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 onâ€, 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.
If we have another Civil War, and the military is as divided as our society on its loyalties, we won’t have room for all the bodies it’s going to generate. It’s going to be ugly. And that’s even before our foreign rivals use the chaos to take what they can. Remember, the last time we had a Civil War, we didn’t have to worry about the rest of the world as much because the British Empire mostly had that under control, and they weren’t going to intervene on behalf of a CSA avowing to preserve slavery. We won’t have that luxury this time around. If we have another go, you can expect everyone and their brother to make a play for any asset they think they can get.
I suspect in that case we’d need to have an accommodation with both sides in the Second Civil War that control of the nukes stays in neutral hands, maybe military leaders both sides trust, where our policy would be to nuke any power making a grab for US assets like Guam, Hawaii, or Alaska and use the nuclear umbrella to secure things while we killed each other like civilized people. That would really be the only option.
Actually that’s not true. The French took over Mexico during the last civil war but it fell apart as soon as the fighting in the US ended. Their guy ended up getting executed by the Mexicans shortly after.
Yes. But initially that had the blessing of the British, and the purpose was to secure monies owed to French creditors. When it became apparent it was a power play, the British withdrew support. I view that as somewhat controlled, though I’d agree it might not have happened if we weren’t preoccupied with killing each other.
The Brits also could do math. The Union had something like 2 million men under arms. If the Brits had tipped the scales in the Confederacy’s favor, seizing all of Canada as compensation would have required just an about-face and a bit of marching. Would not have been a damn thing the English could have done about it.
As Fred Thompson’s character said in The Hunt For Red October: “This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.â€
One of my favorite quotes.
You should think further about who the confiscators are and where they live. They are a class that see themselves above it all and live in guilded cages. They do not farm even if they own land. 95% do not hunt and if they do they use guides to find the game and process it afterwards. They cannot fix anything around the house, apartment etc as they do not know what systems make their lives happen. They do not drive trucks to deliver their needs. They are totally dependent upon the dirt people. If they think that after they have stolen guns or other means of survival I will continue to cooperate to support their lifestyle the saying is “not gonna happen”. Put me or mine in a camp and I will hate you forever and find any means at hand to do you in. This will be a war of the haves vs the have nots and the have nots hold the long run cards. I will poison your water cut your electricity and adulterate your food and if I can isolate your city so the street savages ruin your day I will set it up.
Remember the whole premise of authority in any country is based upon safe have for you and your family off duty. Once gone your parts are in the breeze. All of your fancy assed equipment is dependent upon spare parts and dirt people who know how to put it all back together. Once gone your advantage is gone and when your house if firebombed I would guess that your incentive to rule will be also.
Talk is cheap and once the rubber hits the road then all will be known
Goose
I view Civil War II as being like the proverbial WWIII. It’s a possibility that we all have to prepare for because at the end of the day you can’t win such a war but you can lose. By making sure that everybody loses it is actually much less likely that such a thing will ever happen. As a result, I don’t seriously worry too much about it.
My philosophy is to buy guns that would be useful for warfare, even though that possibility is extremely remote, but they are also useful for self-defense, which is much more realistic. Much like a lot of cold war weapon systems designed to be deployed against the Soviet horde are now proving useful in our current small-scale wars.
THIS.
Pretty much sums up my philosophy on this Civil War II/WIII issue. Lots of masterbatory fantasies aplenty by Swalwell (SmallBalls) and his I’ll but they’d be nowhere to be found when rubber meets the road. Plenty would be happy to make them feelas safe in their homes as Tucker Carlson. We make it painful for them before it gets to that point. If they have already made up their mind that no one is safe from government/agitator intrusion in their own home then we make sure that includes then. The other quote Patrick Henry of pagunblog fame is fond of is “they won’t like the new rules.” No they won’t.
They definitely won’t like the new rules! And the point of that quote, as you and Mike Q says, is to make it so difficult to go further that its not worth it.
The only thing worse than winning a civil war is losing a civil war. If it happens, and I think it is going to if we keep on the same trajectory, it will wreck the country and leave millions dead. Win or lose, we will lose the republic. If we lose, it will be much worse, given the nature of the other side. Therefore, it is worth considering radical ideas to avoid such a catastrophe.
The irony is, Swalwell is hoisting himself with his own petard. He thinks he’s going to take self-loading rifles away from the public, but instead his hysterics are just going to provoke the public into buying even more self-loading rifles.
