From: yarvin@cs.yale.edu (Norman Yarvin)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: Re: Registering "Assault Keys"
Date: 23 Nov 1992 16:27:37 -0500
Organization: Yale Computer Science Department
NNTP-Posting-Host: cathy.na.cs.yale.edu

starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu (Tim Starr) writes:
>In article <1ejudfINN6l0@CATHY.NA.CS.YALE.EDU> yarvin@cs.yale.edu (Norman Yarvin) writes:
>
>}>Well, I don't know about you, but I like the idea that the President would
>}>have to worry about getting assasinated by a mob of angry people if he
>}>got tyrannical.
>}
>}It would not be a mob of angry people which would do the assassination; it
>}would be a lone sniper who would do the job coolly and professionally.  He
>}would have to make his plans well in advance in order to get a decent shot.
>}And even under a gun ban such a man could get a rifle.
>
>Why does it have to be by a lone sniper?

Whoever is doing the shooting would have to shoot from concealment and from
a distance so he would not be seen before he could shoot.  So it would have
to be a sniper; there is no particular reason he need be alone, but the more
people, the more noticeable they would be.

>}I doubt these historians mention Lenin's guards.  That is, the ones he
>}imported from Estonia because there were no Russians which were sufficiently
>}reliable.  Is a man who must be insulated from his countrymen going to be
>}inclined to liberalize?  I doubt it.
>
>Didn't Pinochet have to be insulated so and liberalize the Chilean economy?
>Aren't the insulated gerontocracy of Socialist China doing the same?

In neither of your examples did the rulers have foreign guards.  (Estonia
was at that time an independent country.)  Thus in both cases there was some
class of the country which gave the leader support and which he could
trust.  The conditions in Russia under Lenin were such that this was not the
case.  The revolution there brought to power a class of people who had not
previously held power and who were constantly ready to subvert each other to
get more power.  The only way to keep order was to be constantly ready to use
force.  This ruled out political liberalization.  Economic liberalization is
a different question.  But it would have been possible only to the extent
that it did not interfere with political oppression.

>}  In saying that the
>}Soviet Union was relatively invulnerable to assassinations, I am relying
>}mainly on Viktor Suvorov's account of the way power was exercised in the
>}modern USSR.  He describes it as being shared between the Communist Party,
>}the KGB, and the Red Army.  Whenever one of the three got too strong, the
>}other two would combine against it.  Thus the system was quite stable.  An
>}assassination which hit any one of the three could not affect it.
>
>Not Lenin, Stalin.  And what if it had happened prior to the formation of
>the KGB?  Would the kulaks have been liquidated?

The KGB was present from the very beginning.  Its first name was the Cheka;
though it changed its name several times it never changed its methods.  I
don't know about the kulaks.  Killing Stalin might have made the suppression
of that rebellion (they were rebelling, if I remember correctly) less
brutal, but the rebellion would still have been suppressed by some means or
other.


--
Norman Yarvin						yarvin@cs.yale.edu
 "Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of
  human progress." -- H. L. Mencken
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns