Thought of the day, and I guess open thread: if the shit is going to hit the fan, so to speak, I think it’s going to start in a blue state. The excrement will be put in motion by narrow minded urbanites forcing policies on rural people that ruin them. What state will this happen in? My prediction is Oregon. Portlandia has basically lost its mind, and the rest of the state is culturally the mountain west.
Oregon will be the 21st century Bleeding Kansas. Lets hope it works out better for them than it did for Kansas.
Washington is getting close. The initiative process acts as Seattle’s pocket legislature. It’s used to impose whatever residents here want on the entire state. People living elsewhere know that it doesn’t matter who you elect in the state House or Senate. They know it doesn’t matter who you vote for as governor. They know Seattle will pick who sits on the state Supreme Court. The only opinions that matter are Seattle opinions.
I don’t see how this situation can last in the long term. Eastern Washington would get a fairer shake being run out of Boise than Olympia, and now the residents are merely serfs.
I have come to despise initiative processes. They are far too easy to manipulate by people with deep pockets.
I wish there was a way I could end the initiative process in Utah. Heh, maybe I need to start an initiative….
was about to say it’s a tossup between WA and OR.
Not so many years ago the voters of east King County voted to secede from western King County (Seattle) and form Cedar County. Even though it was approved by the voters per state law it was invalidated by a judge. If it had been allowed to stand it would have bankrupted King County. If you think your vote counts for something, think again. Nothing will change until the pitchforks come out, and they’re in the process of banning your pitchforks now.
As I’ve repeatedly seen (and agree with), the next civil war in the USA will not be between states. It will be between those with rural and urban mindsets.
The urban/rural war is mankind’s oldest. Ever since cities were invented they have exploited the hinterland.
This problem is especially acute in the West where OR, WA, NV, CO, and NM are dominated politically by one big urban area (helped in some cases by Indian reservations) with values that are completely out of touch with the rest of the state. The spark could come in any one of these places.
Because there will not be clean battle lines as there were in CWI and because we are a worse people than we were 150 years ago, the resulting war will be much more violent with no non-combatants, akin to the Russian civil war or the Mexican.
If we are to avoid this, partition is necessary. It needs to happen at the county level, not the state level because of the big city problem.
Utah is weird because a lot of people who live in the cities still have rural mindsets.
As an aside, one of the worst Supreme Court decisions forces State Senates (in those States with bicameral legislatures) to be apportioned by population, rather than be equal representatives of counties. I have sometimes wondered how to remedy this, and I think I have a solution: make it as difficult for a county’s boundaries to be changed as a State’s (ie, it has to be approved by both counties in question, and the State’s legislature), and *then* try to restore the Senate to be on a per-county basis. Perhaps even add an amendment to the Constitution requiring it — much like our modern Constitution.
Heh. While I’m imagining this, I can’t help but think it would be funny (and a good idea) to elect the governor by Electoral College too.
The problem with apportioning the State Senate by population is that it means that cities dominate *both* the Representatives/Assembly and the Senate. The rural counties don’t have a chance!
Have SCotUS revisit apportionment following their Reynolds V. Simms ruling which was decided on the basis of disenfranchisement to address the disenfranchisement of rural voters causes by Reynolds V. Simms.
Yes it will. The moment a blue state passes and tries to enforce stuff like this:
https://olis.leg.state.or.us/liz/2019R1/Downloads/MeasureDocument/SB501
5 round mag limit, no grandfathering, bans on guns that can accept more without exception and 20 round monthly purchase limit.
They may think this is “reasonable” but if the frustration and anger spills over, it’s going to be rural folks shooting the urbanites coming to enforce utopia. And when that dam breaks it is going to spill over into other areas very quickly.
It’ll more likely be rural sheriffs just saying “yeah, no thanks” and ignoring the law (as in “not enforcing it”).
IIRC some Oregon rural sheriffs already did that for the background-checks-on-every-transfer law we got.
The 20-round monthly purchase limit will be struck down, and hard.
That effectively bans all commercial sales of non-defensive pistol ammunition (which come in boxes of 50, and would therefore be illegal). The NY SAFE Act got court-amended when it outlawed magazines larger than 7 rounds, because that’s the vast majority of available pistol mags (the Oregon 5-round proposal will similarly be struck, or more likely “amended”; NOBODY sells a semi-auto firearm with a 5-round mag – the smallest micro/pocket pistol mag holds 6 or 7).
The cynic in the back of my mind is laughing at that. Not only at the absurdly-unconstitutional idea and how they could think it’s A-OK, but at the fact that the 20-round limit outlaws pistol ammunition…
… but leaves much-more-powerful long-range rifle ammunition perfectly legal.
I’d never advocate starting one, but if they get a civil war, do they really want long-range rifle ammunition in the hands of skilled civilian marksmen? Because that’s what they’re guaranteeing when they outlaw everything else!
Matt summed it up well in his post. The current Gun Bill that has the 5 round limit affects ALL firearm magazines. It bans over 90% of firearms made since 1890.
