The 2nd Amendment is Obsolete, Says Congressman Who Wants To Nuke Omaha

Last week a congressman embarrassed himself on Twitter. He got into a debate about gun control, suggested a mandatory buyback—which is basically confiscation with a happy face sticker on it—and when someone told him that they would resist, he said resistance was futile because the government has nukes.

And everybody was like, wait, what?

Of course the congressman is now saying that using nuclear weapons on American gun owners was an exaggeration, he just wanted to rhetorically demonstrate that the all-powerful government could crush us peasants like bugs, they hold our pathetic lives in their iron hand, and he’d never ever advocate for the use of nuclear weapons on American soil (that would be bad for the environment!), and instead he merely wants to send a SWAT team to your house to shoot you in the face if you don’t comply.

See? That’s way better.

But this post isn’t about that particular line from one foolish congressman. It’s about all of the silly left wing memes that have popped up since, trying to justify the congressman’s basic premise that the 2nd Amendment is obsolete for resisting tyranny, and the government would obliterate anyone who failed to comply. Like this one:

I’ve seen a slew of these over the last few days. Nukes kicked it off, but I’ve seen it before with drones, or tanks, or cruise missiles. Sadly, this is one of the better ones, but that’s because the left can’t meme. Basically they all boil down to the same fundamental premise. The federal government has access to advanced weapon systems, and thus anyone who resisted gun confiscation would be effortlessly destroyed by these advanced weapon systems, ergo gun control has already won, forgone conclusion, and they declare victory.

Like most political memes, they’re taking an extremely complex situation, and providing a cartoonish, simplistic answer, which makes them look like complete dipshits to anybody with a clue, but scores them lots of Virtue Signal Points to their likewise ignorant but posturing friends. To my people, this is really goofy stuff. I mean, if you have even a basic knowledge of this topic these memes are about as clever as the ones from the vaccines cause autism morons and the flat earth society.

We are so divided it’s like we are speaking two different languages. Hell, on this topic we are on two different planets. And it is usually framed with a sanctimonious left versus right, enlightened being versus racist hillbilly, unfailing arrow of history versus the knuckle dragging past sort of vibe.

But basically it boils down to one side making the argument: The idea of the 2nd Amendment resisting a tyrannical government is obsolete, because the federal government is too overwhelmingly powerful, and has too many advanced technologies.    

So today I’m writing this for my left leaning friends and readers, in the hopes that I can break down the flaws in this argument. I’m going to try not to be too insulting. Accent on try… But I’ll probably fail because this is a really stupid argument.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a novelist now, but I retired from the Evil Military Industrial Complex, where I helped maintain those various advanced weapon systems you expect to bomb me with. Before that I was a gun dealer and firearms instructor. So basically I sold guns to the people you expect the people I trained to take them from.

On that note, I don’t think you fully comprehend the nature of the individuals you expect to do your dirty work, but I’ll come back around to that later.

First, let’s talk about the basic premise that an irregular force primarily armed with rifles would be helpless against a powerful army that has things like drones and attack helicopters.

This is a deeply ironic argument to make, considering that the most technologically advanced military coalition in history has spent the better part of the last two decades fighting goat herders with AKs in Afghanistan and Iraq. Seriously, it’s like you guys only pay attention to American casualties when there’s a republican in office and an election coming up.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama launched over five hundred drone strikes during his eight years in office. We’ve used Apaches (that’s the scary looking helicopter in the picture for my peacenik liberal friends), smart bombs, tanks, I don’t know how many thousand s of raids on houses and compounds, all the stuff that the lefty memes say they’re willing to do to crush the gun nut right, and we’ve spent something like 6 trillion dollars on the global war on terror so far.

And yet they’re still fighting.

So yes, groups of irregular locals can be a real pain in the ass to a technologically superior military force. That’s pretty obvious.

Now here is the interesting part. Best estimates are that any given time in Iraq we’ve been fighting about 20,000 insurgents at most. Keep that number in mind, because now we’re going to talk about the scope of this hypothetical fight over gun control.

Nobody really knows how many people in America own guns, or how many guns are here. The estimates range wildly. I’ve noticed a trend over recent years of the news media trying to minimize that number, to make it seem like it’s actually a very low percentage of Americans who own firearms, a fading cultural anomaly if you will, and to explain the one to two million new backgrounds checks done every month for new purchases, a handful of us just own a few hundred guns each.

Uh huh…. Sure.

While trying to make gun ownership seem like an oddball thing, I’ve seen the media come up with some truly silly estimates about the total number of guns in this country. The one that was going around earlier this year was really easy to debunk, because they used the number of NICS checks… Problem is, it didn’t take into account the millions guns sold before that (and they never really wear out), the fact that one NICS check can be used to buy multiples at a time, and that many US states (including the gun nuttiest) use their own state background check system, and don’t report to that federal number. Oh yeah, with advances in cheap machining, making your own guns at home has become increasingly popular.

When pollsters call to ask us if and how many guns we own—we think about things like a congressmen talking about nuking us—and immediately lie our asses off. The biggest recurring joke in the gun community is that I don’t own any guns, because I lost them all in a freak canoe accident.

So nobody really knows how many guns there are here, or how many of us own them. But the answer is A LOT.

Recently the WaPo ran an article called Americans Vastly Overestimate the Number of Gun Owners. As with most WaPo articles, it was about 90% bullshit, but they are claiming that only 20 to 30 percent of Americans own guns.  That may sound plausible if you live in Manhattan, but out here in flyover country, that’s downright laughable, but anyways, to make the idea of mass gun confiscation as plausible as possible, let’s run with that rosy figure. We’ll even take the lower one of 20%. (snort)

Too bad America has over a third of a billion people, because even the unrealistic figure of 20% of 325 million is still a whopping 65 MILLION people. That’s about the same as the entire population of France. That’s about the same as the population of Great Britain, only with 500 times the firepower. Good thing we didn’t go with that 30%, because now the number is way bigger than the population of Germany (and you know what a pain beating them last time was!).  Or ironically, about three times the population of Iraq.

It’s kind of funny, when it comes to us adopting social or economic programs, the left is always comparing the US to Denmark, which has the population of LA county, and that’s totally not apples and oranges, but declaring war on a percentage of the American population bigger than most nation states? That’s no biggie.

But I digress…

Okay, so let’s say Congressman Swalwell gets his wish, and the government says turn them in or else. And even though the government has become tyrannical enough to send SWAT teams door to door and threaten citizens with drones and attack helicopters, rather than half the states saying fuck you, this means Civil War 2, instead we’ll stick to the rosiest of all possible outcomes, and say that most gun owners comply.

In fact, let’s be super kind. Rather than a realistic number, like half or a third of those people getting really, really pissed off and hoisting the black flag, let’s say that 99% of them decide to totally put all their faith into the government, and that the all-powerful entity which just threatened to kill their entire family will never ever turn tyrannical from now on, pinky swear, so what do they have to lose? And a whopping 90% of gun owners go along peacefully.

That means you are only dealing with six and a half MILLION insurgents. The entire active US military is about 1.3 million, with about 800,000 reserve. Which is also assuming that those two Venn diagrams don’t overlap, which is just plain idiotic, but I’ll get to that too.

Let’s be super generous. I’m talking absurdly generous, and say that a full 99% of US gun owners say won’t somebody think of the children and all hold hands and sing kumbaya, so that then you are only dealing with the angriest, listless malcontents who hate progress…  These are those crazy, knuckle dragging bastards who you will have to put in the ground.

And there are 650,000 of them.

To put that into perspective, we were fighting 22,000 insurgents in Iraq, a country which would fit comfortably inside Texas with plenty of room to spare. This would be almost 30 times as many fighters, spread across 22 times the area.

And that estimated number is pathetically, laughably low.

In one of the bluest states in America, the New York SAFE Act only has like a 4% compliance rate. And that’s mostly just people choosing to ignore an onerous law. Because the further you get away from the major cities, the more people just don’t give a crap about your utopian foolishness. Its benign neglect, and most Americans are happy to ignore you until you mess with them. You start dropping Hellfire missiles on Indiana? Fuck you, its game on. And that 1% is going to turn into 50% damn quick.

So just by the numbers, it’s an insurmountable problem, but we’re just getting started with how stupid this idea is.

Let’s talk about the logistical challenges of this holy crusade to free the country of icky guns and murder everybody who thinks differently than you do.

In Iraq, our troops operated out of a few secure bases. Those were the big areas where we could do things like store supplies, airlift things in or out, repair vehicles, have field hospitals, a Burger King, etc. And then there were Forward Operating Bases. These are the little camps troops could stage out of to operate in a given area. The hard part was keeping those places supplied, and I believe most of America’s causalities came from convoys getting hit while trying to supply things like ammo, food, and fuel, because when you’re moving around, you’re a big target. All of these places were secured, and if you got too close, or they thought you were going to try and drive a car bomb through the gate, they’d light you up.

Now, imagine trying to conduct operations in a place with twenty times the bad guys, and there are no “safe zones”. Most of our military bases aren’t out in the desert by themselves. They’ve had a town grow up around them, and the only thing separating the jets from the people you expect them to be bombing is a chain link fence.

The confiscators don’t live on base. They live in apartment complexes and houses in the suburbs next door to the people you expect them to murder. Every time they go out to kick in some redneck’s door, their convoy is moving through an area with lots of angry people who shoot small animals from far away for fun, and the only thing they remember about chemistry is the formula for Tannerite.

In something that I find profoundly troubling, when I’ve had this discussion before, I’ve had a Caring Liberal tell me that the example of Iraq doesn’t apply, because “we kept the gloves on”, whereas fighting America’s gun nuts would be a righteous total war with nothing held back… Holy shit, I’ve got to wonder about the mentality of people who demand rigorous ROEs to prevent civilian casualties in a foreign country, are blood thirsty enough to carpet bomb Texas.

You really hate us, and then act confused why we want to keep our guns? But I don’t think unrelenting total war against everyone who has ever disagreed with you on Facebook is going to be quite as clean as you expect.

There will be no secure delivery of ammo, food, and fuel, because the guys who build that, grow that, and ship that, well, you just dropped a Hellfire on his cousin Bill because he wouldn’t turn over his SKS. Fuck you. Starve. And that’s assuming they don’t still make the delivery but the gas is tainted and food is poisoned.

Oh wait… Poison? That would be unsportsmanlike! Really? Because your guy just brought up nuclear weapons. What? You think that you’re going to declare war on half of America, with rules of engagement that would make Genghis Khan blush, and my side would keep using Marquis of Queensbury rules?

Oh hell no.

A friend of mine who is a political activist said something interesting the other day, and that was for most people on the left political violence is a knob, and they can turn the heat up and down, with things like protests, and riots, all the way up to destruction of property, and sometimes murder… But for the vast majority of folks on the right, it’s an off and on switch. And the settings are Vote or Shoot Fucking Everybody.  And believe me, you really don’t want that switch to get flipped, because Civil War 2.0 would make Bosnia look like a trip to Disneyworld.

Speaking of ugly, do you really honestly think that you’re going to be able to kill people because they disagree with you, and they won’t hit you back where it hurts?  While you’re drone striking Omaha Nebraska you really think that the people who live where all the food is grown, the electricity is generated, and all the freeways and rail lines run through,  that some of them aren’t going to take it  personal? And that they’re not going to use their location and access to make life extremely uncomfortable for you?

The scariest single conversation I’ve ever heard in my life was five Special Forces guys having a fun thought exercise about how they would bring a major American city to its knees. They picked Chicago, because it was a place they’d all been. It was fascinating, and utterly terrifying. And I’ll never ever put any of it in a book, because I don’t want to give crazy people any ideas. Give it about a week and people would be eating each other (and gee whiz, take one wild guess what the political leanings of most Green Berets are?).

Similar dinner conversation once, with a bunch of SWAT cops from a major American city, talking about how incredibly easy it would be to entirely shut down and utterly ruin their city, with only a small crew of dedicated individuals and about forty eight hours of mayhem and fuckery. (And guess what their political leanings were?  Hint, most of them were eager to retire because they’d been treated like shit by their liberal mayors, and take their pension to someplace like Arkansas)

So yeah, let’s talk about those people you think are going to be unfeeling automatons who will have no problem killing their friends and neighbors on your behalf…

They are us.

Above I mentioned a Venn diagram of obstinate gun owners and the military, but you can change that to cops and it’s going to be pretty similar. Those diagrams overlap a lot, and depending on the particular department or unit, they make one big happy circle.

Back when I owned a gun store, we were located one block from Utah Army National Guard Headquarters. Every drill weekend my building was a sea of ACU (and the fact that very few of my liberal readers know what that abbreviation means just shows goes to show how incredibly out of touch they are, but I mean that ugly sage grey digital camouflage).  It was just a bunch of guys hanging out, talking shit, and BUYING GUNS.

Lots and lots of guns. And I know most of my left wing readers can’t tell them apart, but they were specifically buying the scary ones that you want to ban the most. Thousands of them.  And cops… Holy moly I sold a lot of guns to cops. Not department guns, though we supplied a few of those, but personal guns.

Having worked with a lot of police departments, guess what? The guys who actually know how to shoot? The ones who run the training programs? Usually they’re my people too. The gun nuts gravitate toward that position because A. more taxpayer funded ammo, and B. they actually give a shit about the subject, so they learn on their own, and then try to pass those skills onto their coworkers to better keep them alive.

Whenever I see one of these dipshit memes produced by some Gender Studies Major, it just demonstrates how incredibly sheltered and out of touch they are. They don’t know fuck all about these people. Usually if they’re talking about soldiers, it’s about how they’re evil baby killers, or time bombs of PTSD rage, or poor deluded fools who joined the military because they couldn’t get a real job…. And cops, it’s about how they’re just a bunch of trigger happy racists just itching for an excuse to execute everybody who looks different than they do.

But don’t worry, despite all those years of abuse, when you ask them to go door to door in their hometown to systematically attack people they’ve known their whole lives, friends and family who’ve done nothing wrong, and maybe get shot or blown up, and when it’s over then turn in their own personal guns, all because some moron in a big city a thousand miles away said so, I’m sure they’ll hop right to it.

See, one of the things you guys on the left don’t realize is that there’s that whole “Othering” thing. You do it all the time without thinking about it. Where you just ascribe increasingly terrible things to people, like all gun owners are murderous, racist, kill crazy, redneck, dumb ass peckerwoods who want children to die, to the point that to you, we’re this unimaginable, evil, Other, so it’s okay to threaten to murder us, and feel good about yourself.  Because we’re bad, and you’re the good guy, and thus totally justified in all you do.

Yet you assume that the people who gravitate toward the career fields you’ll need to wage war on us will feel the same way you do.  When in reality most of them think you’re posturing, elitist, ignoramuses who don’t know the first thing about guns, crime, violence, or America.

Now this is where I’ll part ways with most of my libertarian brethren, because they are quick to point out that there are plenty of places where cops enforce existing gun or drug laws. The part they’re missing is that most people are complicated, and they’ve got lines they won’t cross.

In this case, the target isn’t some Other, it’s not just their people, it’s them. And an active shooting war between the government and half the population? That’s a pretty big fucking line. And we’re not talking about people they are already inclined not to like, but rather they’re supposed to go shoot their doctor and their mechanic for doing something that up until a few days ago was legal and they were doing themselves. A small percentage will be happy to put on the jack boots and start loading people into cattle cars. But a larger percentage will say nope, I’m calling in sick, don’t feel like getting blown up today.

And another big chunk will actively help the insurgents, because they fucking hate you and everything you stand for. Like seriously, out of touch liberals, how many small town sheriff’s deputies do you think would describe themselves as “progressive”?

Now this will vary wildly depending on jurisdiction. Some places, no problem. People will comply. Others because of the culture, they won’t. Yet, in the places where they are the least likely to comply, those are the places where you are the most likely to have the local authorities be actively on the side of the insurgents. (this is kind of a no brainer to anybody who has ever looked at any guerilla war ever in history). Which means that the occupiers then have to import outsiders to do the deed, but then the presence of outsiders piss off the rest of the local fence sitters, and now everybody is getting blown up.

The problem with all those advanced weapons systems you don’t understand, but keep sticking onto memes, is guess who builds them, maintains them, and drives them?  When I first saw this idiotic Apache meme my comment was that sadly Freedom Eagle’s day job was as a contractor doing helicopter engine maintenance.

Those drones you guys like to go on about, and barely understand? One of the contracts I worked on was maintaining the servers for them. Guess which way most military contractors vote? Duh. Though honestly, if I was still in my Evil Military Industrial Complex job when this went down, I’d just quietly embezzle and funnel millions of DOD dollars to the rebels. Because fuck you is why.

So you’ve got an insurmountable challenge, that’s logistically impossible, and a big chunk of the people you expect to fight on your behalf being actively against you. Your side would need an incredible amount of will, especially after they turned off your electricity and water, and there’s no more food on the shelves.

This is why smart progressives prefer to boil the frog slowly.

To pull off confiscation now you’d have to be willing to kill millions of people. The congressman’s suggestion was incredibly stupid, but it was nice to see one of you guys being honest about it for once.  In order to maybe, hypothetically save thousands, you’d be willing to slaughter millions. Either you really suck at math, or the ugly truth is that you just hate the other side so much that you think killing millions of people is worth it to make them fall in line. And if that’s the case, you’re a sick bastard, and a great example of why the rest of us aren’t ever going to give up our guns.

BOOK BOMB! Featuring two books this time, A Star Wheeled Sky, and In Plain Sight
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538 thoughts on “The 2nd Amendment is Obsolete, Says Congressman Who Wants To Nuke Omaha”

  1. Remember the DHS notice about veterans and terrorism? I happened to be having lunch with a sheriff, a chief of police, and a DEA supervisor. I asked them if they were ‘self-reporting’ their folks, and after the sheriff got through choking on his iced tea said words to the effect of, “F you. I’m not reporting myself and 95% of my department. Hell, you grew up here and you know how many of us are vets.” The chief and DEA supervisor agreed, basically saying they’d walk away and lock the doors rather than enforce the ‘stupidity’ as they called it, mainly because they ‘knew’ who they would be facing!

    1. You are right about those folks you speak of, NFO, but that is because they come from a similar culture to you. When I worked for the California Highway Patrol in far-northern CA (just south of the Oregon state line), most of our guys wouldn’t go along with the enforcement of a total gun ban, and the Sheriff of our county (Siskiyou) even stated in public that he would not enforce any new gun laws, let alone another ban.

      BUT – during Katrina, a number of CHP TOs (Traffic Officers) were detailed to NO, AND WENT DOOR-TO-DOOR CONFISCATING PERSONAL FIREARMS FROM CITIZENS at a time when looting and lawlessness was rampant, when there wasn’t a police presence out and about to discourage crime, especially violent crime. I would like to imagine those officers were from the cities – LA, SF, and Sacto – but I don’t know that for a fact. Also, think of the Chiefs of Police from places like Massachusetts, who suck up to the Left, to Democratic legislators, a Democratic governor, and then understand that for some years now, many departments, big city departments and state agencies, have been hiring and indoctrinating young officers into LEOs who believe in enforcing the law, rather than keeping the peace (and keeping people safe).

      I think it is going to be a crap shoot as to which groups of cops will go in which direction. Kind of like the difference between millennials and us old boomers, who still remember a time when we were almost free. Like the Grey Man.

      1. Reg, I’ve got news for you. Those departments that are recruiting Politically correct snowflake jr. officers to train up in the lean times. These officers that will blindly follow orders to disarm civilians, they are standing next to fully qualified killers hired en mass during the times when the department was flush with funds straight from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, or some other kind of istan. These guys are trained to think on there feet in a bad situation and they wont thing twice about taking out some bleeding heart deputy that’s pointing a service weapon at there mother or father or neighbors kids.

        1. And remember, all of those cops have service friends. Guys they will call during the hard times and we will come running.

        2. I recall a shooting incident not too long ago where the Rainbow Patrol police were having to engage in a firefight with a bad guy, and losing. They were cowered like Uvalde PD behind objects taking ineffective shots at the subject who was hiding behind vehicles.

          Then, the Iraq Vet supervisor rolls up, storms out with an AR15, promptly moves in on suspect while shooting & scooting, suspect was propping up the ground in less than 20 seconds.

          Yeah, that guy. I don’t think he’s really on board with all the rainbow pansy shit.

      2. I know of a PMC team that said fuck you on that Katrina contract. next, are they LEO or just uniformed like them? history has proven, pay people enough they will fight. if the separation happens, it won’t be the limp wristed left we see now. it will be out of country assholes. plenty of them are chomping at the bit to get a slice of pie. really ask yourself, do you think the jolly ole England does not want her land back? Canada to the north are loyal to the Queen. we have no friends. but that has never stopped us from kicking some ass. if Russian wants to send me crates of rpks, rpgs, aks, with crates of ammo to support my fuckery. fine. no problem! they are pissed off that the US beast has fucked them, see RUB vs USD and its time line. I find myself more aligned with Russians than “most Americans”. the same “most Americans” calling me deplorable, treating me with gunships and nukes.

        1. On the contrary, Canada is one of the few countries to have stood with America without fail over the centuries. We are loyal to HM, of course, but she does not govern. Our .mil and your work closely together all the time, and in spite of the fuckery our current PM is into, our previous one did everything he could to support America (and Israel, in fact). We value our cousins to our south, and stand with them in all things.

          1. ‘cept for that War of 1812 thing. It’s all good now though (gives a Rodney Dangerfield eye-roll).

          2. Resurrecting this four year old article and your comment. Have you rethought your position now knowing that the Canadian Military were doing joint training with Communist China on terrain that they would have to use to invade the USA?

          3. Hey Mike… It’s now 2022… Do you still feel the same way? Not withstanding the fuckery over the last 2 years? Canada has obviously been taken over by the WEF drones; and has been in a state of tyranny since… I’m a “legacy American”, whose most recent “immigrant” was my great grandfather, who happened to come here from Prince Edward Island in 1898… I weep for Canada and the totalanarism they gave suffered from by the Trudeau dictatorship in the past several years…

      3. Those police have families too and live outside the wire, although potentially, enforcement operations could be conducted by outside agencies so the locals wouldn’t know where they lived.

        1. The local LEOs, OTOH, would know… and would quickly realize that they are going to be tarred with the same brush unless they actively prevent it.

        2. “…enforcement operations could be conducted by outside agencies so the locals wouldn’t know where they lived.”

          Well – maybe so…but: Just exactly how long can you imagine it would be, before those “outside agencies” were fully-identified, thoroughly-catalogued, and full information/”intelligence” laid-out on where they were locally-billeted, and what hours they kept, what “security” (if any) they maintained over their active personnel, etc…?

          And how soon that info would be used to mount attacks of various sorts on those selfsame “agencies”, on a local basis…?

          I’d give it somewhere between 2 days and a week – tops.

        3. Nowhere near enough personnel from outside agencies to be effective. Even with an outright ban, Australia had around a 20% compliance rate, IIRC.

      4. Question for you:
        How many guns did they come back with?
        Were they out confiscating guns?
        Or were they out “confiscating guns” because they were ordered to, but by golly they just didn’t find any?
        Big difference.

        1. They brought back thousands…and tossed them into conex boxes.
          Weird how they never seemed to get around to disarming the ORGANIZED neighborhoods looking out for looters. Just the random lone citizen, usually female.

      5. Yeah, read any of the Kurt Schiller novels about Kelly Trumbull. Not ALL cops will side with the people.
        But, most of those in their home city.
        And, that will be the method used – they will send in troops/cops from far distant places, assisted by the ill-trained irregulars from ‘da hood’. No locals, just the invading forces. They have been training cops, using Federal bribes to hire them, plus more money to buy high end assault vehicles and defensive gear.
        Still beatable, but it WILL be a hard fight, should it reach that point.

