Over at Balloon Juice, TimF wonders why Republicans appear to want a) a totalitarian police state, but b) also want people to be able to anonymously purchase assault weapons.
Actually, it makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Any totalitarian state depends upon a plentiful supply of anonymous “brownshirts” to enforce their rule. Furthermore, any totalitarian state relies on the fact that people with moral qualms are less efficient and effective at using things like assault weapons and less likely to purchase them than amoral people who enjoy killing. The net result is that any “successful” totalitarianism relies on the support of anonymous amoral murderers for its “success” in keeping the remainder of the populace under control, and by and large does not mind that the majority of the population is heavily armed, because the minority of amoral murderers has far greater combat effectiveness due to their willingness to use their weapons and the fact that there is no list of who is one of the “brownshirts” thus you can’t know whether any particular person you encounter is a “brownshirt” or not. See: Sadaam’s Iraq, where everybody had an AK-47 in the bedroom and an RPG launcher and extra ammo buried in the garden, but Sadaam generally had no problem staying in power as long as he paid off the amoral murderer minority by giving them special privileges and goodies.
In short, there is no contradiction between a nation flooded with firearms and dictatorship. As long as the dictatorship provides special privileges and such to the minority of people who are amoral murderers, the amoral murderers will then keep the rest of the populace in check no matter how many weapons the rest of the populace possesses. It’s much like the reason why despite owning firearms I do not carry a firearm in public, even back when I lived in a state where they handed out concealed weapon permits like candy. The reality is that in a face-off between me and an amoral murderer, I would still be trying to figure out whether the situation called for deadly force at the same time that the amoral murderer was plugging my plump penguin ass. Those “moral qualms” things just don’t make for effective use of firearms, which is why one of the first things that the military does with new recruits is make sure that any moral qualms about use of firearms to kill people get quite thoroughly squashed under layers of training.
-- Badtux the Gun Penguin