "it can't happen here", while Mr Wildcat (who, in other contexts, is usually well aware of the problems inherent in trusting top-down solutions) apparently thinks we'd be OK if it did. These are two very different positions, and it's important to keep in mind which, if any, we accept.

Kabbage - I agree; I doubt the politicians and businessmen who have come out in favor of outright gun bans will ever be able to realize their dreams. However, re: the Sith Senator: I'd actually argue that this has already happened to a significant degree, and I'd be willing to bet that a sizable majority of PoEsters agree with this - or at least, used to agree with this, back when men like Jon Stewart and George Lucas were drawing the exact same analogies between "sith lords" and The Powers That Be. Surely, we haven't already forgotten Darth Cheney...!?)

Oscar - actually, most of the people I know at the VA are suffering from stress disorders and come from one of the old TV-watching generations; they ingest too much CNN, and as a result, are quite convinced that (despite a century of evidence firmly against it) prohibition is a fundamentally sane idea, working class Americans need to be disarmed for reasons of PreCrime, and we as a people would be wise to fully entrust our safety to not-racist police officers armed with tanks, drones, and Orwellian surveillance technology. Also, Syria is a war for freedom, Trump has nice hair, and Ariana Grande is just too precious.

Homer, come on man.

Oh, I'll go further than that, EH. I assert that the gun is a key instrument of control of the prole in America. They would be much more free without them, and if the government were ever so unwise as to take them away, it would lose the advantage.

If you go out to the Malheur site right now, you'll see a remarkable thing. A giant pile of guns. Abandoned. What do you make of that?

Has there ever been a country on Earth that saved itself from tiranny thanks to its previously owned weapons?

That I know of, tyrannical governments have been overthrown, using weapons, but buying them at Walmart wasn't a prerequisite for the revolution.

Alex Jones identifies some real problems (and some bullshit) but offers completely pants-on-head explanations of them and useless solutions for them. The real conspiracies are right out in the open, but it's more fun to think about secret Illuminati UN plots than banking regulation.

It happens any time they don't get to have a Republican president. I heard all the same crap when Carter was in office and then again later when Slick Willy Clinton was elected.

A lot of younger people think they are acting out because Obama is black, but that's not the whole story. Most of it is definitely racism, but some of the racism is folded into anything they can find to demonize a democratic president.

If they could paint him as a black, Cadillac-driving welfare queen, they would. I think they kind of tried that ("community organizer") at the start but it didn't really take.

Yep. They'll be back to being big fans of waterboarding and extraordinary rendition once there's a white republican in the white house again.