The Paranoid Delusions of Some Gun Advocates

TPM Reader MV complains that the paranoid delusions which form his support of the Second Amendment shouldn't be considered as paranoid or delusional as those of other gun supporters.

Here is his argument:

What guns do however, is basically guarantee bloodshed if the government ever does take a hard turn to tyranny. That bloodshed is itself a significant deterrent, even if its the revolters’ blood.

To borrow a phrase - Sadly, No! There is SO VERY MUCH that is wrong with his argument that it really is difficult to know where to start. So warning then - this post may ramble even moar than usual.

Item - the US is a country of some 300 million people. It is the twenty first frigging century. If the US government were to "take a hard turn to tyrrany", guns don't mean sweet fuck all. What if a tyrranical dictatorial executive branch were to suspend habeas corpus, disappear random individuals to secret black site torture centres, order the extra-judicial assassination of her own citizens? The government is going to do what-ever-the-fuck it pleases and no number of citizen-held private assault rifles is going to stop them. "Guarantee bloodshed"? Only in the paranoid delusions of some gun supporters - probably after watching a lot of Red Dawn.

Item - The example cited for the deterrence factor? Tiananmen Square. Because we all know how the plethora of privately held assault rifles made a huge difference in China. FFS, if Tank Man had an AK-47, no one would remember him at all. It is the lack of guns in the hands of the protestors that made it a powerful moment in history.

Item - What are the actual results of having all these guns in all of these hypothetical potential Freedom Fighters? TPM Reader MV, the paranoid delusional gun advocate acknowledges that no modern developed country's military is going to lose to a ragtag band of citizens militia. So what are they going to be able to do? I suppose the best you can hope for is maybe something along the lines of Waco. IOW, David Koresh represents the best case scenario to justify the widespread prevalence of killing machines.

Item - Even if the circumstances arise of a tyrranical government versus freedom-loving insurrectionists - the guns themselves DON'T EVEN FUCKING HALP. If the government were to suddenly go Despot-a-palooza, guess which side the vast majority of assault rifle toting jerkwads will be on? The Tahrir Square protestors back in 2011 were opposed as much by the regime as by conservative Mubarak supporting assholes.

Item - And let's look at the current situation. What is happening in the fallout from Sandy Hook? The government has decided that your personal mental health records should be widely accessible. People are proposing that the government place armed guards at every public building. Yayy FREEDOM! This must be what "the strongest possible protections against tyrrany" looks like.

I'm the King of the World! (edited for more math)

via Atrios

The amount of platinum needed to mint a coin worth $1 trillion would sink the Titanic.

It's no surprise that Republicans don't know the first thing about money. The linked Yglesias article puts it nicely:

But saying that the government would need a lot of platinum is like saying a $100 bill needs to have 100 times as much cotton in it as a $1 bill.

Let's skip that part. Let's accept the absolutely ridiculous notion that a trillion dollar platinum coin needs a trillion dollars worth of platinum to mint. So, even if we accept that ludicrous notion, it turns out that the NRCC is still wrnog.

Some maths - the price of platinum is somewhere around $1,600 per troy oz but it fluctuates. One trillion dollars at this price is 625 million troy ounces. A troy ounce is 0.0685 pounds so this works out to around 21,000 tons.

The Titanic had a cargo capacity of 46,000 gross register tons.

Edit: It has been pointed out that GRT is a bad measure for how much weight it takes to sink a boat. That's true - it almost definitely requires more weight than this. GRT is a measure of permanently enclosed volume - or the amount of "buoyancy" the boat has. Since one GRT is 100 cubic feet of enclosed air or 2.8 cubic metres - the actual buoyancy is 2.8 tonnes (the mass of water that this air would displace). Additional, register tons have something to do with subtracting "non-revenue earning space" etc. Complicated rules anyways. Basic point - the Titanic had bulkheads and other enclosed volumes equal in volume to well over a hundred thousand tons of water. Another consideration though, the boat itself has mass. The light load of the Titanic (no fuel, passengers or provisions) was a bit under 40K tons leaving at least 60,000 tons of buoyancy. The loaded weight was ~52K tons (light load plus 14K "deadweight" or allowable* cargo load). Even when fully loaded, if one additional passenger in the form of Moneybags McPreciousMetals were to board the ship with his one trillion dollar 21,000 ton platinum coin, the Titanic still floats. And while she wouldn't be safe to take out into the open seas with this load, history has shown that this was never possible in the first place.

*allowable means actual. If she were loaded less than this, they would fill with ballast to get to this load since the ship was designed to be operated at this draught.