        1. If the “switch is flipped”, this won’t be easy for either side, however, there is a big difference between fighting for a paycheck and fighting for survival and the protection of your family.
          A man will do whatever it takes to protect his family, you can’t buy that kind of devotion.

      6. I know the comment I’m replying to is old. I still wanted to point something out. Namely that between the millennials and boomers you mentioned stands another generation, Gen-X. And by many accounts, Gen-X is the most conservative generation of all. Seriously, go look it up. Gen-X may be smaller, but Gen-X has impact…and a LOT of Gen-Xers own firearms.

    2. The Corporate Constitution of 1871 is made null and void by the United States Constitution of 1776. Us being indentured slave is null and void because we were not informed and we signed nothing. Now if the masses knew this and most do Our politicians would be fleeing to other countries especially when they find out all they’ve done to us. Ya can’t commit the crimes if you’re not willing to reap the consequences of the crimes whether it be done in the courts or at the Judgement of God.

      1. EXCELLENT….the catcs outta the bag enuff now the DC DeepState is desperate to holdon to escape the judgements for their Traitorous Treason being complicit with their Globalist paymasters with fiat FED/IRS money to take Ametica down for Atheist Marxism’s NWO under a OWG….as prophecied…!

    3. Bullshit fear mongering . Yes they have military might but 100 million armed Americans is a mighty big obstacle when many in the military ain’t gonna destroy their own people . If the populous being armed wasn’t a problem , there wouldn’t be a non-stop campaign against the second amendment . If Americans weren’t armed , we’d now be Canada and Australia and it’d be over for us . Millions and millions of us would rather be dead
      Than be live slaves

    4. The Glibalidt Central banksters after writing the Treaty of Versaille launch their 2nd Bolshevik Commie coup on Getmany from 1918-33 when the Nat. Socialist’s stopped it only the firefights goung on dyring that time with Commie tertorist waz fought by freedom loving Republican Germany rural & farm people some were my family members that immigrated here to leave that Globalist setup time bomb to come behind them…for Russia was the 1st successful takeover coup via Lenin/Stalin financed by the same Globalist’s here running the USA for since 1913

      Well there coup after crushing Germany failed & created the Nat. Socialist Party which ended it once appointed by President Hindenburg who then died @ 88yrs old whereupon his appointed Chancellor Adolf took over as Furor as all Germany knew that genocidal Stalin was financed by the banksters to take all Europe once ready…which is WHY Getmany invaded (even tho they were not ready) to catch the genovidal monster off guard bringing thousands of exiled Russian with them to take Russia back from the Stalinist’s….only Globalist installed shill FDR (like prior shill Woodfow) was ordered to fight the Germans; who were only fighting for their lives whole while they could…
      Now the worldwide Atheist Marxist movement IS worldwide and runs America just as General George Patton warned[ why he was assassinated (1945)] once he understood the same truths of which I’m telling you here now…!
      These Globalist bought U.S. DeepState DC infiltrators fully intend a total U.S takeover = YES with the blessing of the owned D R Uni-Party and their Dog n Pony Show put on for your benefit to stay asleep…!
      Awakening time for U’all is almost up…!!!!!!

  2. BTW, those drones…the operators own a truckload of guns, too.

    And the nukes…are kept in places like South Dakota. Louisiana. You know, places just chock full of gun owners. Including the crews.

    Damn it, I hope SCOTUS finally gets off their duff, smacks this garbage down HARD, and lets us move forward to Gun Culture 3.0, so we can re-learn to shoot straight.

    1. On the other hand, if the excrement DOES hit the ventilation impeller, shooting straight is probably soon not going to be a problem any more.

        1. There’s lots stored in all the unelected DeepState 3·letter Agency warehouse ready to go[safe Armory’s for patriots use] for the 5day a week – 9 to 5er’s will be hiding under their beds…!

  3. Rule of thumb- Leftist Progressives don’t understand the concept of Unintended Consequences.
    Should we get ACW II (God forbid!), the rules change. As the war goes on, factions become less about ideology, and more about the personalities of the successful generals. The winning general gets to make the post-war government- and historically, that tends to be a dictatorship with him as dictator.

    Even in the unlikely event of a Leftist victory, it won’t be the current crop of Oh So Woke Progressives in charge. It will be the personal buddies and cronies of the victorious general turned dictator who wind up in positions of power (because it’s about personalities, not ideology).
    The other revolutionaries are first into the gulags.

    1. Gulags or graves. Guards cost money to maintain, bullets are a one-time expense. And rope doesn’t even have the limitation of needing to be reloaded to use again.

        1. Slave labor can’t be trusted with power tools, and slaves still need to be fed and guarded. I think Gulags would be a lot less useful than they had been.

          1. The Soviets were able to make it “work”… with the same regard to safety and quality that they were so famous for.

    2. Or against the wall. I hope Modern socialists remember what happened to the National Socialists’ first goon squads. They kept the firing squads busy for days “liquidating” them.

      1. No gulags.

        One of the greatest weaknesses of conservatism is that we keep letting the Marxists get up from off the mat.

        No. You don’t relax just because you intercepted the missiles aimed at your people. You find the launch sites and blow them to hell. You find the guys who built the missiles and kill them. You find the guys who voted to launch the missiles and kill them. You find the guys who opined it would be a good idea to launch and kill them

        No gulags.
        https://youtu.be/Jy2YhxXn7NY

    3. Yeah. They are men of system.

      “The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it.

      “He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”

      ― Adam Smith

      1. Well I understood that. And it makes sense. But if you’re going to present that truthful statement to progressives, you’re gonna have to dumb it down. Try stick figures.

  4. Larry, if Government want to take out your guns they have something more powerful than the US military: IRS. Taxes and taxes and more taxes. Not all at the same time, but by increments. A 2% on gun sales; then a 10% on 7,62 ammo; then a 5% on .303; and so on and so forth. Always little steps. Until your guns and ammo are so expensive to buy that people will stop buying them. It is working with tobacco. A good publicity campaign, plus incremental taxes over several years, et voilà! No 2nd Ammendment. The power of the State is not its weapons; it is its bureaucracy.

    1. Wow. It’s almost like I specifically wrote about how smart progressive prefer to boil the frog in this very article, but thanks for telling me how to do my job. 😀

      1. Here in CA that’s exactly what they’re doing. Beginning next July, ammo sales with entail a tax and background check, which is why so many gun owners here are heavily stocking up while there is still supply. How in the blazes did we reach this point with so many conservatives living here (and there are a LOT here, just not enough to win elections)? Little by little over the past 20 years, leading to the point where the see-saw has now finally tipped and the insanity is rushing forward in full force.

      2. With all due respect, there’s more than one “boil the frog” strategy, and some of them may very well work.

        Look at the new “red flag” law in Maryland. Under it, anyone you know can get an order confiscating your guns by simply going to the police and saying, “I’m afraid of him.” You don’t have to have done anything wrong. You don’t know it’s happened until a squad of cops show up at your house and demand you hand them over. Then you have no time to hide the weapons somewhere else, or to summon your buddies for a confrontation.

        If I were one of the gun grabbers, I would simply enact this law, then leak a list with the names and addresses of gun owners (both from recent purchase records, and from the member lists of gun-rights orgs) to some lefties-only forum like the Daily Kos, so that anyone who knows a listed gun-owner can go get that red-flag order. Then one by one, that squad of police confiscates all the guns.

        There may be a way to defend against this possibility, but the only one I can think of involves having leakers of our own in the police department, and that’s not going to help most of us. So I’d like to see more ideas for beating it.

        1. First one or two times the cops will get away with it. After that, I suspect you’ll begin seeing people meeting the cops at the door with loaded and pointed guns. And if the cops act as they probably will, we’ll see both dead cops, and dead gunowners. But then that’s obvuiously what Maryland wants to see.

        2. burner phones calling in phony red flags

          cops get tired of wild goose chases

          if confiscation gets worse then ambushes
          make the blue flu go viral

      3. Or better yet freeze your bank account and/or have you suspended or fired from your job for being a danger to society until you turn over your lethal weapons.

        1. Sure, TT. That will work. Since we’re also the people that keep the infrastructure running.

          Oh, and lethal weapons? What lethal weapons? I turned in all the ones I officially bought, one for each caliber of ammunition I ever bought.

          The others? They’re in anonymous boxes in the rental unit I rented with cash and the fake ID your illegal immigrant buddies have made so plentiful. Or just in sealed PVC pipe scattered over a hundred square miles of GPS coordinates until your search parties go away. Or….

    2. I suspect if the tax-the-ammo ploy doesn’t achieve the desired results, a levy on health insurance premiums for gun owners will be in the offing. Most people can not comprehend the power of the bureaucracy.

    3. Wouldn’t work nearly as well. Smoking smells nasty to non-smokers even when the smoker is not smoking. and there are obvious health effects to the user. Look at the spiking popularity of vaping for what happens when that doesn’t happen. Owning a gun has no significant external characteristics except in the process of shooting it which generally isn’t around non-shooters. Between current supply and durability the only thing that taxes would have a chance of working against is ammo, and just like cigarettes black market ammo would quickly become a thing.

      1. What in the nine hells is that name and link on my post. I forgot to fill out the name and email and instead of bouncing my post that popped up. Hmm, either malware on my end or on your end Larry. Might want to have your IT guy check your ads.

      2. Taxes are one way. But you can hear the echos of what they are slowly advocating:

        1) UBC’s universal background checks. They want registration lists, hoping that some time in the future they will have a large enough percentage to confiscate.

        2) Insurance requirements, You can get everything registered and you have a monetary cost to owning your firearms in perpetuity.

        3) Training requirements, another financial barrier, difficulty barrier to overcome.

        4) Ammunition restrictions, a set amount to be purchased or retained. Requiring licensing & background checking.

        1. Someone’s got to enforce it. Who’s going to collect those taxes? And there are no training requirements if I’m not obeying the law. See, Chicago has tried all that. You see anyone enforcing it where people don’t give a crap?

    4. They’re trying this in CA. It’s not working. Even the law-abiding are finding ways around it (stockpiling, reloading, what have you.) The non law-abiding just, you guessed it, drive in their ammo across the border. The problem with trying to do this with bureaucracy is that it’s virtually impossible to keep things hidden from the people you’re trying to foist them on until the last minute; they’ll see them coming and prepare accordingly and as such are two steps ahead when the laws actually hit. Look at the AW ban of 1994 if you don’t believe me.

    5. And the idiots who slowly implement these taxes will be replaced by The People with those who promise to do away with the tax(es).

    6. Most people don’t remember what happened to the “Bureaucracy” (the Eunichs) of the Imperial court of China. Once the people had enough of them, they were hung by their own entrails. Not a bad ending for progressives.

      1. Yeah, but it’s corrosive, doesn’t hold up well with repeating arms, and marks the shooter with a big “I AM HERE” cloud.

    7. But by the time they try “Mr. and Mrs.America, turn them ALL in!!” there will be so many guns, and so many tonnes of ammo, already purchased and in private hands they can tax all they want to, but it will be too late, and only serve to further enrage those who have been stocking up and putting by the essential tools to assure “the security of a free state”. If they try and impose an ex post facto tax on guns/ammo, ya think we who won’t turn them in will actually PAY it? Now that’s real kneee slapper!!!

      And I amconvinced that the status quo right now is so far in the favour of they who will defy any order to “lay down your arms and disperse” (to quote Capt Jesse Adair as he addressed the seventy men of Lexington as they stood on the commmons to confront said Mister Adair….) will most likely be met with an aorist tense response of “Fire, for Gods Sake fire as fast as you can”spoken by Captain John Parker shortly thereafter.

    8. They have something even better than the IRS, and is why they rammed through Obamacare, and want a “single payer” medical system: if you want medical treatment for yourself or especially your wife and children, you will turn in your guns, your ammo, and your friends and neighbors.

      Obamacare was never about providing medical care to those unable to pay for it. It has always been about control. Could you resist if your child was dying of an illness that could easily be cured?

      An old guy like myself, with no children, and with a wife who agrees with me about the current state of affairs, can remain apart and resist, but a father with small children would be forced to go along with the government’s agenda. And there won’t be very many doctors who will be able to resist and still practice, still be able to prescribe medicine, get lab results, x-rays and scans.

      1. Should have said, “even _worse_ than the IRS”. Better for the government, for control, but definitely worse for us.

    9. Fortunately, over the past couple of decades, we’ve had our share of Clintons and Obamas that have motivated people to stock up on certain essentials (.308, .223, .45 ACP, .38/357, 9mm, .22 LR) and the tools needed to used them. Plus, there are millions of reloaders out here that have and are stockpiling components so as to replenish inventories when they are running low. Add to this the relatively simple composition of gun powders, and we have enough ammo and weapons to last for hundreds of years. I am not so concerned about “future” actions to restrict our Rights, compared to many years ago. People are stocking up, arming up, and, most importantly, WISING UP.

    10. Hmmmm
      Lets see, i grow my own tobacco
      I roll my own ammo
      And last time i checked a dozen 80% lowers were about 400$ and classified as paperweights
      And solvent traps screw on the end of the barrel to capture them nasty cleaning solvents,,,,
      Hows them regs workin

      1. And a home machine shop can be had relatively cheap – I’ve got one. Gives me something to do with that box of 80%s I’ve got kicking around…

  5. The analogy of a “knob” and a “switch” is an excellent one.

    I’d point out, though, that no matter what those advocating and supporting violence believe, turning the knob down again isn’t so easy either. Nostalgia for the romantic days of protests and the Weather Underground might motivate a certain level of admiration for violent thugs such as Anti-fa, but if any of the enablers think they actually *can* just dial it down again, or if they think that if people just fall in line that it will be over, they’re fools.

    I also believe that there are a lot of liberal minded folks who are just about as appalled at it all as the rest of us.

    1. “I also believe that there are a lot of liberal minded folks who are just about as appalled at it all as the rest of us.”

      That’s nice to believe, but is there any evidence? Are enough appalled to make a difference?

      1. My experience is those kind of people keep their heads down, and mouths shut, lest they be tossed unprepared in with the knuckle-dragging racist horrors that they are sure we are.

        I got told by one guy that he didn’t carry a pocketknife “because he feels safe here.” Shit, son, this ain’t a fightin’ knife, it’s a tool.

        The best option is to not get defensive or aggressive. Just let the stupid ones shout and then explain to everyone present why they’re wrong, stupid, and laughable. Don’t be nasty to anyone who’s just uninformed. It’s hardly their fault that they went to accredited schools, where wrongthing, badthink, thoughtcrime, and independent cogitation are vigorously punished.

        1. “My experience is those kind of people keep their heads down, and mouths shut, lest they be tossed unprepared in with the knuckle-dragging racist horrors that they are sure we are.”

          First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
          Because I was not a socialist.

          Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
          Because I was not a trade unionist.

          Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
          Because I was not a Jew.

          Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

          1. I have a feeling that the in much of the US “then they came for me” would end with “and their early actions had given me plenty of warning, so I killed a bunch of the bastards, and so did my buddies, and their operation became so damned dangerous that they couldn’t find more cannon fodder to continue it, which gave our guys the breathing space to target to damned fools who ordered it in the first place”

          2. You got the last part wrong.

            “Then they came for me- and they were very, very sorry”.

            “And then I was all alone”.

            Fixed it for you…

          3. Relook at the Bundy incident in NV. To say it was an eye opener for the Feds would be an understatement.
            Thoughts around here if they started shooting, Federal Armed Agents were indeed in jeopardy. Let that sink in…

            CM Dutch

          4. They never ‘came for the Jews,’ because the Jews were the ones in charge, all along. That stupid statement must have been written by a Jew, as “talmudic propaganda.”

          5. I can’t tell if Father John is being sarcastic, or he’s actually stupid. That famous quote is about the Nazis.

            But it’s a rule of the internet, get a few hundred comments on anything and you’re bound to get some whackadoos.

        2. I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly. Never try to convince those you disagree with, because in most cases you’re fighting a losing battle. Tailor your tactics to try to convince those listening that you are the sane, rational and correct one and your side is the one to be on. Violence and agression should never be the first things anyone think of in a conflict if they intend to win, it should only be used when there is no other course of action available or there is a risk to self.

          That said, I carry a gun with me pretty much everywhere I go.

          1. I, unfortunately, spend a lot of time at University. I won’t tell you which one, because they are large, and may be vindictive towards wrongthink. But that means carrying a firearm is a federal crime, unless otherwise regulated by the university. Our university president has sworn to fight any repeal of the target rich environment zone he rules with every resource at his disposal.

            This place makes me feel more disposable than the Marine Corps, a place where people are occasionally referred to as “bullet sponges” and is less responsive and more bureaucratic than the VA. They literally don’t care whether you live or die.

            Remember that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when they have to go to Berlin, and show up in the middle of a great big Nazi rally? That’s a bit what it feels like walking onto campus.

      2. There was some article throwing around numbers (which are likely as reliable as those tend to be, so keep that in mind) that the extreme woke activist “left” is no more than 8% of the population. They’re loud and incredibly obnoxious, true. And their tactics are effectively destructive *because* most of the rest of people are conflict adverse, and also get some notion in their heads that if someone is complaining that loudly they must have a reason.

        We pretty much know that the “reason” is power (as someone else mentioned… I’m just responding here instead of to each person) but most people have busy lives and aren’t completely up on everything people are getting up to. When they *do* hear about this stuff they very likely figure it’s those fringe crazies being crazy.

        I pray for the day when more people realize that they need to take a stand because the extreme woke activist is not a small problem that people complain about because they’re grumpy, but a problem that they complain about because it’s dangerous, destructive, and wrong.

        1. I’m thinking the Extreme Woke is more like 0.8, possibly 0.08 or less. They tend to gravitate towards places like Portland, and their ‘Wokeness’ is pretty much inversely proportional to real-world responsibilities.

          But they ARE far louder in the cultural landscape than warranted – primarily because (I think) the media LUUUVS them demonstrating. Of course, the aftermath of their ‘activism’ is usually horrendous – looking at the Standing Rock anti-pipeline camp shows folks who are so concerned about the environment they left darn near an ecological disaster behind. Or the messes the Occupy Wallstreet crowd left. Basic sanitation is way beyond them, apparently. (Which is funny, considering they’re supposed to be so smart.)

          The time for quiet tolerance is rapidly reaching a middle, to use a phrase. The ‘Proud Boys’ reaction to AntiFa is expected, as the left pushes harder and harder, regardless of how much people do NOT want to be pushed.

          1. I do think that the media loves it. They love them some protesting! So romantic and fraught, don’t you know.

          2. You are right, the extreme woke is a fraction of a percent of the populace. The media, using its power, elevates their behavior to make it seem like it’s in the majority. They do this with all the immoral acts, part of the desensitization strategy. Trans? Sure, there are millions of them! When in fact they number just a fraction of a percentage point. Every damn thing they promote is a lie, they are psychotic in that regard. They echo chamber the f out of a reprehensible subject, then browbeat the hapless viewers until their much skulls allow this garbage to seep in and affect their world view. There is a reason it’s called “programming.”

          3. @ JLawson ..and don’t forget the Darth Soros Paychecks! Heck, I think if Conservs had such a ‘bankroller’, and weren’t busy 24/7, ya know, being Responsible, Productive Citizens and all, We could prolly ‘afford’ to be out busting some heads, too! (I vote we start with ‘Swallowswell’, there…)

      3. Well, this is only a single example, but I used to be one of them. Then I grew up. The trope of people becoming less libtarded as they grow exists for a reason.

    2. Um, no. Left-minded folk who don’t speak out against the violence and calls-for-action are just like the number of Irish-Americans who funneled money or political support to the IRA, or just like the large majority of muslims who are not speaking out against the activities of a few ‘fundamentalists.’

      If you don’t speak out or act out against terror, then your actions result in you supporting terror.

      So, to sum it up in a Correa way, once the bubble bursts, ‘Fuck You, Asshole’ will be the last friendly thing a lot of leftist twit-lips will hear.

    3. Ah, but the Liberal minded were the ones that empowered and emboldened those clowns. Therein lies the rub. The blood and the violence is very much on their hands and they need to own it and wise-up and discard their crap…or face what happens when the switch is flipped…and it’s not very far off that it will get done so.

      1. So we assist them in discarding the crap. As I said, a huge majority of students are not taught HOW to think…. they’re taught WHAT to think, and to leave conclusion making to their enlightened betters.

    4. I always call it analog verses binary. There is no “violence lite”, then “violence medium”. It’s either “off” or it’s “ON”! “off” means walking away from the problem. “ON” means the problem will never walk again.

  6. Hey Larry,

    I love your books. I vote left. I don’t live in the US.

    Now you’ve resolved the problem of the second amendment, I’m keen to see how you plan to resolve the wave of gun violence and mass shooting that’s gripped America for the last few decades, without taking any guns out of the equation.

    Cheers

      1. Also, if you remove the Gun Control Paradises of the five biggest cities in the US, I think we’re way the hell down the list for gun violence. Like, lower than the UK, even with the way they cook their books.

        1. Sorry I am coming late to this. Very true. If DC, New Orleans, Chicago, LA, and one other that escapes me (Philly?) are removed the US is actually one of the safest places for gun crime.

          1. I’m not remotely an expert on metropolitan crime rates, but … were you perhaps thinking of Baltimore?

    1. Hi Mike,

      I wanted to add my 2 cents (pence, pesos, whatever) to there not being a “wave” of gun violence and mass killings which is:

      It’s not possible to “take guns out of the equation”, and not just because people won’t cooperate, but because even if every law abiding person cooperated fully there would be no reduction in crime or tragedy because law abiding people don’t kill anyone.

    2. By “wave of gun violence”, you mean the lowest level of violent crime pretty much since solid recordkeeping started?

      1. But-but… muh NARRATIVE!

        Won’t someone think of the NARRATIVE!

        /Sarc

        You’re correct – but that doesn’t mean much when the Narrative is the only thing that’s important – no matter how accurate it isn’t.

    3. The vast majority of “gun violence” is in the inner cities, fueled by drugs and gangs. Most of those commiting those crimes are already Federally banned from owning a gun thanks to prior run-ins with the law, yet they still get what they want from theft and black market type sales. These are not people who are affected by ANY gun control law, in fact they love gun control, it makes for more easy victims.

      Many of those gang/drug shootings also get lumped into “mass shooting” statistics.

      Funny, in nations with vastly restricted guns, there are still mass shootings (Paris concert), and sometimes people resort to “mass run over with truck” to cause their mayhem.

      It’s not the tool, it’s the murderer.

      1. Hi there, Poindexter. I’m keen to see you explain what exactly these supposed “factual refutations” are, and what ill-informed assertion you are referencing. Judging by your cadence and polished language, I’m hazarding a guess that you fancy yourself to be a highly intelligent sort, possibly an academic or some such?

        I’m certain you can do better than a single sentence. Maybe flesh out your position a bit more? Come now, you must have far greater mental faculties than this poor, retired Infantryman, who happen to be somewhat of a subject matter expert on small arms, violence, and the application of both. Come on, try harder, bud.

        Regards,

    4. It’s easy to think there is a “wave of gun violence” in America when you don’t live in America and only hear the most extreme news reports. I’ve spent a lot of time overseas and get really tired of this one. People think they know what my country is like because we’re in the news a lot, but they really don’t.

      1. Tell me the country, and I can tell you the wave of various major felonies happening, with or without guns.
        And gun control is no proof against mass shootings- just ask France.

      2. And you’re more likely to be a victim of violent crime in Europe than you are the US. Stay out of certain areas of Democrat controlled cities and you’re as likely to be shot in the US as you are anywhere else in Europe.