There is an awful lot of bold talk from the anti-gunners with very little action to show for it.
For a warning sign of any change to the phony war, of real action starting, keep an eye on New York, Illinois and California. They either already have, or are about to have, millions of residents who illegally possess so-called “assault weapons”, at least one million in New York State alone who didn’t register according to the 2013 law.
The confiscation big talkers like Swalwell have all the opportunity they could ask for with those Blue States, to put their big talk into big action.
If civil conflict comes, it won’t start at the National Level. The conflict will only be inside overwhelmingly Blue States which are beating down on their own residents.
They will absolutely target everyone behind enemy lines in Blue States.
I mean, what good are your guns if you can’t even go practice with them without risk of felony arrest? And of course, the more they clamp down, the more gun owners are forced to stay in the shadows rather than share and spread their culture. This results in even more attrition in the Blue States. It’s actually a smart long game strategy.
I call him Rep. “Small Balls” for some reason. We’ll be quite ready for his type if/when they come a knockin’.
mike w is right. They want to boil the frog slowly, and make gun ownership socially unacceptable as it is in England.
It’s been going on since the 1934 NFA. Hard to believe, but it has been ‘that’ long for the anti-gunners and their tactics.
I personally think the anti gunners are talking the way they are because it plays well to the donors. Unfortunately I think they would act on this talk if they got the chance. Fortunately I don’t think this will happen. If Trump succeeds in remaking the courts for another two years, things will be really good for us long term.
Gun control is not nearly as strong as it was in the 80s and early 90s and that last big win put Democrats out of power for years. Maybe they need another reminder, let’s see.
The United States paid hell to defeat the insurgents in Vietnam (later losing the political war), had to bribe off half the insurgency support in Iraq, and have basically lost the Afghan War…all insurgencies against uneducated, moderately armed peasant militias. Yet now, with no sense of history or military realities, part of the United States populace thinks that starting a civil war and fighting a continental size insurgency against a quarter of the American population is going to be a walk in the park. That is a perfect illustrated example of total ignorance.
I also think it’s likely confrontation will come to a blue state, due to this getting pushed too far too fast. A slow boil and people will just leave.
Agreed. It could be a purple state that just turned blue too. And then you would see fighters flowing in from red states. It could blow up quick. Or it could cool down quick, if the leaders back down, like they did with the Bundy Standoff in NV.
Unfortunately I think it’s a matter of when not if and it’s going to be very ugly. Gonna be a lot of bodies on both sides but I think just based on general trends, there’s going to be a lot more for them. Once their trained attack quislings are spent they’ve got nothing left buy a soy latte to throw….
One of the factors that is being overlooked in this discussion is that to the People of the Left, every new situation is an empty slate. For some mental reason, they have no concept of history. It appears to be a requirement to be of the socialist/communist/Progressive persuasion. They are virtually incapable of learning a lesson from prior disasters of the political type, let alone others. The past is a blank slate! Doesn’t exist for them.
So, expecting them to have learned anything useful is wishful thinking. They absolutely will start a war here, having ignored the various civil wars that would be instructive. That is one of the reasons idiots like this are so willing to mouth off, because they CANNOT see the end results.
As the old Soviet joke went: “The future is certain, it is the past that keeps changing.”
Really great point. An often joke is that “History started in 2016.” They can’t even look up what happened a decade ago, much less other countries decades ago.
I know of a large eastern city that I could make unlivable with three small explosives. People would be leaving as fast as they could with nowhere to go that they would be welcomed. Heck, it might be open season on them once they start stealing food they don’t have.
All this just by removing one vital resource.
No I ain’t say what city or what resource.
There are lots of cities big and small like that. Now image that writ large across the country. How long would it take for the other side to back down?
My wife’s uncle was US Army special forces, veteran of Panama, Desert Storm and who knows where else. Prior to his passing he told me things that would make your hair curl with respect to the damage a group of 3-5 motivated individuals could do to a city of any size. All pretty basic disruption tactics they trained in for stay behind ops in the event of WW3….
One thing I cannot help but think about, is supposing that Washington DC authorized the use of a nuke against an American city, how long would it be before insurgents overwhelmed a nuclear silo in the middle of nowhere, and fired it at Washington DC in retaliation?
Even supposing that *only* the government can operate a nuke is dangerous. As Swalwell says, we have too many of them — how many of them aren’t as secured as well as we’d like them to be?