The antigunnees are trying to spark an insurrection in this country with diabolical desire. There is nothing ignorant or misinformed about their intentions. We need to acknowledge this about the left.
I think Oregon is a good guess. I’d add Washington too. Both States are now deep blue but with a long tradition of pro-gun policy, so the whiplash of the new prohibitions hurts all the more.
However, I wonder about the Big Blue States like NY and Commiefornia. There, the screws have twisted so tightly already that there isn’t much farther to go before full-on Australia-type mass confiscation.
In fact, one could argue those States are already at defacto prohibition, because of massive non-compliance with the registration component of their AW laws. You have a condition right now, of millions of people who are effectively criminals within their own States, and probably many of them don’t even realize it. To that you can add millions more “criminals” created from recent expansions of magazine bans in States like New Jersey. The only thing missing so far is any serious attempt by the authorities to actually enforce those laws on those millions of people.
And how much longer before there is real enforcement? Is now the time to call the bluff of the anti-gun cultists? Dare them to enforce the laws they put into place? Dare them to enforce the laws they championed?
The bleeding may be sooner than anyone thinks.
To summarize, the Left only wants The War On Drugs to end so they can use the tactics of it to launch their War On Guns and Gun Owners.
The issue is the speed. NY and CA went slowly enough for the people who cared enough to leave. And the people who are left to adjust to the new normal. Also, even CA hasn’t gone as far as Oregon is proposing.
That’s why it’ll likely happen in a purple state like Oregon. There still is a substantial amount of gun owners left. The blue states like NY or NJ have purged their gun owners for the most part.
Now that Dems think they have the momentum, they will push hard and fast to get these bills going. Faster than the minority can deal with.
It will come to a head. A Bundy Ranch situation with out of staters streaming in seems like how it will happen.
yep. they’re gonna roll in, jump some enterprising state legislators and string them up from the nearest lamp post before anybody knows what’s happening…
Another “Waco Standoff” is coming in the near future.
The issue is speed?
Oh, if New York zealously prosecuted the estimated million residents who didn’t register their “assault weapons”, I think you’d see one hell of a reaction. But instead the anti-gunners pretend they have a ban that needs no enforcement and the public pretends the ban doesn’t even exist.
So I’d say the issue is avoidance.
The only reason things seem peaceful now in those States, is because the anti-gunners aren’t seriously trying to enforce the State bans already in place. At the moment we have a phony war. But with the potential for real war to break out instantly.
Maybe we can turn this phony war to our advantage.
Even if the anti-gunners never try to enforce those State bans, we can turn the potential danger of that enforcement against them. Every time they push a national ban, we can point to New York and Commiefornia and challenge them to finish there first. Challenge them to describe how they would do it, demand to know how much that enforcement would cost, and rebuke them for how many lives they would destroy.
They aren’t interested in enforcement because they don’t have to be. Pick off a few here and there, make an example, make the resisters afraid. Within a generation you have your ban de facto.
If you cant practice, can’t shoot, can’t transport, can’t buy more, can’t transfer your guns to the next generation, and can’t spread your culture, you lose.
It’s actually brilliant long-game tactics by the anti-gunners.
Because of this, I have wondered what we could do to establish gun culture without guns.
I think video games have gone a long way to do this. I have wondered to what degree something can be designed with laser triggers, and pseudo-active targets (things that automatically go up and down when hit with a laser, as if they were hit by a bullet…)
This isn’t just a concern for what we should do in the event that guns become illegal in America. It’s also a question of how to re-establish a gun culture in places outside of America, such as Japan, Great Britain, California, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, where the gun culture has already been gutted.
A sort of bastard/awesome mix of airsoft, for recoil, and laser tag?
OR, WA, and NY have deep blue population centers on the coast. Enough to outnumber the rest of states which are deep red.
That kind of massive ideological divide is a recipe for confrontation and maybe violence.
NY state is probably closer to it than anyone’s comfortable with. NYC basically runs the state, politically, but the rest of the runs very different political views. Hell, go look at the state’s voting records for the last presidential election. The SAFE act is a perfect example. The number of police and sheriffs who said they had no intention of enforcing it was not (and is not) small. When your own police tell you it isn’t going to happen you have a big problem.
I have wondered if the time is coming that we should partition ourselves into two countries, red and blue, and be done with it. The two governing philosophies behind those colors are just too fundamentally opposed to each other. Hopefully, if it comes down to that, we can work out a friendly secession.
Alternatively, Glenn Reynolds has made the case that it might not hurt for certain States partition themselves — because if California wants to secede, there’s a good chance that many of the counties (the red ones, in particular) who won’t. Why not break up California along such political lines, so that the blue parts can continue to blue, but the red parts can get back to being red? But in order for such a solution to work, we would need the Federal government back off from being *either* red or blue.
While it’s easy to see solutions, it’s not at all easy to see how those solutions will work out, *or* (even more significantly) how to implement those solutions. I have a bad feeling that things aren’t going to work out well, regardless — in particular, because the sane solutions probably can’t be implemented for political reasons.