      3. It doesn’t even have to be the “most extreme” news reports. The news makes it seem a bigger phenomenon than it is simply by repeating it constantly on the 24 hour news cycle, and by nationalizing every single event.

        Despite it being “national news” the human mind localizes it. And, because the human mind localizes every report, it seems like it’s all happening right here, right now. It requires some measure of self-awareness to get out of that instinctual reaction.

        (I think we *have* had a spike – though not statistically significant^^ compared to all the onesie-twosie killings out there – in mass-murder events in the last several years. Primarily because the media becomes such a circus, they make this an attractive option for the mentally unstable. Remove the incentive and the spike will disappear.)

        (^^ Keep in mind that comparing one low occurrence kind of event to the broader category will keep the statistical significance low, while comparing the sub-category to itself will make the increase seem huge. One event a year has a 100% increase if you suddenly have two in the same year, though in the grander scheme it went from 1/1000 to 2/1000.)

      4. *wicked, mischievous grin*

        There’s waves of violence, including gun violence…

        Just… it’s not where the rest of the world likes to think it is. It’s …

        South of the USA border.

        South America.

        It’s really not reported on so it’s minimized in the Lefty mind.

        1. Friend of mine while I was in the Army went Special Forces; spent a considerable chunk of time training locals in El Salvador and the Philippines. Understand that this was a guy who was prone to going down to the local strip of clubs on payday, and getting into as many bar fights as he could. He was an aficionado of violence, and actively sought it out. Or, at least, that’s what he was like before he became a Green Beret. I ran into him some ten years after I knew him at our initial assignments, and we re-connected a bit.

          In the course of things, I delicately asked if he’d maintained his payday hobby. In response, I got a wide-eyed look of sheer horror, and he related to me that he’d lost all interest in such things the evening his local El Salvadoran troops had taken him out to enjoy their version of Saturday night with other members of his team.

          They went to a nightclub/bar owned by a relative of one of the El Salvadoran, and it was a favorite of local cane workers. Who had a tendency to keep their favorite cane knives with them when drinking…

          That night, they witnessed at least ten separate fights break out, using those knives, and those were just the ones that they noticed. Couple of hundred cane workers, drinking, whoring, and… Well, you get the picture; the building was a big tin shed in the middle of nowhere.

          There were supposedly something like five killings that night, and it didn’t even make the local newspaper, it was that unremarkable.

          People here in the US think MS-13 is some horrible thing; in El Salvador, they’re pretty much just a little bit more enthusiastic about killing people in horrible ways than the rest of the public. The level of violence in Central American rural areas would leave you stunned and amazed, if you ever saw the evidence–And, it’s been that way for a few hundred years. We think the Old West was some criminal paradise, but the reality was a lot different; by comparison to some parts of Mexico and Central America, the level of violence even in Tombstone at its height was nothing near a “quiet” Saturday night for the campesinos, and there’s nary a gun in sight down there. It’s all cane knives and farming implements. The SF medics got a lot of practice stitching up some really horrendous wounds while they were down there, and the stories they had about it were epic; one of the El Salvadoran troops got chopped up pretty badly, as in “textbook evisceration” badly, and he walked back to the camp with some help, and the SF medics got to try putting him back together. Guy was, as the medic put it, “…basically, field-dressed…”, and he scooped up his innards, walked a couple of miles back to the camp, and politely knocked on the SF team house door, wondering if he could bother the medic for some help…

          Side note: El Salvadorans are tough little buggers, and I would strongly advise against pissing one off, especially when he has anything even vaguely sharp-looking to hand. That young man in Iraq who ran out of ammo, and charged the Iraqi insurgents with a Buck knife? El Salvadoran. And, I’m here to tell you that that mob of Iraqis made quite the smartest decision possible, when they ran.

          Yeah, south of the border? It ain’t like white-bread Norteamericano imaginations have it.

          1. The Housemate had a high school classmate who I think was from that region, and when telling me stories about that guy, he’s described as ‘short but tough fucker, built low to the ground but muscled and dense.’ Apparently someone had made the mistake of pissing off this guy, and it took four people to try restrain him, and were physically dragged along until the fourth person, the toughest girl in the schoolyard (she was pretty violence-prone herself) said “Can’t we let go? I kinda wanna see what happens next.”

          2. I lived in a rural village in central Mexico as a child. We were missionaries and my dad had to serve as the village ambulance driver because there were no doctors there and no working vehicles but ours. A couple of times a week, he’d have to transport someone to the nearest doctor in the town of Patzcuaro, which was a twenty-minute drive that usually took forty due to various obstacles.

            One night he took a guy over that had been repeatedly stabbed in the gut. As he drove, he found that this guy had been shooting pool in Patzcuaro, the very town dad was taking him to; his drinking buddies had turned on him, knifed him, and thrown him down a hillside into a deep ravine. The dude had climbed out and walked the fifteen or so miles back to our village. To get help. Which would necessarily consist of dad taking him right back where he’d been.

            Dad, seeing that the guy was already white as a ghost, dropped him off at the Catholic-run medical facility in Patzcuaro and then waited a while in the SUV — how long I’m not sure, not more than an hour or so. As the sun rose and the marketplace opened, dad went to get some fruit and coffee for breakfast. When he came back to the truck, he saw a man he didn’t recognize sitting on the hood as if waiting for him. Dad greeted him, asked him how he was doing, in preparation for asking him what he was doing on the hood of the truck.

            “Oh, yeah, I was pretty bad off, but they patched me up,” the dude says, and dad realizes it’s the guy, unrecognizable because he was no longer ghostly pale and at death’s door.

            Smart? Debatable. Tough? You make the call.

    5. As Londoners can attest, taking away guns in order to prevent shootings, merely results in more stabbings. Taking away knives to prevent stabbings, results in acid attacks; or pressure cooker bombs; or trucks running over people. Simply put, removing the means of crime does nothing to remove the actual criminals, but merely stomps on the rights of law abiding citizens; never mind taking away whatever few means of self-defense they have in a violent situation.

      Factor in the overall consistent decrease in violent crime in the USA even as gun ownership rates are at a record high, and it should be pretty clear that if there’s altogether any causal link between the two, it likely runs in the opposite direction of the left-preferred narrative.

      1. Control it further down to geographic regions and you’ll see that a large majority of the gun violence occurs within particular enclaves of several major American cities. The rest of the country has negligible gun crime and is actually safer than any European country, save Switzerland or the postage stamp countries.

    6. Mike, as an American police officer who deals with violence of all kinds, I can honestly tell you the “wave of gun violence and mass shooting that’s gripped America for the last few decades” is a FICTION of the leftist media. In truth, violence involving firearms has DECREASED while media coverage of that smaller number of events has INCREASED. The media is LYING to push an agenda.

    7. Pull back on the mass media coverage of every shooting incident and don’t ever use the shooter’s name; make the manufactorers of anti-psychotic meds–which are known to precipitate violent acts in one out of every 250 patients…along with causing suicidal and homicidal tendencies–liable for the deaths caused by their products (if they can sue gun manufacterers, why can’t we use the same tactic?); Put an age restriction on the use of social media platforms (again…they’re doing it with guns); institute nation wide CC licenses; and put in place practical safety measures (like armed personnel) in our schools and other institutions for starters, Mike!

      1. As a side note Mike, after some 230 years of private gun ownership in the US, 57% of all mass shootings in the US have occurred since Facebook went online in 2007. Maybe what we have is a social media problem!

        1. Or Cerberus’ “complete dick” rule. If you can 11 other guys can agree that some other guy is a “complete dick”, then the 12 of you can legally shoot him.

          1. The Vikings did that. An asshole could have his weregeld reduced or eliminated at a thing. Then you could usually find donors to help cover the cost of killing his worthless ass.

    8. If you want to put and end to gun violence all you have to do is take away gun rights from democrats, leftist and progressives. Problem solved.

      Cheers.

    9. Surprisingly, if you look at the demographics behind ‘gun violence’ and ‘mass shootings’ you realize there are two large segments of the population that are causing most, significantly most, of the ‘gun deaths.’

      Young men and some women engaged in criminal activity (ie: gangs and thugs.)

      Democrats. Seriously. Democrats. The people who say they hate guns are the ones that have done most of the shootings.

      Add in the terrorist actions of Muslims (sorry, but true) and that pretty much handles most all gun violence, other than accidental shootings, cops shooting (cops being shot? Gangs and Thugs again,) and suicide by gun (mostly white males, unsurprisingly.)

      So, to address gun violence, we just need to keep guns out of the hands of Gang Members, Thugs, Democrats, radical Muslims (sorry, but true) and teach city cops to shoot better (most country cops already shoot better.)

      That would stop all Presidential assassins, too, by the way (democrats, anarchists or socialists/Marxists, all on the left of the political spectrum, really mostly on the far left of the political spectrum. Right wingers talk about capping some political dimwit. Lefties actually have done so.)

      Of course, this is completely opposite of the story the media and the ‘edumecated’ (yes, purposely misspelled) have told everyone, and what our school system has indoctrinated our youth with.

      1. Most country cops shoot better because they have more opportunities to shoot. When you live in the country, people don’t complain about your shooting in the back yard, or the local gravel pit. (Just don’t shoot the equipment.)

    10. “how you plan to resolve the wave of gun violence and mass shooting”
      Now thats a good question Mike. So let me answer it as concisely as I can. First of all it is a myth and a lie that gun control reduces murder rates AT ALL. In fact gun control was originally put in place at the request of the KKK specifically to INCREASE murder rates. Based on this historical fact, it should be no surprise that one of the solutions to our high murder rates is actually more guns, not less. Concealed carry laws have a pronounced effect in reducing violent crime.

      Next, it is important when troubleshooting any problem to know WHERE the problem occurs, but also where it does NOT occur. These two questions will reveal a lot about the root cause. We have a high average murder rate. Our murder rate puts us squarely in the middle of most countries, which is not great. But our murder rate is not even. Cities like chicago, detroit, st louis, and baltamore have murder rates 100 times higher than cities like plano texas. This despite the fact that gun ownership in plano texas is WAY higher than in chicago. So our average murder rate is bad, but this is a problem isolated to a few locations. Plano texas has a murder rate so low that most of europe can only look on in envy. This reveals the true root cause of our murder rates, which is the democrat controlled inner city slums. You can see studies that show single mother families result in young boys being 20 times more likely to end up in jail. It is democrat policies that caused the single motherhood rate in these areas to go from 20% to 70% since 1960, and we need to reverse those policies.

      Just a note on your claim that we have a wave of mass shootings. No we dont. France has four times as many mass shootings as the United states per capita. So thats just a false claim.

    11. The vast majority of “mass shootings” are gang-bangers killing each other. If you take these incidents out of the equation the US ranks something like 168th in the world in “mass shootings.” Continue voting for leftists and sooner or later you’ll end up in some form of Gulag. Good luck with that. I recommend you read Unintended Consequences by the great John Ross.

  7. Wasn’t it Leftist icon William Ayers who said that when they took power they would have to kill 25 million people for being die hard capitalists who couldn’t be “re-educated”? Of course this was around 1970, the number would be much higher now.

    Very well written and thought out as always Mr. Correia.

  8. Such a beautiful summation.

    Between this and Mad Mike’s blogpost about how you fight tanks/planes with rifles it *should* be a pretty good refutation for this notion, but sadly it probably won’t get read by the people who need to the most.

    (To avoid links, look up Sacred Cow Slaughter House Fight Tanks on google.)

    1. For some reason, they think a war would involve all the icky Deplorables lining up in an open field with their AR’s, and charging a column of tanks.
      That a tank without supporting infantry is a Very Big Target is something they just don’t know.

      1. Unsurprising.

        Remember that from Marx onward, leftists have been Men of System, as Adam Smith put it.

        “The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it.

        “He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”

      2. Modern main battle tanks are actually quite well-protected against man-portable anti-tank weapons. From what I’ve heard, the Abrams losses in Iraq generally involved IEDs with ridiculous amounts of explosives. The RPGs that the insurgents were using didn’t really do a whole lot.

        Now having said that, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. The first is that if things go nuts, at least a few armories (probably National Guard) will end up being “looted”, with their weapons disappearing into the woodwork. And I’ve no idea how well the Abrams is protected against a more modern man-portable anti-tank weapon such as the Javelin. The second thing to keep in mind is that the Abrams is a very thirsty beast. And while killing an Abrams is difficult, killing its resupply vehicle is much easier.

        1. I’ve read there is something on the Abrams that if hit with small arms fire can blind it.
          Also that the Army lost over a hundred tanks in Iraq.

          Tanks aren’t of much use in a 4th and 5th gen conflict anyway.

        2. Junior, I sent my son, who was in 3-71 Cav, in Afghanistan, asked him if a Javelin could take out an Abrams, got a one word answer, “Yep”

        3. Abrams are vulnerable to mission kills with javs. It takes 2 to destroy it, but you can either immobilize or defang an Abrams with a single jav. Incidentally, pretty much all armoured vehicles (tanks, apcs, etc.) are vulnerable to ammonia. The molecules are small enough to get through the air filters …

        4. Yup. Tanks don’t work well without fuel, ammo, and repairs. Their crews don’t work well without food, water, sleep, and occasionally getting out of the tank to perform various bodily functions.

          Most importantly, tanks aren’t very good at protecting the politicians who give the stupid orders.

        5. You don’t have to compromise the crew compartment of an M-1. All you have to do is break something which, when broken, prevents the tank from moving.

          A mobility kill of an M-1 in a hostile neighborhood is as good as a first-shot kill. Once the M-1 is disabled, it can be further attacked at leisure.

        6. “The second thing to keep in mind is that the Abrams is a very thirsty beast. And while killing an Abrams is difficult, killing its resupply vehicle is much easier.”

          No, that is the first thing.

          Getting into a firefight with an Abrams panzer is not smart. The way to fight a panzer is to ambush its fuel truck. Make truck driver the most dangerous MOS in the Army.

        7. They think that way as do all Atheist Marxist’s
          Being on fire has a mellowing effect & affect on those burning…is why Molotov’s are still effectively used worldwide…!

    2. We’ve had a lot of people upset at local police departments getting armored cars. I’m just upset about the waste of tax dollars, not about the possible abuses the police could do with them. Easiest way to take out armored cars is with a chainsaw, two trees, a large Molotov cocktail, and a case of Miller Beer.

      1. Easiest way to take out armored cars is with a chainsaw, two trees, a large Molotov cocktail, and a case of Miller Beer.

        Out of morbid curiosity…. what’s the beer for?

  9. For another, very similar, analysis, see ESR’s “The critical fraction”:

    That means that in order to stop attempted gun confiscations dead on a purely force-on-force level, only one in 317 American gun owners needs to remember that our first American Revolution began as spontaneous popular resistance to a gun-confiscation order. Only one in 317 American gun owners need to remember their duty under the U.S. Constitution as members of the unorganized militia – “the body of the people in arms”. Only one in 317 American gun owners need to shoot back.

    (And like this post, ESR has pushed the numbers in favor of the gun-grabbers as far as plausibility allows, and still gotten a low number for “how many people resisting kills this idea?”)

  10. And that’s not to mention guys like me, who have never owned a gun or even wanted to, who, listening to these wackos, start getting the idea that maybe now is the time to cowboy up. I got a date with a military friend of mine to go shoot some things over Christmas vacation (so my sons can come, too). After that, and finding a local instructor, it will be a matter of working some self-defence into the budget.

    Seriously, talk about nuking Americans who won’t go along with your stupid politics, and you don’t think those of us with slightest toe-hold in history aren’t going to get a little riled up?

    1. You won’t regret it. Well, your wallet might!

      Honestly, this guy could not have made a better, clearer case for the 2nd Amendment if he’d worked hard at it. People like to pretend that the 2nd Amendment is about hunting, or recreational shooting, or whatever. When pro-2A people talk about how it’s really there to protect the citizenry from a tyrannical goverment, they are pooh-poohed and made fun of.

      Then here comes along Mr. Bigmouth and makes the case clearer than just about anyone else I’ve ever heard!

      1. You buy a gun for what seem to a perfectly good reason at the time. Then you see another that suits your purposes better, so you buy that. And then one you maybe don’t really *need*, but it strikes you fancy. And then you trade the first one for a different one. And then [some time elapses] you’re one of those “nuts” the media blithers about, who owns a dozen guns and “hundreds of bullets.”

        And for the love of God, don’t ever buy a gun of any kind that was made in Russia, or anything labeled “1911”. Such firearms reproduce by fission in the darkness of your gun safe, and suddenly you have guns you have no memory of buying…

          1. #5 Derringer

            Right up there with tactical melon ballers and PTSD from firing an AR-15.

            Moments in time that make me glad to have been alive…

            😛

        1. “hundreds of bullets”? Try thousands of cartridges, aka “rounds”. Bullets alone aren’t going to do much good without powder, primer, and a case to put them in.

          And cartridges don’t really take up that much room…

    2. If you haven’t shot before see if your buddy will start with .22lr and work your way up. Most anyone can shoot a .22lr accurately, it takes most people i’ve trained time to get past the flinch reactions of larger calibers.

      Give most new shooters a 10/22 rifle or ruger mark2 pistol and they can make tiny groups all day long. Give them something with a big muzzle blast and heavy recoil and they start “yanking the trigger” or closing their eyes and other accuracy degrading activities.

      It makes me angry when i see people at the range putting newbies on really powerful rifles or handguns.

      1. I think it was Jerry Pournelle who said he did most of his handgun practice with a bb/pellet pistol. It was quiet, cheap, you could do it in your basement, and you could work on your form and accuracy easily.

        I miss that guy.

        1. LASR training pistols and AR bolt-carrier replacements (though the one AR I tried didn’t work, but I’m just one of however many they sent out). They make them in Glock and now in S&W M&P versions. Just sayin’.

      2. I generally recommend something in a bolt action over a 10-22 for a first timer. Not because the 10-22 is bad, far from it. But you have that semiauto there, and there’s the terrible temptation to go bangedybangedybangedy with it. You want something that will cause you to slow down, conserve ammo, and learn the fundamentals for a first rifle…

        …and it’s also nice to have something that doesn’t guzzle ammo next time .22LR gets scarce.

    3. Just so you know, before my serious and totally unexpected canoe accident, I was able to put together a rather nice collection of older military grade rifles and hand guns and plenty of ammunition to practice and store for under $2k. You don’t have to own a Cadillac to drive a car. There are also some great review websites out there to tell you the good and the bad of just about everything you might want to purchase.

    4. For that matter, even if I’m certain they won’t target me – do I really believe they won’t target my neighbors? When nukes are in play my “neighborhood” just got really large.

      Being neutral is now geographically situational, at best.

  11. Fantastic post. So far, the American Civil War is our costliest war in terms of loss of life with 650,000-750,000 war dead at a time when the population of the United States was only 31.4 million people. Igniting another conflict with that potential on our own soil would be an absolutely terrible thing to do. I pray that it never happens.

    1. That’s why we keep telling the Lefties to back off.
      They either can’t, or they won’t.
      They lie about everything all the time, and believe that we do the same.

      1. Mike Vanderboegh, who ran a blog called ‘Sipsey Street Irregulars’, was once accused(well, several times) by a leftist of trying to start a civil war with a post he wrote.

        His response was “I’m trying to warn you just how bad it will be if you get the civil war you keep pushing for, you idiot.”

        1. I once posted on a liberal blogger’s anti-gun screed to the effect that I knew several former military people who could still hit a 5″ group from 200+ yards. And still had the weapons to do it.

          Then I said “Go out your door, look around at all the places within 200 yards that a person could hide.”

          “STOP YOU’RE SCARING ME!!!!” was the reply.

          That was my point. As multiple others have said, if IT starts it’s not going to be confined to those actively trying to confiscate.

          MY opposition to gun control (ok, shameless self-plug):

          redpilljew.blogspot.com/2018/02/a-very-personal-opposition-to-gun.html

  12. Hi Mr Correia, on the topic of boiling the frog slowly, what do you make of the gun confiscations that are occurring in Maryland and Oregon under the “red flag” and Extreme Risk Protection Order laws? Is this the thin end of the wedge of what is intended to be a total gun ban?

    1. One execution by cop here in the People’s Democratic Republic of Maryland so far. Was there really a need to show up a 5 in the morning to execute an administrative order?

    2. I would say it absolutely is. They’re seeing what they can get away with. And it looks like they got away with it.

      The order wasn’t given under the rubric of standard Leftist gun confiscation, per se, but under the flimsiest of excuses – unsupported allegation by another citizen. And apparently the LEOs involved had little problem carrying out the order.

      They’ll sell confiscation as something else other than confiscation. The ministers of culture have already painted most gun owners as racist, sexist, phobic Nazis.

      To the Leftist, It’s easier to shoot unpeople

  13. 24 years USAF aviation Maintenance and Logistics here.

    I know EXACTLY how fragile the Log chain is, and how delicate the machinery is, and how best to break both.

    And the political standings of the people with grimy fingernails.

    That equipment will NOT be used to harm Civilians. And anyone Active Duty who gives such an order will have a remaining span of freedom (and quite likely LIFE) measurable in minutes.

    Single digits only.

        1. I would count on the 11B’s ability to break an ingot of lead. Most likely simply because someone said “Hey, what if…?” 🙂

          1. You can take an infantry private, strip him down to PT shorts, give him an anvil, and lock him in an empty room.

            Come back in 24 hours. The anvil will be broken. One piece will be missing. Another piece may be pregnant.

            And when you ask him what happened to his anvil, the answer will be “I dunno, Sar’nt…”

          2. As a former 11B a lead ingot would be fairly easy as lead is fairly soft. As a liberal, if said war broke out I would not be on the side of the left at all. I maintain I can be a liberal without being a leftist. Gun control is all about breathing, a good sight picture and trigger squeeze. Anything else is nonsense.

      1. Amen. The drone pilot travels between home and work, as does the helicopter pilot, the MRAP driver, the four star general, the Senator or the EPA bureaucrat. It doesn’t take an Abrams or an Apache to stop an Abrams or Apache, just one good man with a rifle.

        The folks in the Warsaw ghetto figured that one out. Being held in place, within a walled city, is what did them in, although they gave a pretty good accounting of themselves.

  14. Hit the social security and welfare servers. Watch what happens when checks stop going out. Now the empire is dealing with riots in the streets of all their major cities as well as fighting the gun nuts.

    You think our enemies overseas are going to sit on their asses and wave American flags, rooting for the government?

    Hell, no. They’ll take advantage of the fact that most of the US military is now battling us gun nuts and make major moves all over the globe. Which will have to be answered thus draining resources from the battle at home.

    Speaking of riots, what happens when the economy crashes as a result of Swalwell’s War? More and more chaos the empire has to deal with.

    Libs never think things through, do they?

    1. They can’t. They have no brains. Well actually some do, but dismiss the idea of thinking the idea through because no one would actually do that would they? Yes I’m putting words in their mouth.

    2. “Libs never think things through, do they?”

      Yep. As it’s been pointed out many times, libs tend strongly to be first-level thinkers. That’s something I’ve consistently observed with the lib friends and family through the years.

      1. Not to malign a ‘flyover country’ game, but most liberals are playing checkers in their minds rather than chess or God forbid three-dimensional chess.

    3. “Libs never think things through, do they?”
      Nope, they don’t. As is frequently pointed out, they strongly tend to be first level thinkers. Through the years I’ve seen this to be consistently true with liberal friends and family.

    4. I have to wonder how many other countries consider what would happen if they tried to take advantage of a civil war here in America? Do they realize that giving us an external enemy is one of the fastest ways to get us to drop our squabbles and unite to fight against them?

