Is the US government verging on dictatorship?

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Recently, I wrote about America’s love affair with guns. One argument that Second Amendment proponents use, to great effect, is that an armed citizenry prevents government tyranny.

Indeed, there are many Americans who believe that a “disarmed society is an obedient society…in which, at the extreme, people obey their own government’s orders to follow the line into the gas chambers.”

Well, that certainly is an unpleasant image. But it’s natural to ask why the US government would even want to install a Nazi-like dictatorship. That seems like so much hard work when politicians can just keep us anesthetized with reality television while they enrich themselves and their cronies.

But let’s assume that the government’s thirst for power is infinite. In that case, will armed patriots keep us free?

That presumes everybody with a gun is on our side, fighting against tyranny. But maybe some of them will fight for the government. Also, it implies that a guerrilla force armed with shotguns and Glocks is going to vanquish the U.S. military, the largest and most sophisticated fighting force in the history of the planet. If you believe that, you’ve watched 300 a few too many times.

From Shay’s Rebellion onward, any armed resistance to the federal government has met with disaster. So who are these people promoting the illogical idea that insurrection is in America’s future?

Many of them are clones of Timothy McVeigh, who thought he was fighting an oppressive government. Of course, not everyone who hates the government is a white supremacist furious that America is becoming more diverse (although there are a disturbing number of them).

It’s less overt. The person who fears that the U.S. government is becoming a dictatorship believes that “armed rebellion [is] justified” in response to the Supreme Court decision on healthcare. He thinks violent revolution is appropriate if Obama is re-elected. He believes that the government doesn’t have authority over immigration — he and his buddies with firearms do.

Yes, this is about people near the top of the socioeconomic ladder who are freaked that a little bit of their power is fading. They are really just fearful of a multicultural society inching toward progressive values.

Latinos are less likely to believe in the small-government mantra. As such, we tend not to call for “Second Amendment remedies” over some perceived slight. Indeed, it’s easy to find someone who thinks the U.S. government is “the new Gestapo.” But rarely, if ever, is that person Latino.

Now to be fair, a little paranoia is fine, as is a healthy cynicism for the government. However, there is a difference between keeping a wary eye and actively poising to attack. It’s fair to ask what the motivation is for such an extreme viewpoint.

By the way, I don’t know of any modern industrialized society where citizens talk so openly about armed insurrection against their own government. But then again, those foreign wimps don’t have guns, do they?