Sigh. I don’t look forward to the seemingly inevitable “interesting times”.
I’ve long been for splitting the country up. We are two people now. We can’t reconcile. We can’t compromise. And while we would be happy with a Federal system, the other side won’t be.
People argue against it on pragmatic grounds: “we won’t be able to split up the debt or military bases.” That doesn’t matter. What matters is can we save lives by splitting up?
The problem is that there aren’t any clean geographic lines that will work. It’s an urban/suburban/rural divide.
I agree.
A lot of people forget how messy the first Civil War was. It wasn’t a clean State vs State division. It wasn’t all Notherners were Unionists and all Southerners were Secessionists.
Today you have many political populations who are in the minority of their locale, whether that locale is urban or rural, Blue State or Red State. There are conservatives even in San Francisco, and liberals even in rural Idaho.
If there ever was some kind of division of America, there would be a tremendous shifting of those groups, as people moved in both directions across the new border, and even after that movement many dissidents would still remain behind either by choice or necessity.
I have played with a county red-blue map. It is doable at that level. America is easy mostly other than a few outliers like N. Maine. The Peoples Republics are harder but I can create about a half dozen of them that have access to a border or an ocean. Whether they coalesce into a single entity or do it alone, I really don’t care as long as they are not part of my country.
And if you think partition is messy, I have a civil war I want to show you.
The scary thing is that politics nowadays isn’t just about winning elections and civilly advancing your agenda, there’s a sense you need to not just win against the opposition but punish/destroy them, or at least reeducate all those who stood against you and your righteous agenda. There used to be a sense that even people who disagreed with you were Americans and neighbors and should be listened to, and debates in Congress acknowledged that compromises were necessary. No longer.
Whenever Obama lost a battle he would say that he just hadn’t gotten enough people to understand his position, meaning that of course he was right and only ignorance defeated him. As I’ve watched the left grow in ferocity and nastiness I’ve begun to imagine forced reeducation camps like communist regimes put in place wherever they took over (South Vietnam, Cambodia, Russia, etc.).
Maybe soldiers wouldn’t come and move you to a camp, but maybe you can’t get a job at any large company until you’ve taken whatever they call their “sensitivity” training. I could certainly imagine that at the tech giants.
And as companies mine into Social Media, which never forgets, those posts you made about “I’m a 3%er! They’ll take my guns bullets first” in 2010 may come back to haunt you at future jobs. Forever. Because you no longer just hold a different view, you now hold a dangerous view.
I do see a lot of the same on our side, though. Like all the trashing of Trump and the NRA because of a bump stock executive order. Trump and the NRA are the best bet to do good things for the gun culture; abandon them, and we’ll have the kinds of laws Oregon is getting.
But to the original point … if there is a civil war of cities against the rural areas, how do we even fight that? It’s not like the resistance in Colonial Boston or occupied Europe; the rural people are spread over wide areas, and there are cameras at every major intersection tracking movement.
I don’t think there will be a major SHTF civil disruption like many people fantasize about, and if there is it will have to be fought in cyberspace as much as on the ground with guns. And we have all the guns but not the best cyberwarriors. So that’s a problem.
If things break down, though, I’m sure that we’re going to discover there’s more red cyberwarriors than we anticipated, as well as more blue gun owners.
And there may likely be enough sabotage to go around for *all* sides. Our infrastructure is woefully vulnerable.
This is a major reason why I want to avoid “interesting times” as much as possible!
With the exception of the larger beach towns (huge influx of NY, NJ, and New Englanders who are very liberal) Delaware is a VERY red, very rural state anywhere south and west.
It’s essentially two states with little in common, and the blue folks in New Castle County aren’t shy about expressing their bigotry towards “slower lower delaware”
City dwellers will come to realize pretty quickly that their food doesn’t come from the supermarket anymore. And as far as surveillance cameras go they won’t be an issue for very long. In a protracted civil war the people in cities are always the least prepared and have no clue as to how vulnerable they really are.
Oregon’s gun owners had BETTER make it Bleeding Oregon. It’s time for the gun control tyrants to be taken down–politically and literally.
California because there have already been initiatives to split the state. At some point, people will have had enough of LA and Southern California. Oregon I think is too small.
But the war will last about 5 minutes. Rural areas are where the food is grown and people own rifles. Rural areas have leverage, just not necessarily at the ballot box.
Don’t be overconfident. The Bolsheviks won with all the same disadvantages and more. Better to just avoid the whole thing with partition.
If it did come to a war between red and blue, those large metropolitan area would be in a bad way very shortly. They have a weakness. Namely in logistics. They could be cut off and they would be unlivable in a matter of days. Look where Los Angeles gets its water. It would be very easy to cut off their water.
Exactly – if people are willing to go there, it takes very little to shut down electric and gas into the city; food and fuel make a difference too, but its electric that is the BIG weak point; most big cities have at most 3 major supply lines and substations; taking out 2 of them would put a hurt on them quickly and with little cost or risk.