Eric: Has the Second Amendment to the US Constitution Lost Its Meaning?

Many Chinese people say that even if the amendment was intended to empower the people to bear arms to resist tyranny, it is meaningless in the face of today's powerful US military.

Among these Chinese people, I fear not one has seriously read military literature; they understand neither the limitations of the military nor the complexity of war.

Any army that falls into a long-term security war without public support is doomed to fail.

The powerful US military has already proven over twenty years in Afghanistan that it is no exception. If, within its own country, it became hostile to an armed populace, the US military would fail even more rapidly, more rapidly than you can imagine.

Armies are inherently unsuitable for security warfare. Moreover, while they appear closed and independent, they are by no means entities that can exist in isolation; their effective operation depends heavily on the social support provided by the people. To put it more simply, the military is a product parasitic on society; without social support, it cannot survive on its own.

Daily logistical consumption alone is an astronomical figure. If fighting abroad or resisting foreign aggression at home, it can rely on the support of its own society. If such support ceases to exist, and the domestic population transforms into guerrilla fighters—half-soldier, half-civilian—who unpredictably sabotage logistical lines and reserves, then even the powerful US military's logistics would be riddled with holes and collapse quickly, followed by a plummeting of morale and internal division.

Even without mentioning numerous additional factors, and speaking only of a direct gun-to-gun confrontation, the US military is certainly the most powerful force unit. However, many people online completely underestimate the destructiveness and deterrence of a single gun, and have no basic concept of the power that can be formed if thousands of guns are coordinated in an organized manner.

It is highly likely that these people have never touched a gun, and may not even truly understand shooting incidents.

Do you know what it means for an ordinary person to carry even an old revolver with only six bullets? For example, it's as if they instantly transform into a super master of the Six Meridian Divine Sword with deep internal power... Now, do you have some basic concept?

Even just to deal with one such gunman—a criminal gunman without any public support—the manpower and material resources the police (many of whom are veterans) must invest are completely disproportionate to the gunman. Even so, they often encounter setbacks and sacrifices.

If there are two gunmen, the difficulty increases sharply. One could even say that for every additional person, the difficulty increases exponentially.

Now imagine what would happen if there were thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of such gunmen. What if so many gunmen also had the support of the people, receiving intelligence, logistics, and cover at any time... appearing and disappearing like ghosts, leaving you unable to attend to one side without neglecting the other? What if the military were viewed as a tyranny, while these gunmen and the people behind them held righteousness in their hands and were united in their hatred of the enemy?

The outcome is predetermined: the US military would 100% be defeated. In fact, they might not even wait for defeat; the military itself would splinter and start fighting among itself.

Those who say that the US Second Amendment no longer has practical significance in checking the government, and that the people have no chance of winning if they bear arms to resist tyranny, underestimate both the real world (thinking that victory or defeat is merely a matter of comparing numbers) and the farsighted founding fathers of the United States.

Knowing only the literary and not the martial, yet believing one has seen and understood the world clearly, is an arrogant conceit. Like Wang Yangming, who understood both the classics and military strategy—the unity of the literary and the martial—is the direction in which we should strive in our academic pursuits.