      1. Note that nobody jumped in during the original Civil War- and England was a major client of the South, with a lot of familial ties.
        There were tons of foreign military observers, most of whom got the wrong lessons from the conflict.

  15. When you wrote this is struck a nerve.

    “In something that I find profoundly troubling, when I’ve had this discussion before, I’ve had a Caring Liberal tell me that the example of Iraq doesn’t apply, because “we kept the gloves on”, whereas fighting America’s gun nuts would be a righteous total war with nothing held back… Holy shit, I’ve got to wonder about the mentality of people who demand rigorous ROEs to prevent civilian casualties in a foreign country, are blood thirsty enough to carpet bomb Texas.”

    Back in 2016, I wrote this:

    “I have watched both the Republican and Democrat primary debates.

    I have noticed something.

    When Republicans talk about their enemies, they talk about ISIS, Terrorists, Radical Islam, Mexican Drug Cartels, North Korea, and Russia.

    When Democrats talk about their enemies, they talk about Republicans, Gun Owners and the NRA, Wall Street, Millionaire and Billionaire Businessmen, and people who question anthropogenic climate change.

    If I new absolutely nothing else about the candidates and their policies, I think that would be enough for me to decided who to vote for in November.”

    I am more and more amazed just how much the Far Left hates its fellow citizens on the Right far more than any terrorist group or avowed enemy anywhere else in the world.

    1. That’s because for the left, those external enemies of America? They are the left’s allies, which is why they do everything that they can, via things like restrictive Rules of Engagement, in order to suppress our ability to fight them.

      The left believes that they are somehow on the enemy’s side, in all this, and that the enemy, having won the battles against America with the help of the “good left”, will treat them as fellows. The reality, which is that they’re going to be regarded as traitorous stooges to be eliminated as soon as possible, is utterly invisible to the usual member of the left.

  16. Yeah they don’t understand that the majority of the “evil military industrial complex” is on OUR side. If civil war breaks out, they’re on the side with no guns and no army.

    1. Check yourself. During the dark days of the Obama Administration, I think I counted at least five “sides” that would be a credible military threat if we ended up in another civil war/revolution. The butcher’s bill for that kind of dustup is something I don’t think any of us is willing to pay.

      And yes, the loony left is one of them. What? You think they’re gonna have any qualms about hiring mercenaries and legbreakers? You think there aren’t people who will do their dirty work for the price they’ll pay? You think that the UN won’t send “peacekeepers” to keep nuclear weapons out of “the wrong hands?”

      Pray to whatever God you believe in such a war does not come to pass. Because if it does, there will be blood. There will be death on a staggering scale. Truth, Justice, and the American Way go right into the toilet. The Republic is over, and foreign powers all come to the carcass and fight each other over the scraps.

      1. The problem with hiring people to do your dirtywork of gaining power for you is they may not hand power back to you when finished… or they may wind up getting offered more money to switch sides.
        Foreign troops would find themselves in pretty much the same spot that cops find themselves when dealing with domestic violence, or friends interveining in a fight between brothers- both sides drop their difference and fight the outsider. Look at Afghanistan or many of the fights in Africa.
        But should things truly get hot, sides become more about the leaders (skill, charisma, ability, appeal) and less about the supposed ideals being fought for. Once the fight is done, the successful leader (most often one of the generals) gets to pick how the government will function. And since Cincinnatus types are rare, you usually wind up with some sort of dictatorship- see the example of Napoleon, Franco, and others.

      2. No sane person wants a civil war. Most of what I see here are people explaining just how large the butcher’s bill would be. That’s far far from advocating for it.

        Except for this… I think that “the other side,” like this Congressperson who just tosses off remarks about nuclear weapons, expects everyone to be eternally patient. Any set of behavior or policy or ideology that depends on people remaining civilized is foolish beyond measure.

        And also… the UN shows up and it’s over. Everything is over at that point. Maybe the country is over, too, but blue helmets show up and there will be NO restraint.

        And all those sides willing to hire out? All those people willing to break knee caps? They have families that live on the same street as yours.

        Personally, I think that the problem is that “the other side”, the one that depends on “this side” to remain civilized don’t understand civilization. They believe that they are *good* and that people are born *good* and will *be* good if only someone puts them in charge and they can pass some more laws demanding it. But people are fallen, or maybe we’re animals, and civilization is a thin and fragile thing that we agree to because we see the benefit of it. So the Congressman thinks (as do many others) that a show of force will keep people in line to have their rights and freedoms eroded (which rights and which freedoms, hmm? ) that they’ll fall in line because the government has nukes?

        And consider the logic of this…

        “They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance, by lying supinely on our backs, and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot?” (…) “Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!”

  17. Green Berets don’t have a monopoly on infrastructure disruption. Anyone who, say, has worked in a food store for any meaningful length of time (and paid attention while on the job) knows that food stores only keep about 3 days of inventory on hand at any given time, and that the “warehouses” that stock the store are really trans-shipment points that only have 3-5 days worth of inventory for the entire region (when dealing with Supermarkets, at least), and that the addresses of said “warehouses” are publicly available. And they also know full well that the FDA will go into full lockdown-and-destroy mode if there’s even the slightest hint that the inventory in the supermarket and/or the “warehouses” have been contaminated or tampered with in some way.

    All speaking hypothetically, of course.

    1. Don’t even need contamination or threat of it.

      One word whispered on the wind:

      Shortage.

      The runs and lines make Black Friday look like a cake-walk.

      Anybody remember a few years back when CostCo said “Only two 25# bags of rice per customer.”?

      Picture that for some other staple.

      Or more than one…

      1. Ding ding. Just keep the trucks from entering or leaving the warehouses for 48-72 hours. Lord of the Flies will look like a civilized tea party by comparison.

        1. Keep them from doing so?
          Shit, I am a trucker. Anything like this happens, truckers could destroy the country in a week.
          We run the gamut politically, except for one consistent thing which is leave me the hell alone, and we know exactly how critical we are.

          1. Oh yes. There’s several areas of Australia (if not ALL of them) where ‘brake-checking’ semis = ‘the truck driver will not be prosecuted for the results, including death of the passengers of the vehicle, and if the idiots do survive, they’re the ones charged.’

          2. @Shadowdancer: If a car driver “brake checks” a semi and gets clobbered, the trucker didn’t choose to clobber him. He had no choice. They are trained never to swerve because it’s a great way to flip your load on its side, and likely crush two or three cars instead of one.

            I did that job for a year, and would like to see the videos used in trucking school made compulsory for all drivers. There is no way to “fix a ticket” for breaking the laws of physics.

    2. A woman that I knew in the Tri-Cities area of Washington told me that when Mt. St. Helens erupted, enough ash covered the area to shut down shipments of food for a short period of time. It was long enough that at least some food stuffs completely disappeared off the shelves of the local supermarkets.

      It doesn’t take much to make the food go away from urban areas.

      1. I would like to point out that the Tri-Cities area is a relatively small urban area and isn’t nearly as geographically isolated as, say, Seattle.

    3. Heck, the CDC just told Americans to throw out every leaf of romaine lettuce they own. Because they have had 32 people get sick in 11 states, with 13 hospitalizations, and not a single death, so far. In a nation of 300 million.

      CDC is advising that U.S. consumers not eat any romaine lettuce, and retailers and restaurants not serve or sell any, until we learn more about the outbreak. This investigation is ongoing and the advice will be updated as more information is available.
      Search for “CDC romaine lettuce” and go to the link that points to the CDC site. That quote is the subhead on the article.

      1. I went ahead and had my salad today. I’ll let you know if I get sick. Bought it at Costco.

        Now, I will say that it’s labeled “organic” and when I picked it up and put it in my cart I did notice that and I actually thought, word for word, “Why do they keep doing this. This is why people get sick from lettuce.”

          1. Actually, the reason we have romaine problems is probably criminal mischief. The last time, the romaine farms were on one end of the valley, upstream of a single large cattle farm that was scrupulous about cleanliness, and the same for the romaine guys. And yet magically, cow patty substances got into the romaine irrigation canals.

            There are several good food safety blogs with info of interest.

      2. If I remember correctly, soaking/washing lettuce in a mild bleach solution for a minute kills e.coli just fine. Most people ingest some e.coli every day; along with dozens of other bacteria. It depends on how much bacteria you ingest, and how healthy you are, that makes a difference between not having any problems, and getting sicker than a dog from it.

    4. When I lived in the bush AK the only way into town was via plane and it wasnt terribly improbable for the planes not to fly for a day or two (or week).

      New folk to town learned real quick what empty shelves and no water looked like and learned to stock up accordingly.

      I’ve always been a bit of a prepper at heart and fit right in, but some of them East Coast city transplants, yeesh.

  18. Count me as part of the Venn diagram (green side, as opposed to blue, and I know a lot of former green who went blue).

    I have a feeling that if Swalwell’s wet dream comes true, Mattis would knife hand the stupid out of him while telling him the military would NOT do his dirty work.

    And then all of those sanctuary states and cities that won’t enforce federal immigration laws, what makes you think your police departments would be willing our able to enforce federal gun laws?

    As a former grunt and now tanker, I was never good at math, but somebody else ran the numbers.

    https://survivalblog.com/mathematics-countering-tyranny/

  19. They think all those high-tech munitions would actually be delivered to the bad-thinker targets they designate.

    Well, they’d likely be delivered, all right. But to somewhat different addresses.

    1. Even if there was a serious attempt to deliver them, I don’t think there’s enough of them. As the saying goes, “Amateurs study tactics, while professionals study logistics.” And it takes a surprisingly large amount of ammunition to try and kill people with any sort of effectiveness, even when you’re using expensive “smart” weapons.

      1. Even old fashioned saturation bombing on a late WWII 1000 bomber scale is less effective than a modern might think.

  20. Great post, Larry!…it’s unfortunate that few progressives are likely to read it, although I will attempt to pass it on to a few.

    In light of what you’ve said here, as well as your personal experience with LEOs, etc., I am curious about your thoughts and observations about the substantial arming of federal agencies…even ones primarily involved with administrative issues…and the stock piling of ammo that has been going on for the last 10-14 years. These federal employees are not local sheriff’s and they are not military…even though they are apparently armed similarly…and there are quite a lot of them. How do you see them fitting into the various possible scenarios?

    The standoffs in Nevada and Oregon a few years ago provided some interesting information about the various players we might see in future potential conflicts. After Waco and Ruby Ridge, I was surprised (and angered as.many were) that LaVoy Finnicum was killed under the circumstances he was…even though his actions at the end were fairly suicidal. With all the fire power covering him, you would think they would have at least waited for a gun to actually appear. The fact is though, this is what swat teams, etc. train for. Was that the action of a highly-respected but inexperienced group reacting out of fear or a group trigger happy after years of training and few opportunities for real action? Is this representative of the armed feds? Do they really think Patriots are the enemy?

    Thank-you!
    LarryG

  21. Recently, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ordered all owners to turn in their bump stocks. Now, gun owner friends comment they had never seen one, and therefore suspected that they are actually quite rare, becasue many gun owners like to show off their equipment to other owners, and no one had shown off one of these.

    A grand total of two bump stocks were turned in, statewide.

    1. I never wanted a bump stock (AKA device which automates the process of missing your target) until I was told I couldn’t have one.

  22. The entire scenario is a shit-show, but I think Mr. Correia nailed the key factors in ACW II. As a former USAF officer, I have to believe the US military would be *extremely* reluctant to execute unlawful orders against the civilian populace.

    1. To be frank, I think a fair amount of the US left considers the military to be, at best, barely-tamed attack dogs. The reasoning goes that the military is so eager to kill people that it won’t matter if it’s Americans citizens or foreigners. Apparently all of us are just itching for bloodshed and are only one order away from terrorizing our neighbors.

      1. And better yet, that once they have been unleashed, and once the killing is done, the military will come running back to heel like a tame dog, and obediently heed the Left’s orders.

      2. This. The funny thing is, I gave out a simplified version of the scenario that the lefties think that they can have happen to a 12 year old kid (just order the soldiers, and they’ll automatically obey any order to kill the populace they’re supposed to protect) and the kid said “I think they’re more likely to turn around and shoot the person giving that order.”

        That kid has more brain than that congressman.

        (My son, btw.)

          1. @Patrick

            With regards computers, no, he reacts with pride. (Especially after seeing that flaming idiot on the Verge ‘instructing people’ on how to ‘assemble’ a ‘gaming’ computer. That thing with no fans and the double-layer of thermal paste… oy.)

            It’s when Vincent shoots off a line in perfect response to something Aff’s said that Aff laughs with delight about ‘how well he’s growing up, brings a tear to my eye,’

            Snark to snark combat training ftw.

  23. The current estimates that aren’t political garbage seem to be 420 million WITHOUT counting handmade, domestic military/police surplus (all those wonderful guns from the CMP and LEO trade in handguns) or illegal imports (Both of the “Operation Dragonfire” and “GI stuck an Iraqi pistol in his stuff to take home without going through the bringback process” nature). Census puts us 320 million people.

    The real unfortunate thing is the NRA seems to be complacent, if not outright involved in, the slow boil on gun rights. Wayne LaPierre has gone as far as outright lying to the membership (Compare his claim in 1986 repealing the Hughes Amendment was a “top priority” to the 2017 Face the Nation interview where he says he always supported the Hughes Amendment.) to pass what he thinks is “reasonable” gun control while Chris Cox preaches for gun confiscation.

      1. At this point, I’m starting to suspect they’ve complacent. If they were secretly run by Bloomberg, I can’t think of a single thing they’d be doing differently from what they’re doing now.

        Ever noticed that Democrat attacks jump straight to blaming the leadership of any organization EXCEPT the NRA? When have you ever heard Democrats name a specific NRA leader outside of when Oliver North became the (powerless, purely figurehead) President (and even then they only did it in response to something he personally said)?

          1. But nothing about the leadership unless it’s in direct response to something they say. Doesn’t that seem strange? Democrats normally go for the head, but Wayne LaPierre and Chris Cox are completely ignored.

          2. Which is frankly hilarious; because the NRA is the one gun organization MOST likely to compromise with the government. Granted, they/we have the most registered paying members; but we’re mild-mannered sweethearts compared to other take no prisoners organizations like NAGR. (Although some of us belong to both-hedge your bets.)

    1. This kind of thing is one reason I’ve always considered GOA and CCRKBA as more worthwhile to belong to than the NRA. They don’t compromise; NRA does.

      The other is that NRA didn’t want either the Heller or MacDonald case to be appealed. NRA’s leadership was either chicken, or had sold out, probably to GOP leadership. It was the other two groups that got those cases won.

  24. So wait, are gun owners crazy bloodthirsty maniacs who can and will kill dozens of people with an ordinary semiauto rifle, or idiot rustics who will immediately capitulate or die? Are AR-15s evil horrible doomsday weapons that are no different from what the military uses, or are they silly toys that pale in comparison to military hardware? Are cops and military personnel power-hungry and murderous, or are they the mindless pawns of the government who will only go after targets the Far Left approves? I can’t even keep it straight anymore.

          1. Damn, that Sarah Hoyt… I hear he kicks puppies too. Did you know he’s currently writing a book from a FEMALE point of view? Stealing our voices like that. What audacity.

    1. Yep, like all the hard left protesters back in Bush, Jr’s second term saying how it was obvious we could never win in Iraq, because you can’t win against a population of insurgents, then two days later, when talking about gun confiscation, would say the 2nd Amendment was tripe. No one with civilian weapons would ever be able to stand again a modern military force.

    2. For the most part, a gun, is a gun, is a gun. Doesn’t matter if it’s an M-16 with a 20 round detachable magazine and single, 3-round, or full auto selection; or a Winchester .308 semi-auto with a 5 round detachable magazine. You need to level the volume, carry more magazines. You need to equal the full auto output? First question is why? Second question is can you achieve the same result without blowing through hundreds of rounds?
      2nd Amendment should allow the citizens of this country parity with any similarly armed force the country could throw at us should they devolve into tyranny. Maintaining firearms is logistically possible for almost all citizens. Maintaining an Apache helicopter, B2 bomber, or even a nuke warhead isn’t logistically possible for the vast majority of citizens; and due to the high and rising costs, our government is often reluctant to put them in harm’s way.

  25. I agree with everything said but I’m still troubled by the confiscation after Katrina. I’m not surprised that big city idiot politicians think they can get away with it, but it was troubling that a national guard unit participated. It’s been a long time but my memory is that it was a unit from out of state. I don’t think the people responsible were ever held accountable. http://iowafc.org/blog/2015/09/09/10-years-ago-the-govt-went-door-to-door-confiscating-guns-lets-keep-it-from-happening-again/

    1. Yeah, it was from an out of state unit. It was the unit of a friend of mine. The entire unit wasn’t happy about those orders. According to him the approach to the homeowners went something like this ” Hi, I am Sgt XXXYYY from ZZNG Unit YYY/TTT,, I am here to ask if you have any gun and to confiscate them if you do, so do you have any weapons in this house…..”. Most folks stated they didn’t have any weapons and only a very few admitted they did and turned them over.

    2. OK, I was on the ground after Katrina with a National Guard unit – the 229th MP company. I specifically remember the LAIG briefing us when we first arrived and very specifically saying that we are NOT to infringe on Louisianans’ Second Amendment rights and we are NOT to try and take their firearms unless we see them endangering others or committing crimes.

      “The people of Louisiana have the right to keep and bear arms,” he said, “and you are not to infringe on that right.”

      I keep hearing these stories, and I’m not sure where they come from other than maybe NG units being present during some kind of dust-ups between local LE and residents.

      But as someone who was physically THERE, I can tell you we were told absolutely not to touch the firearms.

      1. Nicki:
        there are photos and video of this happening. They had media traveling with them. I don’t recall the ID of the groups, but they were running around in the big trucks. 2.5 or 5 ton units. Part of the gun-grabbing groups were CA Highway Patrol officers on loan to the state. In uniform. Pretty bad visuals when you have US Army uniformed soldiers dog-piling old ladies in their home to take her .38 revolver. That’s “helping”?

        IIRC, they were running around with full combat kit. When I first saw teh body armor, I was wondering what the hell? But after seeing that their primary focus was taking guns, it made sense. From my perspective, that whole deal was a big mistake on their leadership’s part. In the future, If I see NG or similar running around with body armor in an emergency situation, I will assume they are up to no good. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would think like this.

        All those gun-grabbers stole a lot of guns, and the police types stored them in barrels of salt water. Took years to get ANY of them returned, and I haven’t heard of a single one that wasn’t destroyed from “safe keeping”.

    1. I don’t think you are wrong on that at all. They support abortion, which is the mass murder of children before they are born. They’ve managed to confuse a generation to the point they think there are 57 genders and you should have a checklist for sex. (How can that NOT be a mood killer?!)

      Not to mention, any person that thinks Americans would be any less dangerous without firearms is an idiot. I think I’d prefer armed Americans to ones forced to get creative.

    2. It’s better for the environment and will leave more stuff for them. No. Not kidding. Serious discussion with one bunch of socialists here who actually opened up and spouted their beliefs when I was in the room resulted in that startling statement.

      They want us dead, or in work-farms. Then they’ll have control of the ‘resources’ and unicorns and butterflies will be everywhere.

      Same pack of idiots have turned the nation’s highest rated public utility into a 3rd world power generation system, with the goal of going 100% renewable energy as soon as possible.

      1. That doesn’t work for me. I worked awfully hard to get off the farm in the first place.

        Plus, people dumber than me telling me what to do pisses me off.

        Yah, I know there have been documented instances at some of those big climate change things were they’ve admitted their goal is to drastically reduce the population of humans on the planet.

  26. So … this guy with his ‘joke’ has repudiated his oath of office. He has proposed turning the military against the people for exercising their constitutional rights. When do we get to see him in an orange jumpsuit? At this point I’m not even joking.

  27. I’ve got over the logistics of this before with anti Gunners. When you point out the sheer number of people that our, much smaller, military force would have to contend with (even if they were so inclined as to kill their fellow Americans) they tend to resort to vulgarity and name calling.

  28. Swalwell’s idiotic comment is just the latest declaration from a Democrat that they hate us – and anybody else who dares to disagree with them – and will get rid of us BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY. He, and they, aren’t just moral retards, they’re actively domestic enemies of the Constitution. That said, when push comes to shove I seriously doubt Swalwell will be pushing any buttons. More likely he’ll be either hiding under his bed in fear . . . or decorating a lamppost as both object lesson and plaything for hungry crows.

    1. So why isn’t Congress, while it’s still Republican majority, expelling people like Swalwell (and Chuck Schumer) for breaking their oaths of office by publicly abjuring the Constitution? I do believe this would work and would render them ineligible ever to come back.

  29. A Nuclear Strike Aftermath would look a lot like Paradise CA this week. Imagine LA if a few people decide to sow the Santa Anna winds? How much of LA would reap it?

    Unlike the Civil War, this time every major power and the UN will try to interfere to maintain the status quo, or jump their neighbor while the Worlds Policeman is distracted.

      1. ISIS claimed responsibility for the fires already. That alone would cause me to think about current practices and figure out what needs to be done to fix the problem going forward.

        That’d be like not fixing the lock on your door after the just released pedophile offers to fix it for you and points out how cute your daughter is.

        1. ISIS claiming responsibility is pretty much worthless, as they would claim responsibility for drunk driving if they thought it would get enough attention.

          1. Sure, but one area where ISIS has been rather successful is in inspiring people who aren’t members or have had any training to commit attacks using the resources at hand. They might not have started the fires, but they might inspire someone to start the next ones.

          2. Sorry for the delayed response. I have zero belief ISIS did cause it. At the same time, it’s a huge vulnerability that could can be exploited with limited resources. Which is ISIS’s MO.

            At this point it becomes how much does it cost to resolve the problem and balancing that cost around the potential damage.

  30. … not only would the gun grabbers lose, but they would lose after managing to carry off just enough insane weapon of mass destruction attacks on their fellow citizens that there is no way that they would be able to just return to their civilian lives after the war. They would be if lucky hunted as war criminals: if unlucky, so hated the general mood would be that they wouldn’t even have the option of defending themselves in courts of law.

    This hasn’t occurred to them because they don’t think they could possibly lose. They think that everyone is either a cowed city dweller or a rube so stupid that they would have no chance at resistance. They have never faced the reality that there are a lot of intelligent, educated and most importantly competent people who would oppose them.

  31. I tend to fall somewhere along the Correia to Kratman scale, depending on how sanguine I feel (either meaning, take your pick). However, I’m less optimistic about the which side military and LEO will side on if such a horrific circumstance were to arise.

    See, they are both at a tremendous disadvantage in that they’re pretty much entirely dependent on the government. Paycheck, health insurance, retirement savings and probably freedom. In expecting them to refuse a gun confiscation, you’re not just asking them to side with the Constitution in an abstract sense. You’re asking them to see their family without money, food, housing, any retirement, health care, and probably then go to jail.

    Further, any sane order would work to make the LE and military institutions intolerable for those who would side with the 2nd Amendment long before attempting a confiscation. They won’t rely on those personnel to do it, they’ll use the bureaucracy to create ever more odious conditions for the guy at the bottom. Eventually, the organization self selects for people willing to endure heinous ROE and endless indoctrination meetings.

    Military and LEO are not immune to “Bad Money Drives Out Good.”

    You want the local PD to side with you? You’re going to need to be sure they can still get groceries in the morning.

    That said, if we’re going to go with “Nukes for Gun Control” and we start at the places with the most amount of violence involving guns…
    I’m pretty sure gun controls ceases to be an issue in this country.

    1. The thing is, the majority of the Left is openly and vocally anti-military and anti-law enforcement. And they know this, because they have to endure the endless “sensitivity trainings” and deal with the policies that favor the lives of the bad guys over theirs. They’re the people who know that politicians would rather see a dead cop than a dead crook.
      “An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
      An ‘Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet that Tommy sees!”

