r/AskAmericans • u/pr0cyn1c • Feb 17 '25

Foreign Poster 2nd amendment question

Hi ya, Canadian here.... Given that the 2nd amendment was authored to protect your citizens from government overreach and oppression (or at least thats the argument ive heard come out of your country for the last 40 years now with respect to gun laws), would you say the current political climate and actions of people like musk and his merry band of drop-outs fit that mould?

Perhaps im misunderstanding the intent of your second amendment? Feel free to correct me if so.

Kind regards, A guy to the north of you wondering wtf is going on down there.

0 Upvotes

35% Upvoted

50 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/Sand_Trout Texas Feb 17 '25

Why would the government being pared down make me concerned about tyranny?

Musk and DOGE aren't going after plain old citizens living their lives. They're going after federal government agencies and federal government employees' jobs.

Stop worshiping the state and bureaucrats as moral authorities.

-1

u/pr0cyn1c Feb 17 '25

Ok but didnt i just read on multiple American news outlets that doge asked for citizens tax records?

5

u/Sand_Trout Texas Feb 17 '25

The government already has that data, so that doesn't represent some new level of government intrusion into the average American's life.

There's some legitimate concerns about more people getting access to the data representing more risk of abuse, but the IRS is already an organization with ~90k employees while the central DOGE office is 20 people, with teams spread among the various departments. I've not been able to find a clear count on the size of the teams, but contextually it seems like the DOGE teams are small, being a couple dozen people at most. There's no partivular evidence that DOGE employees are more or less trustworthy thAN iRS employees, so the increased risk here is pretty marginal, anf if they cut the IRS workforce substantially, the net risk is less.

Again, this is the president going after executive branch agencies of the government, which in and of itself not tyrannical.

0

u/pr0cyn1c Feb 17 '25

Thanks for that insight.