There was an article on the age of these things, too. Most are “hardwired” using systems developed in the 1970s, lack electronically synchronized comms, and require much in the way of human interaction for the arming and firing. It’s scary to think, but it probably wouldn’t take much if/when angry anarchist hackers team up with redneck gun toters to predict a frightening backscatter scenario.
The biggest threat against silos and the launch control centers were seen as enemy action and sabotage, not nuclear weapons. So they were hardened to protect them from such threats.
A student of this, I assure you that notion of hotwiring a Minuteman III missile is Hollywood fantasy. Without access to the secure communications links to either arm the missiles or send in retargeting data, both strictly controlled by the US Air Force, a Minuteman III in Wyoming or Montana is nothing more than a firecracker in a concrete storage hole.
Just getting into a silo itself is a Herculean effort. With authorization it takes over an hour just to open the maintenance hatches and even longer to crank open the silo door itself. This is by design to slow down would-be intruders. Opening the two hatches just to get access to the door to the silo would take hours without the proper codes and keys. With heavy equipment. During which security troops are no more than 20-30 minutes away from the nearest wing base.
Even if you got in, unless you were a maintenance tech on these systems and had the keys, there would be no way to arm or target the missiles. The comm lines themselves are hardened and tamperproofing to prevent classic hardwire hacking. The moment the covers are compromised without the correct tools the missile would be inaccessible. Get past that without the proper codes and the missile becomes an inert firecracker, the PAL rendering the warhead useless and the guidance system questionable.
What happens, though, when you have sympathetic techs who are angry that their cousins (perhaps even their parents and siblings) just got nuked, by order from Washington, DC?
Do nuclear weapons *still* stay sufficiently secure under such conditions?
I should add that I can’t help but wonder *just* how secure our nuclear arsenal is, because for decades, the launch codes were a series of 0’s, because we were afraid that we wouldn’t have time to supply the codes if we needed to launch them.
Is it entirely improbably that certain insurgents (who may very well be formerly involved with nuke security detail) may very well know the weaknesses in security? Nuking an American city may very well allow us to find out…
Maybe no insurgents. A lot of military are “deplorables,” and might decide that such a strike meant that upholding the Constitution required turning the red keys simultaneously. And there are lots of people like my HVAC guy, former Green Beret, with an underground gun safe with his collection of 1000 meter rifles.
I think the biggest problem folks who have this fantasy (my father is among them) have is that they believe 99.9% of gun owners will just fall in line and hand over their guns now that they’re illegal, and that the police / military will likewise 99.9% fall in line with confiscation + going after anyone caught with a gun.
Reality would probably be a lot closer to 99.9% non-compliance than 99.9%
The estimates of compliance with the Australian ban, which gun control advocates tout as so successful that I’ve seen are around 20% of subject firearms turned in.
Yeah… but how’s the gun culture in Australia doing now? If they rust away in someone’s barn, it does freedom no good.
Supposedly so many guns have been purchased in the years since the 1996 ban, that the number of legal weapons in Australia is now higher than immediately after the mass confiscation.
In fact the numbers confiscated in 1996 fell way below original government estimates. Leading to a recent confiscation drive, a “national firearms amnesty”, which also underperformed.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/06/asia/australia-gun-amnesty/index.html
Bottom line is, there are a lot of legal weapons still in Australia, and a whole lot of illegal weapons still in Australia. Despite the draconian gun-control laws of Australia. “Anyone caught with an unregistered firearm outside the amnesty period could face a $280,000 (US$212,500) fine and up to 14 years in prison.”
New York City is instructive when it comes to compliance rates. In NYC approximately 100,000 people who legally own guns compared to more than two million illegal guns.
I think everyone in NJ was supposed to either install blocks or turn in their magazines >10 rounds a couple of months ago. I know of nobody who turned them in. I bought a token 10-round mag for the range.
I think about one or two people have been prosecuted in Colorado for violation of the magazine ban of 2013.
https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2015/11/01/first-large-capacity-magazine-charge-filed-larimer/74887236/?from=new-cookie
Of course the flip side of this is that 99% of gun owners see themselves as badass freedom fighters, even though most of them would crumble at hint of conflict.
You think that.
Go take a look at how the people of the Visegrad States in Europe are swelling up against the EU Puppet Masters; France and Germany. Outside of the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Switzerland will likely join Visegrad in the next few years), those Countries are ‘disarmed’, but gun cultures are forming their.