      1. I agree. I’m just asserting that eventually, the kind of people we rely on in LE and military to defend things like 2A will stop being willing to work for people who “would rather see a dead cop than a dead crook”, and that point will come long before dollars stop being spent on LE and the military.

      1. Yep- the “disciplined” forces weren’t all that happy to not get their paychecks post APEC, so they trashed Parliament house.
        Which got them paid hariap.

    2. This is what DHS was formed for, a “dumbed down” national made up of institutionalized drones that will do what they’re told and never question it. If you’ve been through an airport you surely realize they are not gathering the “best and the brightest”

      1. That brings up another problem- dumb, institutionalized drones who don’t question orders does not a good army make- or a particularly good force for forcing a tyrannical government on an armed & hostile population.

    3. I was Marines then National Guard. I think it is the combat arms guys who would mutiny or walk away in high enough numbers to render units useless. The support pouges would probably stick around in higher numbers – until they get ordered to draw weapons and actually fight.

  32. Some dude should that dumbo( and his staff) a copy of that little ol’ thesis that Mike Vanderboegh did titled “100 Heads”.

  33. Bringing in outsider to do their dirty work is something many Europeans would love to have a crack at trying. When I was stationed in Germany and England, I had more than one member of their military and bureaucracies tell me how they could fly over here and start doing just that … once we signed on to various UN or EU gun control treaties.

    When I reminded them just how large this country really is and how spread out they are going to be, their ardor cooled. I then pointed out that many of their supposed victims could pass as extras for the movie ‘Deliverance’.

    It was amazing how quickly they changed the subject.

    1. once we signed on to various UN or EU gun control treaties.

      *bursts out laughing* “We can conquer you ignorant Yanks easily, as soon as your civilian populace agrees to disarm themselves so we can do it!”

      And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a 24-carat pure example of why the 2nd Amendment exists.

  34. Man I love reading your editorials !!!!! I read them to my family. Federal law enforcement, gun lovers, book lovers, military family, you hit all cylinders for us. Thank you!!!!! Best line so far for us was about Milo and Mormons!!

    1. Until 1976, Mossurians were under gubernatorial orders to shoot Mormons on sight.

      There are reasons why there are so many Mormons good at shooting.

      Correia’s talents are exceptional in Utah. His opinions are not.

      Mormons have faced the US Army before.
      The Mormons won.

        1. Either John Browning or Porter Rockwell… hard to choose.

          For reference, Porter Rockwell was a professional bodyguard. He grew his hair out so he could be like Samson. After Missouri governor Liliburn Boggs (who was behind the aforementioned extermination order) survived an assassination attempt, Rockwell was made a suspect. When questioned, he is said to have replied, “If it was me, I wouldn’t have missed.” This was considered credible evidence and he was let go.

  35. “Similar dinner conversation once, with a bunch of SWAT cops from a major American city, talking about how incredibly easy it would be to entirely shut down and utterly ruin their city, with only a small crew of dedicated individuals and about forty eight hours of mayhem and fuckery.)”

    There’s a real life scenario that’s even easier: The Tsarnaev brothers.

    A couple of college aged bumblefucks with no training in anything brought a major American city to its knees for a few days, and the only thing they had was a pressure cooker and a car.

    You could magically remove all privately owned firearms tomorrow and Americans could still grind everything to a halt. The Left is playing a very dangerous political game with people who don’t look at this as a game.

    1. I think there’s one major consideration that most of the Left is clueless about. The two biggest reasons why the conservative Right haven’t engaged in the Left’s “game” is that first, we prefer to be left alone and not bothered, so we don’t usually start shit; and second, we really don’t have a game plan beyond resisting the first wave, and we certainly don’t have a plan on how to fix the Constitution to prevent this problem from re-occurring without causing more problems than it solves.

      The day we do have those plans, the Left will be in for a universe-changing moment.

  36. I will never forget the slow look of creeping terror on the face of a deeply progressive acquaintances when they sneeringly laughed at the idea of me trying to stand up to the army, or a SWAT team with my “little pop gun”, if a sensible government ever did the right thing and rounded up all the civilian firearms. and I coldly explained that old, fat, out of shape me wasn’t planning on standing up to either. They weren’t the enemy. People like him who voted to send them after people like me were. Then I smiled at him.

  37. Marquis of Queensbury rules?

    Dude, ACW 2.0 won’t follow MARQUIS DE SADE rules!

    One of the biggest problems libs have with military is their general understanding of its use:

    1: Point at target
    2: Send military
    3: Do war things
    4: Bitch about paying for it all

    Logistics? That’s for Kevin the intern and my nepotistic staff to worry about.

    A few years ago, some douche canoe wrote a book called “Christian America”. Didn’t read it, but read about it. Premise was McCain wins in ’08, Palin has him killed, becomes POTUS/tyrant, imposes hard line, radical fundamentalist religion on all (this was a bit before the Hulu show gave us all the finger pointing Handmaid meme).

    From what I gleaned from reviews and whatnot, the last of le Resistance, a million strong, gathered together to make their final stand.

    In Manhattan.

    A million people, fighting against the infrastructure of the US, on a twenty-four mile long island mostly covered with concrete, asphalt and gravel.

    My strategy to fight that? Blow the bridges and tunnels, shut off the water pipes (and the sewage pumps!), build bleachers in Yonkers for folks with binoculars.

    I want the popcorn franchise.

    1. There was a pretty idiotic-sounding movie recently called Bushwick where Texas secedes and launches a dastardly sneak-attack on . . . the Bushwick neighborhood of New York. The reasoning is that they think it’ll fall easily because of it’s diversity but because Diversity Is Their Strength, the blue-staters rally and defeat the evil red-staters.

      Stop laughing.

      1. I thought Bushwick was pretty funny, what with the Texas soldiers being as ignorant of tactics as the Bushwickians, and going for non-combatants before securing the local area.

        For the most part, military bases are located in smaller cities rather than the enormous Blue Dots on the national map. Many of those smaller cites are Red Dots on that same map.

        The 4th Mech at Ft Carson would likely send a BCT south to Pueblo, and one north to Denver, rather than confiscate the guns of Deep Red Colorado Springs. Probably send the 10th SF Group to Boulder.

        1. The 4th Mech would most likely surrender to Colorado Springs. Denver would be burned with the 4th Mech providing a cordon to prevent leakers, and then Colorado would get its game face back on. Boulder and Ft. Collins would fall in line or check out. Industrial warfare, the 10th would be pushed out in more traditional SOF roles for reconnaissance and ensuring no large forces came up unannounced.

          Conservative estimates place high millions to low billions rounds of privately held ammo in C. Springs, realistic estimates place C. Springs as the place that would chortle heartily at a zombie apocalypse.

          Oh, and using US nukes in the US? Nuking Omaha? The place USSTRATCOM lives? You want to open that door? O R’lyeh?

          – Doomsday

    2. Heh… some people don’t watch movies from the 1970s or something.

      Fantasies about a radical fundamentalist religious government are both amusing and horrifying. Amusing because the person building the fantasy knows nothing about religion, denominations, or history. Horrifying because the person building the fantasy knows nothing about religion, denominations, or history.

  38. Back in the early ’90’s, I was a young 2Lt in the RCAF, “living in the mess” (i.e. in the BOQ in US military speak). One of my neighbours was an engineer. OIder guy, who was living in the mess because he had recently divorced. He was an Air Engineer Officer, but had switched to that MOC (MOS in US military speak), from army combat engineer.

    One night over beers, we were discussing something along these lines, and he told me some of the details of the course material from a course he had taken about 10 years before as an army engineer. The course was called something like the NATO Joint Forces Strategic Sabotage Course.

    HOLY SHIT!

    The things he said. Little details, like just how few air traffic controllers there were, and how long they took to train, and how easy it was to access the parking lot where they worked. How much a typical city depends on one natural gas pipeline, and how long it takes to repair or replace a damaged valve.

    You don’t even have to do anything every time. Phone in a bomb threat. Any security expert will tell you that 99.9% of bomb threats are hoaxes, but you still have to treat them as real, because if you don’t, the .01% will be catastrophic. So call in bomb threats, but only leave a bomb randomly every 5th or 6th time, to maximize your “bang for each buck”.

    A few years ago. some animal rights extremists phoned up the headquarters of a major grocery store chain just before Thanksgiving. “We have injected cyanide into several frozen turkeys in one of your stores. Guess which one.(click)”. How much do you suppose it cost them to replace all of their stock of turkeys?

    And this is just the mildest stuff.

    In Gulf War 1, the British SAS sent teams to interdict the MSR (Main Supply Route) of the Iraqi Army. One of their tasks was to locate and cut a fiber optic cable, and then to ambush and kill the repair party, because the number of qualified fiber optic repair engineers in the country was very small and killing even a couple would drastically degrade the capability of the Iraqi government to maintain their communications network.

    Look what happened when one cop in LA went rogue. He was a complete loser and a mook. He didn’t have any kind of real plan, no pre-prepared safe house, no second vehicle, or any kind of contingency planning, and yet one guy with a couple of firearms pretty much paralyzed the entire police force of LA for almost a week.

    These people have no idea what they are talking about. They will not get what they want, they will get Bosnia, or if they are really lucky, Peru in the ’80’s, or if they are VERY lucky, Northern Ireland.

    1. You really do not want to sit down with a guy who has only had a passing acquaintance with demolition and sabotage, if you want to sleep soundly at night afterwards. If you sit down with a guy who’s actually been trained to do that sort of thing, well… You’ll never sleep soundly again. Ever.

      Civilization is fragile. Ohsoveryveryveryfragile. That food you eat, that you take for granted? There are a thousand interconnected things that have to happen for it to make it to your supermarket. Same-same with that water that comes out of your tap when you turn it. And, all of that is both very accessible, and fairly easy to sabotage. Hell, a deer rifle and a couple of hours target practice could shut down most of the electrical grid across the Westen US, with predictable effects on California. And, let me tell you what–There are only so many replacement parts available, and after they run through those fixing what was shot up? It’ll be awhile, folks… Get used to 19th Century living, at its finest.

      Here’s a pointer that a lot of people forget, thinking that all of this is specialized military training, or something–When I was in the Army, I taught myself a bunch of techniques that are usually only formally taught to SF Engineer guys, and do you know what I used? Industrial safety manuals. If you know how to prevent industrial accidents, then you already know how to cause them… All it takes is a little imagination, some application, and… Well, I think you can get the picture. There’s no need to resort to BS sources like the Anarchist’s Cookbook, which I still halfway suspect was authored by the FBI as a honeypot. All you need to do is present a neat, clean-cut appearance, and do some research about industrial safety at the library and/or the actual industries. End of the day, you’ll have some very useful knowledge that would scare the bejeebers out of these ohsoveryproper gun confiscators.

      See, the smart thing is to leave the guns out there, and just not piss off people, ‘cos if you take away the actual, y’know, weapons…? You really are not going to like the things we find to substitute for them. Like, to just throw something out there, LNG tankers… There’s this really neat technique called a BLEVE, or a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion, and if you do it juuuuuuust right, you can fairly easily replicate a small nuclear strike with just the stuff you find down at the local petroleum distribution center. Take people’s guns away, and instead of shooting just you, they’re gonna kill you and about a couple of thousand of your friends. All at once, and very, very indiscriminately…

      Even if you could just wave a magic wand, and take away everyone’s weapons? Guess what? You ain’t fixing squat, ‘cos the only really dangerous weapon exists solely between the ears of a human being, and you’re very much advised not to flip the “enable” switch on those…

      1. Be fairly easy to cripple bulk shipping in the central 3/5ths of the nation. Single point of failure in a really isolated location. Nearly happened naturally a few times because of floods damaging the location in question.

      2. Maintenance and Logistics, twenty years in this ‘n that. It doesn’t even take malicious *intent* to do massive damage. Merely negelgence. Been reading (and testing, and suchlike) industrial safety and standards manuals of various types to about that long, too.

        There’s stuff we don’t talk about out of school. Or on the internet.

        That said, my nightmare is an engineer with reason for malice.

  39. This whole Leftist fantasy – now mainstream on the Left, I might add – is a prime example of Brandolini’s Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.

    Larry already spent a barrage of paragraphs only to scratch the surface. Leftists who know nothing of war seem to think it’s only going to be some fat redneck taking potshots at an F-18 with his Winchester. I don’t put it past a redneck or two to go out in such a pink cloud of glory, but the fact is that there are a lot of well-educated, well-trained people who are going to be a tad smarter than that, should it come to it.

    The support and logistics involved with getting a fighter or AH in the air, or a tank rolling to the battlefield*, or a drone in the air is simply beyond the knowledge, let alone comprehension of these latte-sipping generals. Those are the things that would be under attack: the convoys (fuel, ammo, food), the personnel in off base housing, the infrastructure. There’s not enough military or LEOs in the country to protect all of the vital roads, bridges, damns, electrical relay stations, bases, civil buildings, railways, police stations, and mass transit hubs.

    San Francisco can’t even stop people from shitting on the streets, but the government is uber competent enough to stop tens of thousands of people from organized mayhem?

    So when the economy tanks after about a week of this shit (None of these geniuses ever consider the economy), and the food trucks stop delivering, the all powerful government is going to come crashing down.

    And that’s when things really get ugly.

    *Battlefield – where would that be, again?

    1. I think it actually goes deeper than not understanding how the systems work. Many progressives do not comprehend the nature of violence or the use of force on either a practical or philosophical level. And that is why I am convinced that if, God forbid, a brother-on-brother conflict we’re to ever occur on American soil again, it will be started by leftist progressives.

      1. Your comment is why I take the hint from the late Mike Vanderboegh, and get up close and personal with the idiot in question.

        I tell them that I will not comply, and that they will have to force me.

        Then I tell them that if they do, yes, they will get a few people like me, but the rest of us will hear about it, and those people not yet raided will leave their homes, and come looking for the people who are sending the cops out.

        People like the ass hole standing in front of me.

        Then I ask, “How serious are you about your desire to confiscate firearms? Serious enough to die for it? Because you will. Not the cops you send in your stead. YOU.”

        In short, I make it absolutely, crystal clear that said ass hole has a very real personal stake in the outcome should their wet dream manifest in reality.

        They usually don’t like this kind of conversation.

        1. I’ve had this converstaion before. If, hypothetically, the police come for my guns, they won’t politely knock on my door. They’ll cut the power, disable my phone, throw in tear gas and storm all entry points in full battle gear and gas mask. At that point, I can acquiesce or die. So, I’ll give them my guns, politely apologize that I didn’t realize the deadline had passed, and assuming I don’t just disappear, burn down their homes while they are out pulling the same crap on my neighbor. If they DO disappear me, I have friends who will take up the torch, as it were. This won’t be a war between willing participants. A lot of women and children will die horribly. It will make Sherman look like Jesus.

          1. More or less, yes.

            I mean, lets war-game this, right? Have the people who seriously think they can have government enforce this *peacefully* ever thought it through?

            And I bet every single one of them cried about “hearts and minds” in Iraq, too. Every single one of them.

          2. Ever notice how the media glossed right over what happened in East Germany the day after the Communist govnment fell? And the weeks and months after?

            Nobody ever comes right out and says what “many scores were settled” really means, or what the final body count was.

          3. And they’ll never find the second set of guns and ammo that fell out of the canoe 10 years ago.

  40. If one can find it, look up the movie _Moon 44_ (the first collab between Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, BTW). There is a moment in that movie where, after one of their number is violently assaulted, the “smaller, weaker” folks band together to take control of the moonbase’s food, water, and air storage. In fact, at one point, the group’s speaker says straight-out: “We control your food, your water, your *air*”; then goes on to state “Any further attacks on any one of us shall be taken as an attack on *all* of us”, with the implied retaliation means indicated….

    This is in essence what the Urbanites will face should they decide to Raise Their Hands In Anger against us. We control their food, their water, and if not their air then enough other tangibles to make such an act the last mistake they will *ever* make.

  41. Actually military hardware is relatively easy to sabotage. All you need is a PKP fire extinguisher. Spray it down the intakes, all over any electronics visible n so forth. Its immediate all stop strip n clean thoroughly to try n save as much as possible due to the corrosive nature of PKP powder. That stuff is awesome.

  42. I still insist that the moment the people in D.C. order the U.S. military to take punitive action against the fly-over states, the bulk of the force will simply squelch comms and say, “What was that, sir? Couldn’t copy. Standing by.” Meanwhile, several of the fly-over governors will mobilize their National Guard units — National Guardsmen swearing oaths to their states, before the people in D.C.

    So, the combined NG force rolls for Foggy Bottom. Along the way, they pick up about a gazillion Reserve and Active and Retired military volunteers, who want to join the party. Because Larry is right: the switch will have been “flipped” and D.C. will no longer be seen as the capitol of the country, but a hostile foreign city actively attacking the Constitution. And since all of us who’ve worn uniforms swore an oath to uphold and defend that very same Constitution, once we unanimously agree that D.C. has gone rogue and represents a clear and present danger to the U.S., it will be game-on.

    Now, the denizens of the Pentagon may or may not side with the D.C. politicians. Very probably, half that building will be actively involved squelching comms and/or quietly aiding the NG force en route to Foggy Bottom. But the nukes will not be launched. Even careerist generals aren’t so craven as to send bombers and missiles to get Granny on her porch with her double-barreled shotgun.

    Wait, what was that? Law enforcement, you said? The cops will stop the NG ‘insurrection’ before it reaches the capitol steps? I hate to break it to you — rainbow-flavored, 57-gendered “woke” folks — but the super-majority of lawmen in America will be begging to go with the NG force. So, we wind up with this yuuuuuuuge bunch of NG, Reserve, Active, Retired, and law dudes — many law dudes belonging already to the categories of NG, Reserve, and Retired, by the way — and they are all rolling into D.C.

    While the Pentagon sits on its hands. Deliberately.

    How does it ultimately play out?

    There is some bloodletting. Most of it is political blood. Very, very few troops fire on their own. The skulls getting cracked are political skulls, and the few quixotic activist-protesters who put on their pussyhats and take to the streets with broomsticks and bags of glitter.

    You know that video of the ANTIFA kid who takes a tire iron to a counter-protester, and the boy gets clocked in the jaw? It will look kind of like that, only with rifle butts to the jaws of the ANTIFA clowns.

    “The three-letter agencies will save us!” you shout.

    Maybe. But most of them will have figured out that there is no ‘win’ against the NG force, which has clearly decided it has nothing left to lose — and will happily raze all of D.C. to the ground if met with determined resistance.

    Thus, a giant pile of (D)s and some (R)s get arrested. Those who evade arrest, fly to Europe — where they will live the rest of their lives in celebrated champagne exile among the cognoscenti. Jobs will be offered in Brussels, with the E.U. Which will be hurling angry confetti across the Atlantic.

    Back in the U.S., a Hague-like trial commences. With most of the defendants being found guilty of treason. They are subsequently placed up against a wall, and shot. Those not shot, are sent to Gitmo. Where they can be bacha bazi for al-Qaedists.

    One or possibly several of the large coastal cities may find themselves kicked out of the Union — to prevent their political stupidity from contaminating the D.C. clean-up process. Hey, let’s admit it. They wanted out as soon as Trump got elected. Why not oblige them? They can buy and trade for what they need from America, assuming they can handle punitive tariffs and reluctant vendors working against them. Welcome to your new Venezuela, Manhattan, Chicago, San Francisco, and L.A! I am sure Commissar Ocasio-Cortez will set it all right eventually!

    A mass refugee exodus of progressocrats — from the liberated fly-over territories, to the newly-created city-state Peoples Democratic Socialist Republics — helps parse the situation even more. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

    For restocking of U.S. government, Constitutional guidelines and fresh elections are then used to fill all the empty seats in the realigned Senate, White House, WH cabinet, and Congress. With a warning note left on the capitol door by the armed guys who are all heading back home to their families: fuck with us again, and it will be even worse for you next time. THX. Bye.

    1. Those that flee to Europe wake up one night, with either one individual there to terminate them, or a team to extract them back to the USofA for trial and summary execution.

      There is no safe space after that.

      1. Considering that Europe is 100% dependent on the US for defense, they would pretty much be handed right back should the USA say so.
        It would pretty much be Russia or China.

      1. Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Roy Fincum; not to mention the police vs bikers fiasco in Waco a couple of years ago says different.

        1. It all depends on the reaction of those involved, if it was “Oh, cool beans, lets do that again,” or if it was “WTF was that all about?”

          Sort of like the old guy who was shot getting his gun confiscated because a family member decided to call the red flag thing in.

          Going on Tuesday to do something you might not be really happy about but which is the law now, is different from going again on Wednesday to do the same thing *after* finding out that no one really found out or cared if the first guy was a danger or not before writing the order.

          1. I imagine that the cops and soldiers doing the deed will probably do a much different calculation once they see pushback–One old guy is not a big deal, but when “someone” starts showing up at the sheriff’s house with Molotov cocktails…?

            It’s going to be a lot less attractive to go out gun-hunting, and after a certain point, that is what is going to happen. I suspect a Lexington-and-Concord moment would take place, and after that? Zero participation rate in the gun grabbing raids.

            Thing is, these people have nowhere to go, nowhere to hide–There are not yet “secure enclaves” established for them to live in with their families, and until that happens, the agents of the state are going to be vulnerable.

            You want a vision of what it would look like, go read up on Tsarist Russia, and the revolutionary periods of the 19th Century, when Russian newspapers refused to bother printing biographies of newly-assigned police ministry officials, on the theory that they might as well just save what they had on the guy for his obituary.

            The left is not going to like what it all looks like, after they bring their “revolution” to modern America. I don’t think they’ve quite done enough groundwork to make their wet dreams come true, and the response they get when they try to trigger things won’t be what they’re imagining.

          2. I was USMA Class of ’93. One of the things that I only realized later is that the shooter at Ruby Ridge and also at Waco was a USMA grad. This is a guy who spent four years at WooPoo learning to honor the Constitution. He then spent more years as a commissioned officer. He also shot and killed American Civilians who posed no threat to him….

            THink about that for a minute.

        2. Ruby Ridge was the only one of the incidents you named that really indicates otherwise, and even that wasn’t as unambiguous as the diehard libertarian crowd claims.

    2. Sometimes I wonder if Obama was vaguely aware of the problem when he was campaigning in ’08 and mentioned something about a “Civilian National Security Force” as well funded as the military.

      Though it didn’t seem to get off the ground, so I guess blathering about such things in a campaign speech is easier than actually organizing, training and equipping it.

      1. To make a “Civilian National Security Force” actually work as a potential military, you need people who are willing to endure hardship, work, take criticism, subject themselves to discipline, sacrifice- all those tough things.
        Now, think about the average spoiled special snowflake, and yeah… not going to happen.
        It’s one of the reasons “The Resistance” will always be just a bunch of Che LARPers who’s playacting is solely confined to the Bluest of Blue Democratic run cities. Actual revolution requires privation, hardship, rough living, and a willingness to suffer and even die for the cause. Most happen because the actual oppression by the government is worse than the hardship of a war, and they have nothing left to lose. America ain’t that for the spoiled children of privilege pretending to be revolutionaries.

      2. Only an completely ignorant moron would fail to observe that authoritarian states always create a politically reliable paramilitary force along side the military – specifically to enforce the dictates of the dictatorship where the military would be expected to object. In many historical examples, those forces were composed of foreign mercenaries. Indeed contemporary examples would be places like Iran.

        1. Should the US Secret Service start forming armored divisions and fighter wings- that’s pretty much a sign that things are about to get hot.

