Quote Originally Posted by reaper239 View Post
the problem is that everyone is responsible for defense, there are no designated guards who's only job is to pull duty, everyone rotates out. besides, we here in america have lots of guns and, aside from major differences on civil rights which led to the civil war, we haven't had anything major here. also, there's some truth to the old adage "an armed society is a polite society," the only places here in the US that we've had major rioting and civil unrest is in cities where guns have been heavily regulated. plus, are you going to try and rob your fellow survivors if you know for a fact they all have guns?

the reason for doing a system like that is to try to keep small communities where people know each other and care about each other. they would get lots of practice running things as a community from the lowest levels of government and then, no matter hw high things go, they will still operate as a small community. what's going to be a harder place to break open: the place with 120 people milling around who don't know each other too well, or the place made up of 6 tight knit communities working in concert together, where the people are invested in each other and willing to stand up and fight for one another?

regarding war, there should be no real need to go to war. if the colony reaches the point where it would be feasible to raise an army to wage war, there won't likely be any people with the strength to take them on. in pretty much every other situation the colonies prime focus should be self defense. if, at some point, it should become necessary to go to war, i imagine it would just be volunteers going off to remove a threat to the colony.
Crowd sourcing of defence would be less effective than guards trained for discipline. The reason for gun control is quite simple, take the DKR shooting. That happened with only the stresses of normal life in a first world country. The extra stress of seeing so many people die/blaming people for the deaths of loved ones could easily lead to shootings and makes it easy for one individual to take control turning the place into a dictatorship. As far as war goes I'm not talking full scale war, only the maller-tower type situation. Does the government have the authority to force the citizens into service for their own defence?
Does war have to be announced via a referendum?
The tight knitted community thing is a bloody good idea, my only fault is the community's then are suspicious of outside communities even with an alliance. When gun control is not existent and the communities get paranoid things could easily get out of hand.