As it should be

According to GunPolicy.org in the U.S. there are about 270 million guns in private hands, about 3 million under military control, and about 900 thousand owned by the police.


I find the ratio of 69:1 appropriate odds.


Public servants should keep this in mind if they entertain thoughts of changing the relationship.

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17 thoughts on “As it should be

  1. I think that 270 million figure is significantly low. They’ve been using that figure for probably close to 20 years. The report cited is from 2007, but it’s basically the same number I’ve seen over and over again for a long time; not to mention the fact that gun sales have been abnormally…um…brisk…since sometime around November of 2008

    Guns are not particularly perishable. In fact, if they’re taken care of, they’ll last for upwards of 100 years. There will, of course, be attrition through gun confiscations from criminals (which, in many cases, are sold back into the civilian market at some point), guns lost in fires or other disasters, guns that become mechanically unserviceable, but that number should not be anywhere near the millions of guns that are added to the rolls of civilian gun ownership every year.

    I’d be willing to bet that the number of guns in American homes is closer to 300 – 350 million.

    Any of those numbers are estimates anyway because they’re based on surveys and a certain (probably quite large) percentage of people won’t admit to gun ownership for one reason or another. So, if we’re going to estimate, I like my Wild-Ass-Guess better than theirs.

  2. The really hard thing to realize, most people won’t use their guns. Look at us in the past, we just rolled over for every piece of gun legislation that came along. People line up to be as compliant as possible, just look at CWP’s. See what the Brits and Aussies did, they knuckled under, just like they were told to do. The idea that we will fight when pushed too far is a pipe dream, we are way too PC these days and human nature will prove that very few have the stomach for a fight. We always look to someone else to do it for us. That’s why the NRA makes so much money, they know statistically what percentage of people will just donate to a good cause, kind of like the info the insurance companies work off of.
    Yes, some people are rebels and don’t go along with the rules, there will be fights and deaths, but not enough to matter. Most of the populace will just go back to their TV and act like nothing ever happened. We’ve been programmed very well.
    WyoMarine0321

  3. If only it was simple numbers. They have tanks, air support and more importantly a willingness to use them on you. I doubt they will go house to house when they can just blow it to bits with a drone using IR to identify occupancy.

    The only way this would work is for the politicians to exclude this use and ignore the military. I can’t see that happening.

    Then you will be left with the occasional assasination and commando type activity which will not last long.

    btw: In the UK most of us complied with gun confiscation because they already had a gun register. You can be sure that most who were not registered did not hand them in. Like yourselves when Obama came in. Most didn’t buy guns unregistered knowing that they would hand them in. They bought them to store and bypass registration. Registration in the Uk was before my time. I had no option but to register mine and if, after the latest nutter, they collect them they know my name, address and exactly what I have. Resistance is not an option.

  4. I don’t think half of the military would comply with an order to engage their own citizens, let alone carry out anything unconstitutional that would result in direct action…

  5. “I don’t think half of the military would comply with an order to engage their own citizens, let alone carry out anything unconstitutional that would result in direct action…”

    -AntiCitizenOne

    They would not need a majority. 20-30% of the military would follow an order that came down the chain of command,(oddly enough, 20-30% of the military voted Democrat…Coincidence? I think not.) particularly in the case of a “crisis” situation as manufactured by the government. That is all it would take, even if every other enlisted man suddenly got religion and joined Oath Keepers. Combine that with the Federal Law enforcement, recruited O-bot true believers itching for a chance to break things and terrorize people in the name of social justice, throw in the occasional Lon Horiuchi and you my friend have recipe for a full on Jack boot Police state. The majority in this country now lives off of the production of the minority. Remember that they will happily kill you, your family and your little dog too to keep the entitlement checks coming. We are all cash cows and when cows stop producing, they are slaughtered.

    -J.

  6. It depends somewhat on the situation (riots and mass property damage is different than mass arrests and concentration camps) but I expect the military would be likely to sit things out in the type of situations where widespread use of firearms against uppity servants occurs.

  7. They would not need a majority. 20-30% of the military would follow an order that came down the chain of command

    Wrong.

    Do you think they sort military organizational charts by political affiliation? That “20 to 30 percent” is spread relatively evenly throughout military units.

    You think a squad of 10 soldiers would be able to function as an effective combat unit if only 2 or 3 of them were willing to play?

    You think a Tank would be effective with only a driver or loader?