    3. I shall piously hope that if America goes this badly to Hell in an SUV, that we are able to agree to peaceful for the most part partition. I would guess we fracture peacefullyinto about six parts.

      As a further practical point, there are large number of more or less conservative people who are not gun owners. Their opinions on the Aecond Amendment, says polling, are not distinguishable from gun owners.

      1. “I shall piously hope that if America goes this badly to Hell in an SUV, that we are able to agree to peaceful for the most part partition. I would guess we fracture peacefullyinto about six parts.”

        Not happening. The left is absolutely OBSESSED with seeing to it that anyone who disagrees with them about ANYTHING winds up prematurely dead. Therefore, they constitute an existential threat to EVERYONE who disagrees with them. Therefore, the left’s existence cannot be tolerated.

        We’re just responding to the rules THEY are writing.

    4. “Back in the U.S., a Hague-like trial commences. With most of the defendants being found guilty of treason.”

      That I can see. However, I suspect we’ll be a bit more ‘humane’ than having them executed. We’re far more likely to do to them what was done to the Tory sympathizers after the Revolutionary War, eviction and exile from the U.S. and we’re not giving up an U.S. cities either. That’s a case of eminent domain and eviction.

    5. AMEN… not to forget the 10 million hunters & shooting sport regulars that are true gunslingers + sniper level oneshot one kill lifetime operators that Love America = as well as the many ‘use to be’ – or – retired hunters in the millions still well armed & able tho slowed mostly by age gladly can hold the homefront to defend it as best they can = many 12gauge shotgun toten grandads & grandma’s…!!!

  43. Excellent piece, Larry, and gold in the comments.

    One thing, though – Something the lefties not only don’t comprehend, they’ve never considered it, is that once something like CWII starts it will not end until it is completely over. There will not be a negotiated truce, a jointly-reached armistice, or a holiday cease fire. The major part of the conflict will – probably – be done within 60 days, maybe even 25-40, but the carry-on will last for years. Think of “Saturday night in South Chicago in every metropolitan area every single day for years.” There are lots of people – individuals and very small groups – with A List Of Scores To Settle and they will not be denied. It may take them months, maybe years, but those scores will be settled, and since there wil be no Robert E. Lee or Ulysses Grant, no Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis, directing or controlling activities, just random acts by unassociated random actors, any level of control or influence will be impossible, and it’s highly likely that a great deal of that activity will be both very irrational and very destructive.

    Real scary shit, that, but totally uncomprehensible to some.

  44. MUTINY — as said so well, most of the best green and blue will instantly quit

    FRAGGING — some will stay in to take-out govt loyalists

    GOOSE-CHASING/AMBUSH — all the non-fragged govt loyalists will have gotten blue/green flu by the end of a month (more likely week)

    PATSIES — suspected liberal neighbors will have to prove their anti-govt loyalty by helping the above so theyll be killed by govt if they run to them

    TROPHIES — the price of milsurp and arms w/ a story “got this off a dead nazi/liberal” along w/ the obvious non-necessity of bring-back papers means that most of the govt dead will happen just for the sake of grabbing up govt weaponry

  45. The one thing goobers like Swalwell don’t understand is just three words:
    No.
    Rear.
    Areas.
    They have the image that the war will be fought way out in Flyover Country, pitting toothless morons against Minions of the State who will perform all violence at a distance. They believe that the closest they’ll have to get to the reality of violence is giving orders, and watching on the tv news.
    Ain’t gonna be that way. This isn’t going to be like the other guerrilla wars, over the horizon and at a long arms length.
    If the ACW2 ever really does kick off, I give Swalwell- now that he’s made his opinions clear- a month , maybe three. After that he’s some Bubba’s ear tag.
    No rear areas.

    1. No rear areas.

      Nothing but “irregulars” in civilian clothes.

      But the government has nukes… or at least A-10s.

      Oh, and the excuse the Obama admin came up with to remove Qadaffi was that he fired on civilians…

    2. ^This^

      Assuming some military units remain functional, they still have impossible problems.

      Most of us goobers aren’t equipped to deal with a main battle tank or even an APC. But eventually the crew has to get out and refuel the vehicle and themselves. preform maintenance, and take a dump. That’s when Cletus shoots them in the head with his deer rifle unless they have a lot of infantry screening them. (In which case, he might decide to cap a couple of grunts)

      Same with chopper and drone pilots – if they leave the base, they are targets.

      1. It’s an excellent book. I was thinking about it while reading this. Orson Scott Card’s ‘Empire’ is in a similar vein.

  46. I for one am glad to see such statements from left-wing politicians and their supporters – entertainment factor aside, they flatly dispel the image the left has been trying to style for itself for decades. Ever since the hippie days, the American left was supposed to be the “do no harm” side – the side that’s peaceful, tolerant, nature-loving etc. You could call them incompetent, stupid, naive – none of it mattered so long as they could cling to non-violence as the basis of their moral high ground.

    Nowadays, however, things are looking much the opposite. From Antifa thugs looking for excuses to riot and smash random store fronts, to actual elected officials threatening violence against their own people, the left has lost it’s virtually only appealing pretense – that they’re peaceful, reasonable, *civil*. Because without it, they have nothing else to go on. And the more they realize it, the more berserk they get.

    The funniest irony is that, as was noted above, when it comes to actual violence, they’re but paper tigers. Even as they’ve lost face by making blatant threats, they’re unable to make good on them. They’re still thugs; they’re just wimps as well.

    1. “I for one am glad to see such statements from left-wing politicians and their supporters – entertainment factor aside, they flatly dispel the image the left has been trying to style for itself for decades.”

      Don’t forget the ubiquitous, “No one wants to take your guns” line and all its mendacious variants.

      1. Think of it as your standard keyboard warrior, or a perpetually aggressive chihuahua. A thug is someone who threatens or tries to use force as primary means of attaining a given goal. Being a wimp simply means they don’t have that much force in their disposal to begin with.

      2. Think bully- he’s rough and tough when the target is weaker than him, but cringes and cowers when the target turns out to be stronger than he thinks.

    2. There is a caveat to this. Leftists in US sent tens of thousands of bombs to places all over back in the 70s. Robbed banks and committed much mayhem. History has been rewritten to erase this and if you weren’t alive you wouldn’t remember.

      1. Except for how often they managed to blow themselves up, sending bombs or setting bombs is somewhat low risk in concept, in that the goal is not to expose yourself, even if your organization claims responsibility it’s not a personal responsibility.

      2. History being rewritten makes sense, never mind me also being an outside observer – the Socialist government here in the Balkans was even less likely to report such events, perish the thought we besmirch the fellow travelers.

        At any rate, in the modern information age, the facade is coming down hard, yet I find there’s an even better development – the image of the right is greatly improving. As I noted, in most cultural aspects – family, religion, social order etc. – Eastern Europe is far closer to the American right than to the left. But this is something I wouldn’t have known without direct access to more right-wing media and cultural examples, including writers such as our kind host. And now that cat’s out of the bag, there’s no putting it back. It’s like when you’ve heard tons of insults about someone behind their back, and when you meet them, they’re actually pretty nice – and it’s the insulting parties that you now know are full of crap. An enlightening experience indeed.

  47. Most of the weapons that the extreme Left has wet dreams about using against gun owners (Attack Helicopters, drones, “NUKES” – although I’m sure that was hyperbole, etc.) ARE relatively accurate. HOWEVER, they aren’t small. America is very homologous. I may be a gun nut… well… except for that tragic boating accident… but my neighbors? ALL OF THEM are Democrats. ALL OF THEM. Both sides, across the street, behind, ALL OF THEM, and it’s a suburb, so the space between houses isn’t all that big. If they were to us a Drone, or an Apache to “take out my house”, collateral damage would be absolutely certain, if only in PTSD and/or hearing damage. But let’s face it. If they went that way, there would be a LOT of people that they would need to “take out”. How many times will they miss? How many times will someone make a mistake and blow up the house next door? How many times will they blow up people who moved in yesterday, because they guy that lived there 3 years ago was an avid gun collector?

    1. If the collateral damage in war zones (where we arguably have less of a vested interest in the locals, notwithstanding the hand-wringing of “caring” liberals) is any indication, the body count of lib dems would be well beyond what they could tolerate.

    2. I live in an apartment complex in the middle of a large-ish city. A drone strike to take me out would probably kill several dozen of their fellow travelers. A WMD to take me out would take out a large population center on the West Coast.

      Maybe we just follow the Constitution, instead, and call it good.

    3. They renamed and renumbered the houses and streets in my town a couple of years ago to implement the Emergency 911 program. I pity the poor couple that have my old house number.

  48. An attempt to wrest the arms of self-defense from the American people by force would first require the locking down or shutting down of the internet. Why? Because within hours of the action starting the full data – names, addresses, schedules, places of employment, browser history, etc. – of all persons ordering this *and* their families, friends, co-workers, doctors, teachers, day-care workers, hair stylists will become public information. Shortly after that nightmarish carnage will undoubtedly ensue. When that switch is flipped from “Vote” to “Fight” it will be a war to the knife.

    1. Which, I assume, is why WRSA recommends “bipartisan accountability folders.” Hard copies don’t require a connection.

  49. There was a line item in the Star Trek history mentioning the day they killed all the ‘lawyers’ –from this Congressman’s crap I think it was misremembered, should be the day they killed all the ‘liberals’.
    You have to handle the frog to boil the frog, and it is clear they’ve been licking their fingers and getting high off it.

  50. I love the irony of a government official threating tyrannical acts to compel the citizens to surrender the means to defend themselves from tyrannical acts threatened by government officials. It’s as if the Founders could see the future. Aside from that . . .

    America has about 2 million military personnel world-wide, not all of them trigger-pullers (somebody has to teach diversity classes, process payroll, cook chow). There were 15 million hunting licenses issued in America last year, every one of them – by definition – a trigger-puller. If only 10% of the hunters resist, you’re in an even fight and no military commander wants those odds when going door-to-door in Minneapolis or Memphis or Missoula.

    If sheer numbers aren’t terrifying enough, consider that American troops deployed overseas know their families are safe at home where they can’t be taken hostage or killed. But the families of troops assigned to kill Americans here in America will not be not protected by geography, they’ll be potential hostages to influence troop morale and inspire desertions, a well-established guerilla warfare tactic.

    Dumb mission, lousy odds, logistics SNAFU and family terrorized, how long before Corporal Smith decides he’s had enough fun and goes home to protect his wife and kids?

    War-gaming is intellectual fun but in real life, the WOPR computer was right: the only winning move is not to play. Let’s hope Congress understands the lesson.

  51. My wife’s uncle was SF, fought in Panama, Desert Storm, and who knows where else considering what I saw in his records after he passed. He said the same thing about a few motivated individuals taking a major city to it’s knees. I won’t repeat our conversations for the same reasons you mentioned but it was freakin scary the ideas he had for massive disruptions using almost nothing of consequence……

  52. Not sure if it’s been mentioned in the 100+ comments above, but I’d be super interested to know how many of those statist leftards who don’t know anyone who owns a gun know anyone who is a veteran or who has children, or the children of friends, who have swerved in the armed forces? Who, exactly, do they think are flying, refueling, rearming, and repairing the Apache gunships? Can pretty much guarantee it’s not a bunch of hand wringing girly men (or women).
    Pretty easy to discern how it will go when Johnny Nuremberg returns with his rocket pods empty from hitting Bobs house and the refueling specialist called that same guy “Uncle Bob”.
    It’s not their children who have born the burden of the last 17 years of war. It’s not their nieces and nephews who have 12, 30, 48 months combined in Iraq and Afghanistan wielding an M4 and spotting ieds under dead dogs on the highway. It’s been people like us, or our sons and daughters. It’s the kids who were in Boy Scouts, whose dads took them fishing and hunting, who put their hands over their hearts for the flag at the Fourth of July parade, whose parents served.
    They are grown and they know right and wrong.

    1. The Left thinks that we would never harm them because they are our neighbors, coworkers, and ‘friends’.

      Sorry, but if you SWAT me, you’re fair game, and I’m not stupid enough to leave an enemy at my back.

  53. I’m reminded of the various “versus” debates I’ve seen and had about fictional characters and even armies, from both the physical and ethical standpoint. There’s a staggeringly large number of people who believe that violence is something nice and orderly, the good guys never harm anyone unintentionally or more than they mean to, and the fight is easily called based on who’s “stronger”. You can guess how much practical experience or even purely academic knowledge such people actually have. At any case, when they decide to demonstrate the lack thereof, on any subject outside popular fiction, well… you get masterpieces like the congressman’s tweet. And I thought Alexandria Occasional Cortex would be the dimmest bulb in the box.

  54. It had to be said and I’m glad you did it elegantly.

    One additional point to throw in that mix. Not only is it unlikely that sworn LE would violate the Constitution and act against their otherwise law abiding neighbors, it is also very likely that they would decline to assist the Leftists. By this I mean the Leftists probably don’t understand that if the police take a prolonged smoke break, there is nobody to respond if, for example someone broke into the Leftists’ gated communities and meeting halls. Their tantrums are, as usual, poorly conceived and not at all thought out.

    1. “Doggone it, I thought I turned on my walkie when I got out of the car. Geez, how long has my radio been off” – me, numerous times over the years.

      Good thing I worked in a fairly peaceful environment. LOL

  55. Swallwell……the guy that repeatedly goes on Tucker Carlson’s show, gets humiliated, and comes back for more. He’s either a masochist, too stupid to realize he loses every time, or too arrogant to know he’s too stupid.

    or all 3.

  56. I hate to say this. The government doesn’t need to come get your guns. You will turn them in or your family will starve. The Dems will just set it up so you’ll get a letter telling you to turn in you stuff or provide names of new owners by X date or your bank account, govt checks, SS Benefits, cell phone accounts, etc will be shut down. By going thru credit card data from institutions we already are beginning to acquiesce, the govt will find out who are weapons owners, purchasers of ammo and weapons accessories. If you ever ordered 5.56 on line – gotcha! Look at the new NY bill requirements for handgun permits. Cannily, they will do this incrementally, step by step, already starting with red flag laws and age limits. The Dems love this power over the peeps stuff. Remember that you can’t ever really delete your Facebook posts. The FaceBook pictures of you and Billy Bob with your Stag carbines you deleted 2 years ago? They are still in Facebook database subject to a court order of release. If would truly take a massive organized revolt on an order never seen in history to overcome this. Unless we get wise soon and vote these yahoos out on their ears. But can we? What about the majority of liberal politicians already in office who think the 2A is an anachronism and vote for any anti-gun bill they see? Are gun owners with cozy government jobs going to fall on their swords over this. What about the over % of gun owners who already vote Democratic? It’s a tough situation.

    1. These are reasons why so many gun owners don’t particularly want gun registration, and why they don’t want Universal Background Checks (because, in order to have any sort of meaning, it will require gun registration).

      But then, this is also why Democrats want to ban home gunsmithing (not that it would prevent determined people from making guns in their own homes….), and why they want to close the “gun show loophole”.

      We need to be eternally vigilant. *And* we need to be prepared to back up our words with non-gun things as well.

    2. Want a guaranteed revolution? Force an armed populace to comply or starve.
      Seriously, hunger is one of the things that will flip the switch from “just angry” to “we have nothing left to lose here”.

    3. 1. Do not need any guns to bring anywhere to its knees. Home brewed napalm will do the trick
      2. Then ask how many guns are ghost guns no govt records
      3. How many false alarms of all sorts over two or three weeks to break the back of the govt gestapo. Burner phones.
      4. How many broken down trucks on a bridge with leaking tanks to stop up the works.
      5. Transformers are big magnets with elaborate cooling systems. Make up your own plan. Iron filings and a battery powered sawsall
      6. Sewer pumps, Natural gas pumps, Fuel pipelines, Water towers and pumps, all unguarded and a million locations. How much does it take to derail a train – not much really signals are easy to break.
      7. Flash mobs riot for 20 minutes and dispurse . Again and again over weeks the feds will be exhausted.
      8. Food warehouses fragile electrical delivery and generators that are easy to break
      9 Refuse to work for the elite. Their mansions need daily care to function. Big buildings have a many systems that take daily care no people in the basement or on the roof the building shuts down.
      10. I could go on and write a book on how to do it, but every dirt person, deplorable, standard issue redneck does not need me to tell them how they work at it every day and know how. I am only giving you a list of what will happen to those who call out the dogs. Remember that brake spray and carb cleaner will fu*k the lenses on all of your cameras. And the local merchants will have failures of equipment. Any questions look at Mexico and how the drug lords have brought the govt to its knees. I have sharpened my knife and my wits – bad for you.

    4. “your bank account, govt checks, SS Benefits, cell phone accounts, etc will be shut down.”

      Nope. That would not be how to get anyone to turn their guns in. The minute the government pulled a trick like that, they’ve lost any hold they may have had over the person. Seize my back account, that’s armed robbery with zero ability to legal recourse. Instant authorization to ethical and moral use of lethal force against any and all government entities. Legality is irrelevant, because the government already declared you outside the law. Benefits? Arbitrary abrogation of that nature of a legal contract means you can’t trust anything the government says ever again; so again, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by going full on rebellion.

      “But your kids would starve, or not have health care, or whatever.” What’s different about that from what the founding fathers faced? Not one damn thing. The question is, Are you going to live as a free person, or a slave?

    5. You will turn them in or your family will starve.

      I’ve never understood this argument.

      If you have a gun, you can go out and shoot an animal for food. If all you have is a handgun, sure, the animal might be a stray dog, but still…

      Or, if you’re feeling particularly snippy, shoot the government functionary that told you to turn in your guns, and take his food.

      If you turn in your gun, then the government can still take away all your food and now you can’t do anything about it.

      The odd thing is that you always hear this argument from the same people who try to persuade everyone that the Second Amendment is for hunting.

  57. “And guess what their political leanings were? ”
    Statist, through and through.
    It’s not “Left vs. Right”; it’s those who believe governing others to be legitimate vs. those who don’t. The statists on the Right will stab you in the back (or the chest) just as fast as the statists on the Left. Especially if the deal is you do this or lose your theft-funded “job”.
    I know those who sympathize with the Right statists like to think of them as friends of liberty, but that’s wishful thinking. They object to the ways the Left statists violate liberty, not to violations of liberty in general.

    1. “It’s not “Left vs. Right”; it’s those who believe governing others to be legitimate vs. those who don’t.”

      Even that has its caveats. Everybody believes the group has some rights to control its membership, by simply kicking out the ones who won’t play nice if nothing else. The questions are where you draw the line of what counts as “nice”, who gets to draw it, and how far you’re allowed to go in the kicking.

      1. Well certainly the choice isn’t between “government should do all the good things” and anarchy.

        Still, I think that the limits on government placed there by the Constitution is an excellent place to start. Statists on either side want to add “right up until it makes me uncomfortable” to those limits.

  58. Guys I knew in the military used to comment on the number of bridges across the Mississippi River, what it would take to drop or severely damage such bridges and the logistical nightmare it would cause. Nearly no car traffic, little truck traffic and huge hassles with train traffic. The majority of cargo inside the borders is hauled on trains and trailer trucks, meaning the lack of bridges across the main north/south river would cripple the economy. Bridges take a long time to repair or build so such actions would create havoc for months up to years. Major power transmission lines would be another logical target requiring massive efforts to repair.

  59. I’ve seen plenty of thoughtful defenses of the Second Amendment, yet as most of them are by American gun owners, they tend to be dismissed as merely rationalizing their own paranoia, violent mentality or what have you. So, being neither American nor (currently) a gun owner, I’d like to offer another perspective.

    In my neck of the Balkan woods, there’s a fairly common con going around, where the government would lease some state property or other to a private business, wait for the business to develop said property as a successful and profitable venture, and then find an excuse to scrap the deal and get the now developed estate back, so as to sell it piecemeal to whatever mobster is currently lining the clerks’ pockets. Oftentimes, this involves literally outmuscling the (legally disarmed) guards, maybe with the help of crooked cops or just plain thugs for hire, and taking possession of the company without any court procedure involved.

    This, ladies and gentlemen, is tyranny. It’s not particularly dramatic, or even all that violent; it doesn’t involve an evil army marching around in jackboots, because the simple fact is, it doesn’t *need* to. The dictators involved are not some Machiavellian schemers, but small-minded corrupt paper-pushers and the thugs doing their bidding, and anyone standing in their way is eventually crushed, not because they’re so strong, but because when self-defense is simply not allowed, they don’t have to be.

    And this is why the Second Amendment is so important. It’s not about taking down army choppers with hunting rifles and homemade rocket launchers. It’s about making sure that any unlawful use of force by the government itself gets real loud real fast, much against the preferences of petty dictators who’d rather keep things quiet. It’s not about winning the fight; it’s about making sure there is a fight to begin with.

    1. Which is why I suspect the Bundy Ranch standoff was such a pivotal moment. Patriots saw that they *can* stand up to Uncle Sam, and the controllers saw it also which is why they seem to be doubling down on ‘common sense gun safety’. Largely because, unlike at Ruby Ridge or Waco, the encounter was televised – from *both* sides.

  60. From the opposite angle I remember some Leftest ranting years ago about when President Bush declared martial law how he’d stop the US military. The Leftest claimed that was really good at first person shooter computer games so he and his buddies would knock over the local National Guard armory and with a military grade rifle he’d be a world class sharpshooter even though he’d never handled a real gun.

    I swear I’m not making this up. The utter cluelessness of these people boggles one’s mind.

  61. When they kick at your front door
    How you gonna come?
    With your hands on your head
    Or on the trigger of your gun

    When the law break in
    How you gonna go?
    Shot down on the pavement
    Or waiting on death row

    You can crush us
    You can bruise us
    But you’ll have to answer to
    Oh, the guns of Brixton

  62. Good Morning, Sir! I’m here to ask if you have any firearms. You don’t do you? I thought not. Thank you, and have a nice day.

  63. And then there are the psychopaths like me who keep thinking “Bring it on! I have years of bottled up fury from dealing with a goobermint who thinks they are my owners/rulers instead of the employees I hire every election cycle! I wanna hunt, slaughter, butcher, cook, and eat those fuckwitted scumbags so I can turn them literally into the turds they figuratively are!”
    Yes. When the war starts, I will be a war criminal anyway so I don’t care. I will target and kill as many Swalwells as I can until the war is over or they get me, whichever comes first. Whoever wins I will be tried and hung so I’m just gonna have fun while I can.
    Please start the fucking war. My inner serial killer is waiting patiently.

    On the other side of this damned argument, I’ve been pointing out to anyone who will listen that the war started years ago and the evil ones are going to win it because the news of it is suppressed in the media. They dynamic entry one home every day and kill everybody in it already. So what if it’ll take them centuries to get all of us. They are the government. They have all the resources of the American tax base and they don’t have to hurry.
    Just my two cents.

  64. They better hope that the day never comes , and that switch is never switched on , for on that day a life will be worth about 38 cents a round ,

  65. you really think that the people who live where all the food is grown, the electricity is generated, and all the freeways and rail lines run through, that some of them aren’t going to take it personal?
    Gee, how long did it take a downed power line to generate an incredibly deadly wildfire in the utopia of California? And what state is very BLUE and receives ALL their electricity from elsewhere, while every aspect of their lives is connected to that commodity? Hmmmmmm……

    Like seriously, out of touch liberals, how many small town sheriff’s deputies do you think would describe themselves as “progressive”?
    Several sheriffs are refusing to enforce Washington state’s new anti-gun laws.

    but then the presence of outsiders piss off the rest
    And are likely to be very visible because they are outsiders.
    Oh, and having re-watched 1776 Sunday, I’m reminded that one of the things that turned a lot of Americans toward independence was when Old George hired foreign mercenaries to put down the uprising.

    the ugly truth is that you just hate the other side so much that you think killing millions of people is worth it to make them fall in line.
    And there you just described “tyranny”. Which brings us full circle to “why we have guns”.

