Yes, NRA Has been telling us this for the last 60 years. Crickets from them now. It’s really hard for their fans to realize it was all bullshit.

And for all the people who said the police and National Guard would protect us from a tyrannical government, how's THAT working out for us?

So far the National Guard has not turned on the public. And I'd like to believe they won't. They've just gone where they're sent. The real danger so far is ICE. That and our government is run by the most incompetent and mentally disturbed malicious people imaginable.

I'd also like to believe the National Guard won't turn on the public, but I also like to have backup plans, because what I'd LIKE to believe often turns out not to be true.

That's a possibility.

Still owning a gun in case of government tyranny. If Trump is going to start sending national guard to cities then I want my guns.

The tyranny has arrived and the police state has started.

And right now both the tyrant's forces and civilians are armed, but shooting hasn't broken out yet because it's not that time. So it seems like a poor moment to try to disarm everybody but the tyrant's forces.

That isn't going to happen right now as there is a Republican majority in the Senate and the House.

Agreed. People have pushed for 40 years to ban scary guns, and been defeated soundly at pretty much every turn; that's not going to change NOW, with a corrupt SC and a fascist party in power.

Thirty years ago there was a ban on assault weapons for 10 years and it was successful. Under a Republican WH it was allowed to lapse. Gun crime rose again after.

Kind of. But it's not as cut and dried as all that. The Federal Assault Weapons Ban was passed in 1994, and a multi-decade crime bubble burst in 1993, so the ban was passed at a point where violent crime was dropping across the board anyway.

And yes, mass shootings rose sharply after the ban expired, but IIRC they started to rise before the ban, because the 1999 Columbine shooting kickstarted a whole new age of mass shootings. Also, I believe there were fewer mass shootings in the 1960s and 1970s than when the ban was in place.

And the specific kind of mass shooting that is a regular thing now, where somebody goes into a public place and tries to murder everybody they can before getting gunned down...? The first time it happened in America that I can find was in the 1940s. It never happened when machine guns were legal.

It's reasonable that banning assault weapons would have some kind of effect in lowering the number of incidents and/or lowering the lethality of incidents, but it's not a hard proven fact that the ban in question DID have that effect.

St. Valentine's Day Massacre?

So I don't want anyone touching gun laws. If the police state is starting then we should want to keep our guns