Even though they might be ‘disarmed’, Germany and France would lose a War with Visegrad in about a month. People do ‘snap’ when pushed to their limits.
Yep, people will push back. Everybody has their limit of course, and its different for them too. You might only get 10% who would fight at a scary looking gun ban. But that’s still a LOT of people.
Somebody said the left has a dial for violence, while the right has a switch. I think that’s pretty accurate to gun owners as well. For close to 100% of gun owners, that switch has not been flipped. It’ll only take a few for that switch to flip for a lot more.
If 1% of the 100 million gun owners who think they are badasses went hunting government officials or resisting federal LEOs, that one million people can fire probably 100 shots before they are killed or captured (maybe more if they have proper rifles–500 meters is easy, even for a distinctly intellectual non-badass). Swalwell will run out of LEOs and fellow Democrats VERY quickly.
I don’t think gun control or any other “law” will cause an honest to goodness shooting war. What WILL cause it is a lack of resources. The GRID is incredibly fragile. If it goes down for more than 2 or 3 days the trucks and trains that bring food to the cities will stop rolling because there won’t be enough generators in the world to pump the fuel out of underground tanks to fuel the engines. And what fuel there is in local storage tanks won’t be replenished because the pumps on the pipelines will have failed. Fighting in that case would be over food! Shelter! Heat!
Or, how about the gooberment finally defaults on the loans they’ve been taking and all of a sudden Kroger’s stops accepting EBT cards. Again, we’ll be fighting over resources.
We’re all already felons, because somewhere, somehow, there’s a law on the books we break daily. Let the Dems make another law to make us even “felonier”…but until they start trying to actually confiscate I’m not going to sweat it all that much.
But still…I’ll be prepared.
The match that could have lit a armed rebellion already happened . the Federal government backed down That was the Bundy Ranch conflict Armed civilians surrounded BOLM and police from Vegas and the local sheriff, better attuned to local attitudes, made the BOLM release the cattle.
The Federal government later tried to convict the Bundy’s and they failed.
Remember this was under the Obama administration that suddenly had a potential armed conflict with US citizens and he flinched.
The incident that could happen will be in April like Lexington and Concord and the Bundy Ranch. April 2014 I have noticed it always happens in April. The Baltimore riots happened in April 2015
Attempting to implement mass confiscation will lead to devolution. The southern and western states will simply refuse to cooperate with Fed.gov. There will be roadblocks at state lines and checkpoints at airports where federal officials and agents will be noted and tracked. Federalism will really come into its own and the commerce clause will finally be pruned back to what the FF intended: Interstate trade, not intrastate.
Because the lefties largely ignore history,there is something they don’t understand. They think gun owners would be fighting it out with the cops and the military. While there is some truth to that, the thing they don’t understand is that primarily we will be fighting them.
The left believes they will sit at home, watching Rachael Maddow narrate events and enjoy some hot cocoa, while the military kicks down peoples doors. If these assholes had even a little understanding of how these things play out (Iraq,Yugoslavia, etc) they’d know that once the government starts killing people at their behest it won’t take long for the violence they were initially so pleased about to find them.
Yes, that’s 4th Generation Warfare and “Clinton’s Serbian Rules of Engagement”.
“For they will have provoked a conflict that will not be directed at the war-fighters, the grunts, even those in the outnumbered federal police, but rather at the war-makers, i.e. themselves.
In this they have only Bill Clinton to blame. When the Philanderer in Chief, frustrated with Serbian intransigence in 1999, changed the rules of engagement to include the political leadership, news media and the intellectual underpinnings of his enemy’s war effort, he accidentally filed suit under the Law of Unintended Consequences. The Serbians knuckled under, yes. But the rest of the world took note, including us. I assure you, the appeal to the higher court of history in that case has yet to be decided.“
Do you want Freikorps? Because this is how you get Freikorps…
The next civil war might start out as alphabet agencies fighting gun-owners. If it escalates, cities will starve, our currency will be worth less than the paper it’s printed on, and the global economy will crater like a meteorite.
To me, the biggest concern with foreign powers is that they’ll interfere in lower key ways.
For example, the EU and Russia will ship in food and fuel to NYC and DC. Along side those humanitarian supplies, there will be arms shipments and trainers. Which if the underlings in NYC and DC want a share of the food, they’ll have to enlist to fight.
The EU does not have long to live. Look at Paris.