    The only point I would make “against” your arguments, Larry, is how unorganized any rebellion would be on a large scale. Whereas the military would have some pretty good command and control to begin. And, even the cops would have better C2 because of the intrusiveness of folks like the NSA in our communications structure.

    I think that would inevitably be overcome, as well – though it might take longer (many of the maintainers/producers in that domain are well-indoctrinated progs).

    1. And while I did not spell out the details of the European Incursion in my novel Minutegirls, because it was history not current, I did put in a lot of details, and am grateful to all of you for suggesting more details as historical references in the sequel.

    2. You make a good point, but take out a few key cell towers and C2 disappears.

      I wonder how much a short-wave radio costs these days?

        1. As a former Army commo soldier, the Army loves the crap out of old communication methods. Lots of our commo gear is short range radio. They drilled is every chance they could on our line of site radio systems because “when the satellite goes down, what are going to do?”. The answer to that is that no matter how good we get at setting it up, no one is emailing anyone.

          Knocking out a cell tower wouldn’t have any effect. The Army doesn’t use cell phones for important comms (which I was repeatedly told when I said half duplex radios are dumb).

      1. Less than 50 dollars, including the cost of the antenna.
        And, may I suggest the ARRL books, particularly the one on designing and building ‘stealth antennas’ that cannot be seen by neighbors/HOAs?
        http://www.arrl.org
        Look into local clubs in your state/region. Worth every penny to join, but most will allow you to attend meetings, even without formal membership or a radio operator’s license.
        Also, try YouTube for how-tos.

    3. As I mentioned above. The only things keeping the conservative right from doing anything is (one) a triggering event, (two) a lack of a game plan to win any conflict, (three) lack of a plan on how to prevent such an occurrence in the future without making the amended Constitution worse.

      1. One wonders what would happen if a substantial group of like-minded conservative libertarians got together to create an entirely hypothetical game world in which targets are identified, game plans are refined, and post-war constitutions are created. Naturally, the nonprofit organization behind the game world would apply for tax-exempt status as an educational institution that exists for the sole purpose of investigating social trends that affect future prosperity and stability. That such social stability and prosperity would be in no small part promoted by … *ahem* … scaring the crap out of violent leftists needn’t be said out loud. ^_^

  66. And if your police force isn’t amenable to your desired level of political control, and so you systematically replace the officer class (and then many of the constables) with people more to your liking, you may find that you’re in the same situation as England:
    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-46272442
    where to some extent the police force no longer has the public consent to police; at that point, good luck trying to enforce the “law”.

    1. Sir Terry Prachett discussed in his “Discworld” books dealing with the City Watch of Anhk Morpork that the “authority” of police was based on a fiction that was mutually agreed upon by both the police AND the general public (who MASSIVELY outnumber the police). Once one side or the other stop believing in that fiction then the whole thing goes smash and you are back to complete barbarism.

  67. This Progressive imbecile is only making (badly) an argument I’ve been hearing for years; namely that firearms will do little good against tyranny if the tyrant has tanks.

    Some years ago I started to point out that Tyrannies are not run from Tanks, they are run from desks. And furniture is far less bulletproof than Hollywood would have you believe.

    1. Yeah, that’s the mentality I noted above – that conflicts are decided based on who’s “stronger”, without considering logistics, field and situation details, limitations and weaknesses…

      It also couples with the knob vs. switch idea, in how laymen tend to think that violence is something easily controlled and respectively planned for, you can dial it up and down as needed, and you never have to worry about collateral damage or friendly fire. Apparently, even when nukes are involved.

    2. Tyranny needs the active support and cooperation of the populace to work. Note that the Russians went meekly along with Stalin’s terror, but fought like rabid wolves against the Nazis… and then meekly allowed themselves to be cowed by Stalin once the war was over,

  68. If there were to be a fight, they also need to factor in us competent old fucks not long for life anyway. Trade no more chronic pain forever, for defending against tyranny?

  69. The fallacy of the article lies in that #1 our government wears silk gloves when dealing with Arabs, but will not extend the courtesy to its own citizens, and, #2, Americans are not willing to die and are not as resilient as the hate-crazed Arabs.
    Sad but true.
    On a brighter note, the numbers alone should deter our beloved and caring government.

    1. What you call fallacies are nothing of the sort.

      1) Those “silk gloves” you mention are in fact how you win a counterinsurgency campaign. If the government takes them off they’ll just lose even faster.

      2) Americans are willing to die for liberty, 200 years of history has proven that. What they’re not willing to do is die stupid like most of the inshallah Arabs.

  70. Thank you, Larry, you’ve explained it so well. It boggles my mind that people on the Left think that millions of people can’t do things against superior technology, that sheer numbers don’t matter at all. Aside from current day events with the War on Terror, it’s like they don’t even understand the Revolutionary War. Guerilla warfare against a superior force, one of the premier powers in the world, and the guerillas won and here we are today. Of course, it shouldn’t surprise me that they don’t understand history, given that they’re convinced that people who just won a revolutionary war a decade before had no intention of ensuring that such a war could be fought again in the future if needed.

    1. Do keep in mind, though, that the War For Independence was also fought by a regular army (and a pretty dang ragtag one, at that), not just guerrillas.

      Though, that regular army also did very unconventional things – like cross a half-frozen river in the middle of the night in rowboats, and attack their enemies on Christmas Eve. Totally NOT the “way things should be done”!

      1. Don’t forget that America was happily willing to starve and firebomb two different nations, then hand half of one over to it’s worst enemy afterwards.
        We’re kind of like that Bruce Banner guy. Don’t make us angry- you wouldn’t like us if we’re angry.

  71. Elections would become interesting, or disappear.

    Once the SWAT teams started inspiring counterattacks, the slate of viable (pun intended) candidates would grow sparse. And few would want to be the designated successor in a Mel Carnahan situation, as they would likely also become ineligible the same way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Carnahan#2000_Senate_election_and_death

    Yard signs would become a thing of the past, for obvious reasons. Hate someone? Sneak over and put a political bumper sticker on their car. Or house.

    No identifiable campaign offices.

    Election day violence, at the polls or elsewhere? Count on it. No election night parties, with the candidate and a bunch of his or her supporters all gathered in one place.

    So, will candidates campaign via television from a bunker, or will elections be canceled? I’m guessing the latter.

  72. Having gone and re-read your re-post of your 2012-post-Sandy-Hook posting, I wonder….

    Have you, in those intervening 6 years since the original, gone back and re-looked at some of the numbers? Such as numbers killed until intervention by a cop or a regular citizen?

    We’ve had a bunch of incidents since Sandy Hook, and it would be interesting to see if anything has shifted. (I’m betting not dramatically.)

  73. There’s another thing that’s more than a little disconcerting in the tweet, and the mentality behind it. Namely, it’s entirely built around the smug appeal to force – that people using firearms to defend their rights simply won’t work against the mighty government armies – rather than the fact that this poses an even greater problem – that people can’t defend their rights should the government turn sour. Is this really something to be that happy about? Or maybe people should universally adopt the preferred liberal methods of the past two years – rioting and screeching at the sky – because those have been tremendously effective so far.

    Much as with the whole hate speech debacle, it seems the left can’t really grasp the possibility of their vast regulations being interpreted and used against them. That even their beloved big government wouldn’t necessarily take their side on a given matter. And last but certainly not least – that those evil crazy gun nuts, with their scary black rifles, coincidentally defend their rights by virtue of standing up for their own.

    1. I’ve noticed they keep calling for restrictions on freedom of speech to prevent hate speech, then suffer some sort of emotional breakdowns or tantrums when I point out that if these were imposed right now, they’d be putting Trump in the position of Censor-in-Chief. The more rational ones then usually explain that they want Trump impeached. But they can’t seem to get a handle on the fact of that if Trump had the powers they wanted, he could simply declare talk of impeachment to be hate speech.

      Course they don’t want Trump to have any such powers. I’m not sure who they think they’d be giving them to. Even if they had a Democratic president, it’s unlikely this Democrats would remain in power forever, even with such a censorship law. They don’t seem to get the laws would ever be imposed against them.

      1. Jordan my friend, that’s exactly why they were totally fine with Obama having all those powers, but then have massive meltdowns over Trump exercising those same powers that Obama did.

        The objection isn’t the powers. It’s who wields them, and they do not like anyone else having the powers they want to have. Vileprogs consider themselves – at least in their own heads – master over everyone else, and nobody is allowed to be their master unless it is ‘one of their own.’

        It’s actually rather fascinating how they wish to be ruled versus be governed. *mischievous smirk* Dare I say that is why they fantasize so much about the Handmaid’s ‘role’?

      2. That, or they don’t ever expect to be the sort of person or be in the position against whom such laws would be enforced. It is easy to call for outlawing any item you never anticipate needing or wanting to possess, or any action you never expect to want to take.

        1. I’d say it’s even worse than trying to outlaw something you don’t feel you’d need. If anything, it’s quite the opposite – the celebrities most vocal about gun control are also the ones invariably accompanied by armed guards. The mentality here isn’t that when you don’t need something, you think other people shouldn’t have it. Rather, it’s that you *do* need it, but you exploit every loophole or outright impose double standards to prevent others from having it.

          Similarly, if somehow the army and police in the Venn diagrams above were to be magically replaced with left-leaning armed forces, you can bet there’d be a slew of arguments as to why they should walk around, each with a sparkling new G36 in hand, to protect people from Nazis and stuff, all while the average citizen is banned from carrying anything sharper than a letter opener.

          And now factor in the already highly visible attitude that a severe enough accusation doesn’t need further evidence, let alone proper due process. That’s the mentality in question – that unrestricted and unaccountable power is all well and good, so long as it’s in the hands of people who agree with you. But the moment they don’t, well… You can understand why the left went in full “reeee” mode the moment they lost the elections a couple of years ago.

      3. I’m not sure who they think they’d be giving them to.
        Don’t you remember all the “Republicans may never win again” and “Democrat dominance forever” headlines? Though it’s a religious belief, and therefore not subject to cognitive anything, much less dissonance, they believe that because they are on the “right side of history” that their sorts of people will eventually come to dominate, and there won’t be any of those bad, evil, no-goodnik conservatives ever in power again.

        Come on over. It requires much less thought than conservatism or libertarianism (or even liberalism), and we have kool-aid.

  74. Great post. But I don’t think Democrats have any objection to murdering millions of people they disagree with. But I think that will motivate the rest of us even more.

  75. I think that the “knob” versus “switch” analogy has hit the nail squarely on the head.

    I don’t think, until now, that I even realized that I had a switch. I’ve found, on reflection, that I do.

    The left not only badly underestimates our numbers, they badly underestimate and misunderstand us, the people, period.

    I hardly fit anyone’s stereotype of a “gun nut.” I’m female, approaching retirement age, and “fluffy.” I’m educated and a professional. I’m easily overlooked, underestimated, and disregarded.

    I’m also descended from a long line of tough, strong, independent people and people who have fought for their country, from the Overmountain Men on down. When you threaten to come in and take fireams by force, you are threatening the very freedom that they have fought for. You are threatening me, you are threatening my son, you are threatening my brother, and you are threatening most of the friends and family that I have. I’m not going to stand by and let you carry out that threat, without a fight.

    I believe that there are many more people just like me throughout this country. Law-abiding, productive citizens who nevertheless have a switch, and you’re threatening to flip it. “People just like me” isn’t code for WASP, either. People just like me also came here from Cuba, the Phillipines, Vietnam, and other places, all over the globe.

    In an odd way, I am grateful for this guy’s complete and probably totally unintentional honesty. It made me aware of my own personal switch and has given me a better understanding of myself. Not only that, though; in one fell swoop, he made the argument for the 2nd Amendment more clearly than two dozen pro-2A folks could have done in a month’s worth of talking. He took firearms ownership completely out of the realm of hunting and recreational shooting and made perfectly clear why we have the 2nd Amendment in the first place: so that citizens can protect itself against a tyrannical government, if necessary.

    He can say he was “just kidding” all he wants; if it’s not in your heart and mind, it won’t come out of your mouth (out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks).

    1. For the most part, we have hope that things will pretty much continue in a fairly good way with the system we currently have.
      There’s still a good amount of faith in our Constitution, and the soap box/ballot box are working, if only just for the most part in most of America. Think beater car that still seems to get you where you want to go, even if you have a bit of a time getting it going.

      But, take that hope and faith away, and you will see a revolution.

      1. “Well, boys, we got three engines out, we got more holes in us than a horse trader’s mule, the radio is gone and we’re leaking fuel and if we was flying any lower why we’d need sleigh bells on this thing… but we got one little budge on them Rooskies. At this height why they might harpoon us but they dang sure ain’t gonna spot us on no radar screen!”

    2. I seem to recall Barbra Streisand saying this past week that you’re one of those brain-washed women who can’t make any decisions without your husband telling you what to do.

      Argh! Lefties like that make me want to chew on nails, to the detriment of my teeth.

  76. God made man and women. Sam Colt made them equal.

    Guess what else? God made me a weak fat man. Sam Colt made me more equal as well. I can’t run. I can’t fight. I can shoot a rifle well, and a pistol badly.

  77. Now, about that comment about boiling frogs…

    It turns out that frogs won’t passively accept being boiled to death. Once the temperature gets to a certain temperature, they notice, and try to get out of the water.

    I don’t think this ruins the analogy, though: progressives have been trying to boil the pot for decades. At first, people of the gun didn’t object too loudly. Over time, though, they began to feel the heat — and thus, in the 1970’s they orchestrated a coup and took over the National Rifle Association, and made it a political animal as well as an organization for training people to use guns.

    Since then, gun owners have become wise to progressive antics. Every time someone pushes for more gun control, it only reminds gun owners that the heat is on. We know that the end-game is gun owners boiled to death, so we fight every inch of the way.

    (Well, sort of. The NRA supported the bump stock ban…until the ban was made so general, it would have made even trigger replacements illegal. These guys can’t help themselves! They have to push the envelope as far as they can, because they know that if they don’t, they’ll be unable to reach their goal of nuking every city that has people who resists gun confiscation…)

    1. Remember, the NRA has backed EVERY gun control measure that has passed, in fact they endorsed the Hughes Amendment in 1986 and told no one why they bought as many transferable select fire weapons as they could before the bill was released. (And those people on the board made a crap ton of money from that) While the NRA has done some good, it doesn’t take away what they’ve done, so they have to be watched too. Notice the die hard 2nd Amendment supporters never seem to make it to the board of directors?

  78. OT- Larry, you ought to look at Nick Kapur on Twitter. He’s found a Japanese 1860s book that describes ‘an incredibly jacked Ben Franklin shooting a cannon from his bare hands’ while John Adams gets a mountain fairy to give him a giant Eagle to help him kill the giant snake that ate his mom (John Adam’s mom, I mean). Looks right up Monster Hunter alley.

  79. Couple of notes on this from the Demented Dominion, Canada.

    1) We had a gun registry. The year before it was passed, the government estimated there were 7 million gun owners in Canada. The estimate changed to 3 million the year the registry was passed. Roughly 1.5-2 million people signed up, so even on their own terms they only got about half.

    Going by historical records, like imports and old gun company logs, there’s probably 10-16 million gun owners in Canada. Because as Larry said, they don’t really wear out. 1914 Mausers and Enfields still shoot straight.

    2) Making your own. This is something they’re terrified of.

    https://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.com/2018/10/illegal-gun-making-in-canada.html

    7 years in jail for making some guns. Like a dozen or so, roughly. Maybe two dozen at the outside, this was not a big factory operation.

    Actually using a gun to kill somebody in cold blood, six years.

    The enforcer guy who was carrying one of the actual guns that was made, out on early release after a year and a half.

    The reason the government is terrified of people making their own guns is that its really, really easy. I made a race car once, a gun is a piece of cake compared to that. Not out of reach of the average garage mechanic. Got a torch and a couple sheet metal tools, you can make guns. As many as you want.

    Once sleazy people figure out how easy it is, and how much MONEY they can make doing it, it’ll become the next big cottage industry here in Canada, now that dope is legal.

    1. Always remember that the M-1 Carbine was designed and the prototype built by a prisoner in a prison machine shop. (As told in Carbine Williams)

    2. Mac 10’s and 11’s aren’t all that hard to do in a machine shop. Australia’s rounded up a bunch of home rolled copies in recent years.

  80. I was especially amused by your definition of “Othering” in the middle of one of your usual screeds about how evil, stupid, and worthless liberals are.

    1. Well, you could read it that way if you’re really fucking stupid, but your side is the one being flippant about nuking us, so…

  81. There’s a lot of socialist gun-ownership groups emerging too, and I’m sure that, if we’re approaching government vs. citizenry times, they’ll be loud and recruiting. It won’t be just conservative militias/sheriffs/ex-military vs. the left and the government – a lot of the left will be fucking up supply chains right there with the rest of the people. They sure as hell don’t trust the government either, and rightfully so.

  82. A couple of things- The former Soviet Union disintegrated ( such as it did ) because a small number of generals refused to dispatch the unruly populous.
    Remember back to the US Census. Here in AZ, the Census workers where required, among other things, to LOG GPS CO -ORDINATES of the FRONT DOOR of residences. Mind you, they had addresses. So…what was THAT about? Predator Drone strike with your morning paper? OH YEAH. Another one of those Obama-era things that have been just squirreled away against a possible future use.

  83. Ok, gotta recommend Kurt Schlichter’s “Indian Country”, just this scenario.

    Hillary is elected, America splits into the United States and the People’s Republic.

    Hilarity ensues.

  84. OH, and I LOVE the “The Government has tanks” meme from leftists.

    Again, Kurt S.’ solution:

    Wait until the tank commander has to take a pee, then the guy with a deer rifle takes his head off at 300 yards.

    Then you take out the ammo truck. And the fuel truck.

    Suddenly your world conquering M1A1 is a 45 ton pile of scrap metal.

    1. “Airman! Do you realize you just cost the tax payers 10 million dollars because you dropped that wrench inside the bomb casing and allowed air to get at the core?”

  85. A funny thought to memeify – there are 3 boxes important to freedom here: soap, ballot, and ammo.
    I was curious about 3d printing as relevant to the firearms debate. From a bit of Googling, a plastic-capable 3d printer seems to cost about as much as a handgun, but makes an unusually low-quality gun. Metal-capable cost about $100,000.
    I find it wildly implausible that this comparison will be the case forever.

    1. Usually I hear it as four boxes: Soap, ballot, jury, and ammo, often with the proviso that they are to be used in that order.

      That said, regarding the 3D printer guns, just like with the FP-45 “Liberator” of WW2 (and the 3D printed spiritual successor that came out in 2013), the purpose of those guns is to kill a person with a better weapon, to take it for your own. As such, only firing once isn’t a significant limitation (though the chance of blowing up in your hand might be a bit of an issue… 😉 ).

      1. And if you can get to the food or drink of the people or person who has the better guns – poisons are plentiful in nature, no need to go to a store for something like rat poison, and a lot of them would not be noticeable when mixed in those. Not until you got very, very ill.

        (I wanted to find out what wild plants I could forage some years ago, figured that knowing what to definitely stay away from might be even more important to learn first)

  86. I don’t doubt that Congressman Swalwell is an idiot, or at the very least is saying something thoughtless in a lazy attempt to appeal to his base. But his claim may betray a deeper issue.

    Suppose the problem is not that the 2nd Amendment is obsolete as a safeguard against a tyrannical American government, not because of drastic disparities between government and citizen resources, or between state and insurrectionist willingness to cause/endure collateral damage, but simply because the factions in conflict are now fundamentally divided over what it means for a government to be tyrannical?

    If Congressman Swalwell and his co-believers are operating from the fundamental Deep Left principle that “rights” are creations of the State, rather than objective a priori principles a just State must recognize, then a government gun seizure would only be “tyrannical” if agents of the government did it without legal backing. If they did have legal backing, then by definition (goes the thinking) it wouldn’t be tyranny, since the only way to get legal backing in the States is for enough of the Right People Who Matter to agree on it, and that’s not tyranny. So from this perspective, the claim that you “need the 2nd Amendment to forestall tyranny” is a null statement: if the actions depriving you of the legal or practical capacity to own firearms aren’t extra-legal, they aren’t tyrannical, and by “your own” definition you therefore have no right to resist them.

    What this betrays is a fundamental clash of philosophy and perspective among the political and cultural thinkers of the States, and ironically it’s one that firearms in themselves are not likely to be much help in resolving. When the problem is not the government’s temptation to remove a right or not, or the cost-benefit analyses of any practical attempt to do so, but that half the populace disagrees about whether or not they can or should in the first place, the firearms will only be of use when resolving that issue has failed beyond recall. The 2nd Amendment cannot prevent a tyranny arising if the definition of a tyranny is merely “enough people who think the 2nd Amendment can and should justly be repealed” — you can’t shoot ideas, and it’s immoral to try.

    (Needless to say, of course, all of the above is merely the exploration of an opposing philosophy, not a serious attempt to argue for its rightness.)

    1. This is precisely why the recent Maryland shooting seems to have worked in the confiscator’s favor. Confiscation won’t be sold as, “We’re repealing the 2A, because we’re philosophically opposed to it.” It will be (was, in the Maryland case) sold as removing firearms from the hands of people who are a danger to themselves, or others. Hence the attempts to cast as wide a net as possible with broad terms like “mentally unstable” or other such vagaries the benevolent state can use to intervene and protect us from ourselves.

      They see as merely regrettable that the poor sod had to be shot to protect him from himself.

      1. “It will be (was, in the Maryland case) sold as removing firearms from the hands of people who are a danger to themselves, or others. “

        Exactly. Thus conveniently eliding the definitional legerdemain whereby the simple fact of possessing a firearm means you’re a danger to yourself or others.

        This is another one of those fundamental philosophical issues: To what degree can or should citizens trust their fellows to behave safely and responsibly with dangerous properties without legal compulsion to do so? Part of the reason this is a problem is because it is far easier, and quicker, to emotionally lose trust in our fellows than it is to rationally build it.

    2. The defect is your Leftist position is that ultimately it denies the existence of tyranny. If simple majoritarianism can’t be tyranny then if the majority denies you rights based on [$RELIGION|$RACE|$HAIR_COLOR|$LAST_INITIAL] you can’t be the victim of tyranny.

      As in every case, the Leftist position only works as long as you don’t think too hard. That’s why Leftists either don’t think or are evil.

      1. Exactly. It goes back to Rousseau and the concept of the “general will”, wherein by definition anything that the State has accomplished the power to do must be licit, or there would be no impetus for it to be done in the first place. It’s the political equivalent of causal-deterministic eliminative materialism.

      2. In my experience, the opposite is also valid – the moment some regulation or other doesn’t *precisely* match any given leftie’s personal preference, or if it requires certain quid pro quos in order to function, they complain about how oppressed they are and how tyrannical the whole system is.

        For instance, let’s say they get free higher education… at the cost of cutting funding for the made-up humanities fashionable right now, while pouring tax money into the more useful STEM fields. Or universal healthcare, only they can’t choose the doctor, plan, and even the city where treatment is to take place. Or guaranteed employment and housing, but again, they get assigned per the needs of the economic plan, changing cities if necessary, rather than by choice. Or eco-friendly cars and appliances, but with barely a couple of brands, and a waiting list for every purchase.

