Watching events unfold in Kiev, Ukraine over the past few days - much of it broadcast in live video streams as it was happening - made me think long and hard about the role of guns in a society that seeks to overthrow its government.
As the gun promoters would have it, the Second Amendment guarantees citizens the right to bear arms because the Founding Fathers wanted the populace to be able to defend themselves. The gun promoters repeat, over and over, the mantra that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
This is all very convenient if you are a gun manufacturer or sell guns for a living, of course, because it guarantees a steady stream of customers for your products.
Gun promoters are less inclined to dwell on the part of the Second Amendment that precedes the above mentioned fragment, i.e. the part that goes "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..."
I will not spend overly much time discussing that since it is clear from simple reading of the text that the intention was to provide an organized populace a means to overthrow usurpers and repel invaders. At the time the concept of "standing armies" was also anathema to many of the Founding Fathers after they had personally experienced the brutish heel of King George's Redcoats - a professional, standing army used to try to suppress the Americans revolting against the Crown.
Suffice it to say that, in the US, we have inherited a jumble of concepts about firearms and their role in keeping society and country safe and free. We are daily bombarded with pro and con arguments about citizens' rights to buy and carry firearms and about the need (or lack of need) to further regulate gun sales and/or ownership. That debate is not what I'm discussing here, however.
What I want to look at is this: what about other cultures, where personal possession of firearms was not a given, and in fact was often discouraged or even outlawed? Would lack of firearms inhibit or prevent those peoples from ever having hope of rising up against an oppressive government or invading foe?
The reason these questions came to mind was that, as I was watching events unfold in the chaotic nighttime streets of a beleaguered Kiev, I would see tweets from Americans lamenting the lack of firearms in Ukraine "to help them defend themselves" against the police. There were posts proudly proclaiming that in America, gun owners would have "riddled the cops with bullets" (or words to that effect) if Americans ever decided to revolt against their government in the way Ukrainians seemed to be doing.
That got me to thinking. What would have happened in Kiev if some guns showed up in the Maidan? (Independence Square, where most of the confrontations between protesters and police occurred.) How would such a scenario have played out?
First of all, what actually did happen in the Maidan? Mostly bare-handed protesters, some wearing hard hats or old Soviet era helmets, confronted well-trained riot police armed with batons and equipped with riot helmets (with face and neck shields,) body armor, long aluminum shields and lots of warm clothes (the temperatures were at times -9C that night) which gave them additional defensive padding. When the two sides finally collided, what ensued was mostly a massive shoving match. Very few police batons were in evidence, although it is clear they were used at times on a some individual protesters who got singled out for whatever reason. No visible weapons were in the hands of protesters in any of the hours of streaming video and still photos that I personally watched quite closely.
The outcome was basically a standoff, which in most respects represented a de facto victory for the protesters, since in the end the protesters still held the critical heart of the Maidan protests - the stage structure and large tents behind it that housed medical staff and supplies - and had prevented the riot police from clearing the square entirely of the presence of demonstrators.
What then, would have been different if, like some Americans like to daydream about, the Ukrainian protesters had been armed (to any extent, really) with firearms? Would the outcome have been substantially different - a more marked "win" for the protesters, say?
My sense is, assuming the government knew to expect firearms among the protesters, there would not have been a riot police clearing action taking place in the Maidan that night, but rather a full-bore military operation involving elements of the Ukrainian army and probably special forces units and armored vehicles as well.
Obviously, this is not a scenario describing a peaceful demonstration that could evolve into a popular demand for a change of government. Rather, what you have when two sides, each carrying firearms, confront each other, is a pitched gun battle at best and - at worst - a full-on urban combat situation that for all intents and purposes is actual warfare. Imagine such a combat situation unfolding in a city of several million inhabitants, many of them with firearms, confronting an army equipped with modern infantry weapons, armor, aircraft and possibly even light artillery.
What the gun proponents forget is that, once actual combat is joined, restraint and rules go out the window. Collateral damage and civilian casualties are a given. There is no graduated response, no simple way to turn off the slaughter once it starts. Just ask the Syrians today.
Ukrainians, coming from a society that does not promote widespread possession or ownership of firearms, do not have the "luxury" of an option of armed revolt against their government, should they decide one would be necessary. And, although there are significant numbers of hunting rifles and some pistols in private hands, it is a very small percentage of Ukrainian homes that have them. Even so, no firearms were in evidence in Kiev's many thousands of protesters in those chaotic scenes. Had there been even one, and it was used on, say, a member of the police, the outcome of the night probably would have been very different, and not in a good way.
Well, the gun proponents will probably argue, what if the government of Ukraine had responded to the protests, not with riot police, but with firearms equipped shock troops? What chance would a revolting populace stand against such an adversary? Don't citizens in the end need to own firearms to keep a tyrannical government from taking away their liberty?
To answer that question, simply take an objective look at all the places in today's world where firearms play a prominent role in revolution or civil war. In almost every instance, the government counters any rebels that oppose them with firearms, with all the force of the nation's military: heavy infantry, armored personnel carriers, tanks, artillery, helicopter gunships, jet fighters, even toxic gas in the case of Syria's Assad. And to have any hope of "winning" the rebel side has to either acquire similar heavy weapons and use similar wartime military tactics, or be defeated.
So while American gun proponents may well have the right to keep and bear arms, for them to imagine their use in an armed insurrection against the US government, is patently absurd. Defend your home from burglars, real or imagined - fine. Carry them in your car or boat if it is legal and makes you feel more secure - great. Go target shooting, collect, carry to the extent it is legal - more power to you, right?
Just don't go telling foreigners that don't have firearms, that they have no chance in hell of doing anything about a corrupt government that they see no way to change, except by means of mass protests and calls for new leadership - because Ukrainians are proving that not to necessarily be the case.
Admittedly, we have a scenario in Ukraine where the government has used "soft" strength when it also had the possibility of coming down "hard" with armed troops from day one. For many reasons, even the (IMHO) foolish president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, knew that to do so would be overplaying his hand and end up losing the game for him in other ways.
To argue from history, lets take a look at a people who tried to peacefully revolt, and were ruthlessly crushed by their nation's military might: Hungary in 1956. With the help of Soviet forces, the Hungarian communist state squashed their population's uprising in a matter of weeks, with thousands dead in the process and hundreds of thousands fleeing the country in blind panic. (I was a boy in Italy then and still recall the seemingly endless convoys of buses and trucks carrying pale refugees from Hungary, all hope gone in their faces.) Here is a case where a US-style armed citizenry could have hoped to stand up to their oppressive government, right? Again, the answer is no - not unless you want the situation to escalate as it did in Syria or Lebanon or dozens of other examples of full-on civil war.
The simple fact is, no citizen revolutionary/self defense force can stand for long against a nation's military forces if the leadership decides to use the full force and effect of modern weaponry against its own citizens.
Ukraine's citizens' struggle against their corrupt regime is still unresolved and may go on for some time. But as long as firearms are not part of the equation, the people there have some chance, however slim, of forcing a change of government. But the minute that firearms become an element in play, everything changes and the matter quickly escalates to a destructive and costly (both in human and economic terms) civil war.
Americans can argue all they want of their right to defend their homes and selves with firearms against criminal elements, but to hang on to the delusion that firearms are, in this day and age, a practical way to overthrow your government or to defend yourself from an oppressive leadership, is complete and utter folly. Only a lunatic would argue for that scenario because if it were to happen, history and the nightly news confirm that no one wins but the crows, buzzards and blowflies that feast on the dead.