        All these were staples of the old days on my side of the Wall, and any of them would be enough to get modern “socialists” back on the streets, complaining that they actually got what they asked for, since it’s still not what they really wanted. Regardless, nay, *especially* if they’re still treated equally under the new regulations. Because they don’t want equality, but really just special treatment, on someone else’s dime. That’s also where the Second Amendment factors into it – a firearm is in many ways an equalizer, and in all cases makes it a lot more difficult to force your own will on another, even if you *both* have guns. And for this reason, it is precisely that sort of equality of force, that sort of system that actually *is* egalitarian, lock, stock and barrel, that the left finds the most oppressive.

  87. All it would take is -one- sympathetic SysAdmin or DBA to zero out SNAP/EBT, and the blue cities would be swallowed by riots inside a week.
    And you just know the guys with that kind of access and ability are the same ones responsible for backups…

  88. Good Lord, what a great post. As ex-military, I can tell you that whenever I have presented such arguments to leftists, it becomes obvious that they have absolutely no idea how this all plays out. But they fantasize about confiscating guns and murdering their fellow citizen. Pure evil.

  89. Taking the “militia clause” into consideration, the 2A clealry guarantees an absolute right for citizens to buy, own, possess, and train with the types of arms common to an infantry unit – at a minimum – because militia formations have traditionally been infantry units. While specially trained and equipped “select” militias did have artillery, it is those types of militias that are currently represented within the National Guard and Air National Guard, while the basic (unorganized) militia is made up of the citizenry as a whole.

    Thus, if you give credence tot he “militia clause”, as a citizen, you should be able to own things like actual assault rifles – M-14s, M-16s, and M-4s. Also Automatic Rifles and machineguns, like the M-249 SAW andM60 and M240 GPMGs, grenades and grenade launchers like the M-79 and M-203, anti-vehicle arms like the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle and the M-2 Browning .50 cal MG, and even infantry vehicles like Armored Personnel Carriers and Infantry Combat Vehicles (I’d guess that Humvees of various types, various armored cars and other wheeled vehicles like the LAV or Stryker would be popular choices, since they are less expensive and more maintenance friendly than tracked vehicles like the M113 or Bradley).

    The argument that a citizen militia would be unable to fight back against a tyrannical government doesn’t prove that the 2A and militia concepts are obsolete, but that the militia – i.e. the types of arms available to citizens – must be strengthened and expanded to include more anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons, to stop that AH-64 gunship, F-16, or Abrams from imposing the will of a despotic, totalitarian government on the citizenry.

    1. Joedog, you are 100% correct.

      That is exactly what the 2nd was written to do:

      “The power of the sword, say the minority…, is in the hands of Congress. My friends and countrymen, it is not so, for The powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry of America from sixteen to sixty. The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress has no power to disarm the militia. Their swords and every terrible implement of the soldier are the birthright of Americans.”

      Tench Coxe
      Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.

  90. ” libertarian brethren, because they are quick to point out that there are plenty of places where cops enforce existing gun or drug laws. The part they’re missing is”

    … that the LAST thing they want is every cop deciding on his or her own is WHICH law they will or won’t enforce on the community!

    If libertarians do not like some law the cops are enforcing (drug laws, selling single ciggs, defecating on streets, etc.) they must not expect the cops to skate that knife edge. It’s the LEGISLATORS who make those laws and the cops are tasked with ENFORCING the written laws, not deciding which ones they should or shouldn’t enforce. Do you really want to not know, as you walk down your libertarian city streets, whether the cop approaching does or not NOT choose to enforce some law you may or may not be breaking?

  91. https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/12/daniel-zimmerman/cook-county-sheriff-wants-dig-dirt-ccw-applicants/ Dart wants to use Illinois’ LEADS system – basically “Google” for law enforcement – to search the background of every applicant for an Illinois concealed carry license for *anything* in their background – and we mean anything – and use that information to file an objection to issuing the permit . . .

    And he’s not just worried about current Cook County residents. No, he wants to run a search on anyone who has lived there at any time in the past ten years.

    Got a traffic ticket or three? He’ll protest.
    An arrest where charges were later dismissed? He’ll protest.
    A DUI from twenty or thirty years ago? He’ll protest.
    Your spouse file for an order of protection against you when you got divorced at her lawyer’s request? Even if it was denied, Dart will protest your application.
    Underage drinking ticket when you were at SIU Carbondale in the 1970s? He’ll protest.

  92. NOT TO MENTION, this will all be happening in our back yards. No back road will be safe, because they’re our back roads. No shortcuts, back trails, game trails, caves, empty houses or buildings will be unknown to the locals.

    They gonna move everything by air?

  93. The question I like to ask the budding leftist ubermenshen antifaKKKrat is
    “How many people have you ever heard of giving up marijuana because it was illegal?”

  94. Just read that a misplaced toy grenade forced a story evacuation on Black Friday in Indiana. At this point I don’t think the group of special forces guys would even need to cause property damage, let alone kill anyone, to shut down Chicago.

  95. I saw the 2016 voter map for San Diego County. It was solid blue for Hillary except Camp Pendleton, Miramar MCAS, and Coronado Island Navy Base. They were solid red.

    Tell your liberal neighbors to check the bases closest to them before spouting off about which side the armed forces will support in a civil war.

  96. We blow up Facebook, Google, and Twitter and they all die of social media withdrawal or commit suicides.

    Roads, rail, pipelines, powerlines, fiber optic cables.

    And they are talking self-driving cars and trucks soon…

    And now everything is “just in time” to save a few pennies.

    There was already a techno-thriller novel about cutting off just some railroad bridges: Train Man. It was about one man seeking revenge.

    The Vote or Kill switch also has a problem because when set to vote, there is a tendency to be nice and even helpful even to political opponents. Like helping change the tire on a car with a Bernie bumper sticker.

    And tending to obey laws while waiting for the next election (if they depose Trump they will like what comes next even less, and Trump is only there because Ron Paul was treated badly in 2012).

    The counter meme is that the Government will just drop “Gun Free Zone” signs everywhere.

    https://youtu.be/xZ0obTU4AzM

  97. Obviously, someone hasn’t been reading Bob Chipman’s tweets: with vertical farming, cities will be self-sufficient, and can nuke flyover country at will.

    On a more serious note, I’ve been hearing rumors about gang infiltration of the military, so perhaps more than a few would be eager to go along with disarming future victims.

    http://vt.co/news/us/street-gangs-infiltrating-us-military/

    https://www.quora.com/Are-there-really-gangs-in-the-military

    https://www.slideshare.net/carterfsmith/military-trained-gang-members-in-the-volunteer-state-four-year-followup-with-the-investigators

    1. Wait wait wait–someone actually thinks vertical farming can feed the cities long-term?

      Is he out of his mind?

  98. On a related note, I’m surprised you didn’t touch on how massively expensive this “buy back” would be.

    The congressman in question proposed 1000 per gun. According to the ATF, “during 2008, AR-15s accounted for eight percent of all firearms and 22 percent of all rifles made in the U.S. and not exported. ” and over 100 million guns were sold during the 2008-2016 period. The NSSF estimates there are over 16.5 million AR15s and AK combined, which is certainly a ridiculous lowball given the above and how PSA alone makes 1800 barrels a day (and that doesn’t count their premium uppers with FN made barrels), but it’s the best I can find.

    That’s a total cost of 16.5 billion, or more money than the annual budget of the FBI (9.5) or the Marine Corp’s personnel costs (13.8+.9 for reserves). That number doesn’t even account for overhead, shipping, security, destruction or disposal of remains. Does he think the money is going to come from Obama’s stash?

    1. Just realized: That’s enough to as many aircraft carriers as Russia currently has in service.

      You could build the USS Calvin Coolidge, make it the largest aircraft carrier in the world AND have enough money for all the planes to put on it.

  99. What they don’t get is that even if all the privately owned guns just up and disappeared and they got the military and police to enforce their other idiotic laws the rebellion would still be over in a couple of weeks or at most a few months.

    Our side doesn’t even need guns to win. We have numbers and we blend in. For the most part the other side would not know who we are but because they have to act publicly we would know who all of them are.

    And because of the way modern society works they are going to have to travel and stay in hotels and go to restaurants and attend rallies and all sorts of other things and so will be constantly intermingled with our sorts. We’ll be their waiters, their doctors, their mechanics, their garbage-men, their gardeners, their kids soccer coach and on and on and on.

    We would constantly keep track of their locations and when the time is right they would…stop being a threat.

    They would not see it coming because we would not be wearing uniforms or acting as rebels. We would look and act like normal people right up until it was time to do the thing. Whatever you imagine the thing to be.

    This war would be won by folks using paring knives that can be bought three-in-a-pack at the local dollar store. Or with socks with rocks in them or sharpened sticks or just whatever happened to be laying about where ever the target was.

    Now the very high level guys will have bodyguards but that’s okay not all of the mid or lower-level peeps will. And in any event there’s always someone on the perimeter that’s vulnerable. Doesn’t have to be the main guy to send the message. If bodyguards and other security personnel start having issues of a serious nature that might well encourage the others of their job description to find some other occupation.

    The gun-control folk imagine that their is going to be a series of set-piece battles where both sides bring all their stuff and fight it out on some huge battlefield over a day or two, winner take all. But it’s not going to be that at all. The battlefield will be made up of hotel rooms, waiting rooms, street corners, super-markets, a booth at Arby’s, the line for the Tilt-a-Whirl at the local carnival and so on.

    We blend in, they don’t. And to my knowledge they have never mentioned that and may not realize what that means.

    However, we do not want any kind of protracted conflict. Sure the rural areas have the food and the water and generate a lot of power. But the urban areas contain manufacturing, a lot of computer processing power, and our financial centers.

    Disrupting those for an extended amount of time would turn this country into a non-functioning hell-hole from which it would be hard to recover and would allow others to take advantage of the situation.

    So the sage course is to keep trying to explain the reality of the situation to them in the hopes that the smarter ones finally understand what they’re about to unleash and they can pull back and encourage the dumber ones to stand down.

    1. The Left thinks ninjas are always dressed in black with masks and tabbie socks the way they are in the movies. They don’t realize that real ninjas don’t look any different than everyone else around them; which is why they are invisible.

  100. It’s even simpler than that, @Warren. Every army in the front lines requires an even bigger army in the homeland. Someone has to cook the MREs, manufacture spare parts and consumables, drill for fuel, even produce the guns themselves. For one, you can already imagine the gun rights stances of most if not all civilians working in these fields – all they have to do is not show up for work for a couple of months, and the armed forces are basically crippled. And even if, somehow, magically, there are enough left-leaning competent specialists in these fields (an oxymoron, but bear with me here), they’d still be vulnerable targets for Bubba and his $15 Mosin on the way to the factory.

    At any rate, my take from all of this is still that, while the left can’t really make good on such half-baked threats, at least now they’ve dropped their longstanding facade of pacifism by making them.

  101. “And the settings are Vote or Shoot Fucking Everybody.”

    That sounded crazy at first. But I remembered that American colonists spent a decade after the French and Indian War peacefully arguing with the British government over their rights.

    Then, the Brits tried a gun-grab that turned into a firefight. That single fight (The Shot Heard ‘Round the World) flipped the Colonists collective switch and they immediately decided to shoot and kill their way out of the argument.

    1. Well, actually, it was something like 2/3s rebels and 1/3 loyalist.

      And it was something like a hundred and fifty years since the last big English civil war, whose refugees settled the colonies, and which had a gun grab as a trigger.

  102. I think Larry said it better than I could,

    Again.

    I swear I need to have these loaded on my Kindle and bookmarked by Gun-Banner Myth and the logical counter.

  103. Great post. I sometimes focus too much on the vast majority who will never rebel, not the tiny percentage (but large in numbers) who will rebel.

    Some commenters have raised the ways that the government can easily drive down gun ownership through the slow boil of taxes, regulations, etc. However, those don’t conflict with Larry’s main insight that there only needs to be 1% of gun owners who rebel to drive the country into a bloody conflict. If you really think that making guns illegal will keep firearms out of the hands of devout gun owners, then you must not be aware of Prohibition or the War on Drugs. Gun bans will be just as successful at building a huge black market. If a gun grab takes place, it will mean that the country will have become a progressive utopia which will, in turn, mean that there is next to no border control with Mexico. Do you really think the cartels will not want to step into the void and sell guns and ammo? The cartels will be willing to sell all kinds of things not legally available now.

    1. I think I remember reading somewhere that only 4% of the population of the colonies actually took up arms and action against the British and their Tory neighbors. And I’m sure many of them only joined in after the few (1%?) led the way.

      1. I’d heard once that the numbers were thirds… a third supporting revolution, a third wishing everyone would just knock it the heck off and plant their corn, and a third supporting England.

        I’m sure that’s not accurate but even so. Of the third who supported revolution, it makes sense that only a few percent ultimately took up arms and were a part of combat. At least half would have been women and of the remaining men, many would have been too old or too young or been the one who ended up planting corn while brothers or cousins went to war.

        1. You have to have that logistical tail to support people in the field. Considering the profit margins of farms and minimalist factories of the 1770s, it probably took most of that supportive 1/3rd, and a large portion of the neutral 1/3rd to keep that 1% comprising Washington’s and the other general’s armies in the field during the Revolutionary War.

    2. Apparently, communists have taken over the counter using only 3% of the population as armed militants. Thing is, a lot of people in America know that, and know they don’t want to end up in a mass grave.

      The black market for drugs and alcohol is not a good model because a) guns are much less of a consumable b) druggies have a fairly low level of foresight. US is pretty much impossible to secure against a wide range of non firearm vulnerabilities. By the time the black market in firearms was adding or replacing significant numbers of firearms, things would already have gone very sticky.

  104. Excellent piece Larry,
    Great blog you run, looking forward to lots and lots of reading then downloading a few books andvreading some more!
    Wishing yall a Merry Christmas and excellent holiday season!

  105. “So you’ve got an insurmountable challenge, that’s logistically impossible, and a big chunk of the people you expect to fight on your behalf being actively against you.”

    My guess is they would call in the “EU” army for help and start WW3. We all know Germany can’t help themselves.

  106. If it comes to it, people will take the fight to left wing voters and journalists.

    The next vote will turn out differently, after that.

    1. I wish someone would have an open discussion on a radio station on this subject with call-ins. Just a thought, they say there are over 16 million vets just sitting around watching and already talking about what-ifs. I was in the 82nd long ago now I’m a lover, not a fighter. To assume that a small group would go head to head against the machine is silly but yes a few might. I honestly don’t believe that most of the Armed Forces and Police forces would go door to door taking your stuff, and yes some will. If smart you will allow it and watch for another day. It would stop quickly when the after-effects kick in but not right away. Just saying for my neighbor. The leaders involved doing this are not thinking so well and have no clue that the American citizens that you are going after know exactly where you live.. Yes, some too don’t understand this. Signed Jack Daniels

  107. What everyone is missing or eliding (either due to myopia or simply a domestic focus):

    There will be no ACW II.

    The domestic unrest will end a retreat by the tyrants in very short order, or it will end in WWIII.

    As soon as the USA looks wounded, the chains will be off the various Axis of Evils in Asia, Europe, South America.

    Second, any serious unrest will have the anti-gunners bringing in UN, Russian, Chinese help (because all of what Larry said about the military and first responders), and the international coalitions will help because: oil & food & pharmaceuticals (as a net exporter of food and drugs, and essentially a net exporter of energy, the USA is too important to the rest of the world. Geographically, where is the energy and food? Hmm.)

    Also, unlike ACW, the population and INDUSTRY is not concentrated in one side’s location, or, if it is, it NOT the coastal urban areas.

    “Red Dawn” was supposed to be a cautionary tale for the Communists, not inspiration.

    1. As someone from the other side of the Iron Wall, I’d say if the American left does indeed try and get the Eastern European and Asian countries involved, their reaction might not be as most stereotypes would have you expect. For one, precisely because of the oil, food and pharmaceutical exports, the world at large would prefer the USA to remain as it is, particularly given the economically destructive leftist policies in that regard. The USA is valuable as a trading partner far more than as an unstable puppet state.

      More interestingly, however, we’re much more culturally conservative than we’re credited for, and with far less counter-culture influence. Strange as it sounds, old-school socialism is the conservative policy the further East you go. Rose-tinted memories of the good old red days notwithstanding, there’s little popular support for modern leftist policies. So, any direct involvement is more likely to favor the American right if it is to gain public approval at home.

      If anything, I reckon one reason the American left is imploding culturally right now, is that it had spent half the past century envisioning itself as the world-wise opposition to myopic conservative chauvinism. Now they have to face the realization that most of the world is even more conservative than the American right. And that oftentimes it actually prefers their flavor of American culture to the hogwash coming from most of Hollywood and the music industry. Now that’s a confidence killer if there ever was one.

      So, with Ted Nugent from my speakers and sweet tea in my hand, I’d say that if us Easterners do get more involved in an internal American conflict, we’re just as likely to root for the right side, as opposed to, well, the wrong side.

    2. If there is a true ACW II, the global economy will completely crash. More likely old rivals start fighting each other than mounting expeditions to stick their dicks in an American civil war.

  108. One important consideration that I rarely see mentioned is the effect upon national defense that a program of confiscation would have. Does Swalwell think that the chaos that will ensue upon an implementation of a national gun confiscation scheme, by force, will produce? The Russians and the Chinese will be dancing in the Politburo and the General Office of the Central Committee. And will surely try to take advantage of any such employment of the military and police. My guess is that within days that portions of Europe, not to mention the entire South China Sea, will be under Russian and Chinese control.

  109. In your post you complained about the left “Othering” people. Do you not see how you also do this all the time?

    1. Sure. And the second I propose using brute force, up to nuclear weapons, on people just for disagreeing with me, then feel free to call me on it.

    2. Classic “Skim Until Offended” here.
      I just don’t see how the whole “you pointed out this minor thing that you kind of do too!” invalidates the actual main point of the argument- that starting a new civil war will be far, far more unpleasant than the Left thinks.
      And I suspect that Travis can’t either.

      1. Joe, it is actually something that all human groups do to one extent or another, and have done so for all of human history. But right now, I’m talking about one particular group who is saying they can use Apache attack helicopters to blow up my neighborhood with impunity, because my people are subhuman monsters who need to fall in line or die… So let me check if his attempt to shame me worked… Nope. Doing fine. 😀

    3. Othering: Calling groups of people racists, Nazis, fascists, homophobes, etc. because they disagree.

      Not Othering: Pointing out how “othering” people makes you an asshole.

      Hope that helps.

  110. One thing I would recommend making a point of any time a hard-charging gun grabber takes this line:

    “The legislators who vote for the confiscation will all die or go into hiding within the first week. Those in the media who most loudly called for it will also die. I like to think that the folks taking them out will try to do so with surgical precision, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere within 100 yards of a Swalwell. And I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be working for him.”

    1. That five-pound bag can also take out an entire fleet of vehicles. For a semi-truck, I believe you only need a cup or two. Eliminate the refuel capability and a tank quickly becomes a large, roadside attraction.

      Not to mention LEOs can’t go out to confiscate anything.

  111. “for most people on the left political violence is a knob, and they can turn the heat up and down”
    yes, witness this recent incident where antifa was blocking a sidewalk while carrying rifles. They obviously think they can control how far that escalates. I think they are wrong. Someone is going to point a rifle at someone else and realize too late that once people think you are going to kill someone then its game ON and lethal force is now justified in self defense. This is the video of the incident in seattle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy4QyvXWiq0

  112. Your quote regarding turning a knob vs flipping a switch is right on the money. I think the left can turn a knob because the Pantifa types who do the dirty work are losers with nothing to lose. Most of us have something to lose and therefore must wait until it is essentially lost to take steps in that direction.

  113. Oh I think “liberals” understand most of this pretty well. They know very well that with a measure like this they’d be relying on a group of people they hate.

    Why do you think there’s such a push for AI and robots in the military?

    1. Robots need maintenance as well, and are limited in terms of adaptability and hence the types of operations they can conduct. That said, it’s not unlikely some lefties *believe* that an invincible robot army could be used to enforce their preferred form of social order, and so push for automation of the military… but lefties aren’t exactly known for holding reasonable beliefs to begin with.

      Regarding the concerns of economic or otherwise less-obvious pressure – bank accounts, employment and so on – one has to consider the sheer number of gun owners in and of itself. From what I’ve researched, over a quarter of the American population owns firearms, and that’s not accounting for multiple family members around the registered owner, or distribution away from the coasts and/or major cities. That’s a lot of people, typically working jobs far more essential to the economy than your average downtown barista. Any consistent form of economic pressure would cripple multiple industries, and then be rendered meaningless by a rise in alternatives, from private trusts to literally putting money in the mattress.

      Finally, I live in a country with rather lopsided firearm laws – such that make it ridiculously easy for political bigwigs and hired thugs to obtain a carry license, while it’s all but impossible for private citizens. Yet, you’d be surprised how often you’d have a defensive use incident with a weapon the guy had just found lying on the ground, freshly cleaned and fully loaded, and was just rushing to return it to the police station, honest. I can only imagine the frequency of such happy little accidents in a nation with an already developed gun culture and widespread means of acquisition.

      And I reckon that’s another thing liberals don’t get about Second Amendment supporters – if we wanted to be armed illegally, we would be. That’s not the point. That was never the point. The point is that self-defense, from attackers both on the street and of the state, is a civil right. And that those who wish to revoke it, especially with the argument that it’s no longer relevant because the guns aren’t big enough, are people who don’t have a problem with guns, but with self-defense as a whole.

  114. The shot callers on the Left are well aware of the problem that they don’t control most of the cops and military people, and they are going after the problem aggressively. That’s what’s behind the push for women and gays and transexuals in the military. They want to change the culture of the military and drive out conservatives by making it unpleasant for them. That’s also what’s behind the sensitivity training. Force conservatives to sit through bullshit, not because you expect to change many minds, but because it is torture and a lot of them will say “screw you” and get out. That’s the real goal.

    These efforts to change the culture of the military are arguably the one thing that is most dangerous to western civilization, because once conservatives no longer control the institutions of force, democracy is over. Look at what happened to the FBI and CIA.

    1. This MTF trans person is decidedly in your corner. So do many of my LGBT brothers and sisters. We understand how dangerous it is to limit arms possession to governments.

  115. Brilliantly written.
    Although the boil the frog strategy will still work.
    But until the frog is nearly dead there’s a good chance that the information war may be won, converting more people to the frog’s side.
    Ultimately the only solution is to make sure, if you can do nothing else, that you take at least one with them. We are more.
    BTW, some food for thought: an Italian court examined the evidence that MMR causes autism and found in favour of Wakefield. Viral microbiologists have been increasingly killed under suspicious circumstances since early 1990s, 24 in 2004 the year of SARS. A whistleblower in Aug 2009 predicted a Nov Ukraine outbreak. These and many more indicate CovID has been a plan long in the making. It’s one of the 4 pots being used to boil the frog: CovID, Climate change (see Tony Heller), gun control, grooming of the military.

    1. You…don’t know jack shit about biology, do you?

      Or anything else, for that matter.
      ———————————
      Facts do not depend on opinions. Unfortunately, for far too many people, opinions do not depend on facts, either.

  116. When the left ‘tards’ start the next civil war, I will consider it an honor to take at least 200 of them with me as my ass hits the ground. And yes, they will be prying my guns from my cold dead fingers. Not until then.

  117. Police are of no value when the people stand up to them in sufficient numbers and exert enough force, you can see it in the numbers who quit in various left-wing cities the left has done just that in. I don’t support antifa or BLM or the left in the first place, but just showing the real colors of police when the people stand up to them in force, and a very small minority of them at that.
    Can you imagine how useless they would be in a real uprising of the people, and i don’t mean the left, either? Imagine all the freedom fighting patriots who want their rights back, their right to freedom, the constitutional rights we are entitled to, then what do you think the police or the military will do ?

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