    How about an Apache attack Helicopter with only a copilot/gunner and the guy who pulls the chocks? No ammo, no fuel, no maintenance.

    No military unit would be even remotely functional at 20 to 30 percent manning…and that assumes that the other 70 to 80 percent wouldn’t actively work to stop that 20 to 30 percent from perpetrating their unconstitutional acts.

    In order for the military to be a factor at all in any kind of government action, they’d have to have a firm majority…almost unanimous…buy into it and support the action to be able to be effective.

    It’s possible a situation could be framed in such a way to get that kind of cooperation from the military, but not real probable. The US military isn’t a force of conscripts. Most US military people are relatively well educated, intelligent and informed. Duping them on a matter of such magnitude would not be easy.

  8. I have seen figures much higher at 360-380 million.

    I just wonder how much ammo people have managed to squirrel away in the past 2 years.

  9. What do you mean ‘resistance is not an option’? That’s what the 2nd amendment is all about. Face it people! If they are stupid enough to try to confiscate our guns, some ‘gun owners’ will wimp out, no doubt. But you had better get serious with yourself and your God-given rights, and question everything you believe in. Would you rather give up your rights, just to live? If so, what kind of life do you expect to have? Does history give us any clues? Thousands! I don’t know about you, but if the government decides to commit to ‘SWAT’ style raids to steal our right to keep and bear arms, I’m not planning on surviving. And no, I don’t consider myself to be a ‘martyr’. I don’t want to live under the oppressive rule of a dictatorship. I’m planning on killing as many government goons as possible before they kill me. That’s what it’s going to boil down to for many of us, folks. Get with it! When they bust in your door, unconstitutionally I might add, you have the right to destroy anyone who is a threat to you and your freedoms and lives. Yes, that’s the way it is going to start, until more organized resistance is established, which will happen. Remember, many thousands of current ‘citizens’ were trained by our armed forces, and they know how to drive ‘captured’ tanks, jets, artillary etc. It isn’t going to be as easy as some of you think for the tyrants. Their blood will be spilled also.

  10. @garret

    That was my statement. Just for your info I live in the UK and as such all my weapons are registered. When they come for me my weapons will be ineffectual against them. I will let them take them but that does not mean I would not resist in other ways. Suicide by cop is not a long term strategic option.

    I have the feeling that the mood of the people is changing. Why it is changing so slowly is a mystery to me but soon the blood will flow. As usual it will be the wrong blood. I suspect changes here will be triggered by external events, such as in the US.

  11. Well, Jeremy if they all did become Oathkeepers, that most likely means they just wouldn’t show up. We’ve already seen that.

    Wyomarine, you are most probably correct. There will be some who will fight and because they are so few, they will successfully be portrayed as madmen. Dead madmen. However, there are worse things than death. Slavery is one of them.

  12. History tells us that military and police will cooperate. I’m not a history expert, so hopefully I’m wrong, but I don’t know of a case in which po/mil defied orders in any significant numbers, such that an outcome was changed in favor of liberty. The American Revolution, maybe, since the Americans were all British subjects… Anyone have examples since then?

  13. How many police, for example, refuse to enforce vice laws just because we have a constitutional right to ingest anything we want, and we have the right to free association, etc.? How many refused to go along with FDR’s internment program against Japanese, German and Italian American citizens? How many refuse to enforce current anti constitutional gun laws? A number so low as to be totally insignificant. It’s like hoping Apple will fail because so many programmers are disgusted with their closed system policies.

    Now lets talk about what it takes for an entrenched power to give up. Look what it took to end the War Between the States, W.W.I and W.W. II, et al– an absolute end to all hope, and then some. Before that, total destruction and millions dead.

    I hope no one is chomping at the bit for a fight like that.

    The problem with pivotal points in history is that those who live in it never know it at the time.

  14. Lyle,

    Where I live, there are lots of people trained by the military. The problem is that it wasn’t the US military. They fought for the Soviet Union, Korea, Vietnam, etc. They have no desire to overthrow this government. To most of them, this is freedom.

  15. First of all, I do not thnk we are ANYWHERE near the point of armed struggle. However, the viability of such, given enough (passive) support from the population and a fairly small number of active guerillas, should not be underestimated. Only about 1/3 of the population of the 13 Colonies supported the Revolution (and that counts some rather lukewarm support!), 1/3 actively opposed it, and 1/3 didn’t care, so long as they got to keep their rice bowl.

    People always throw out the line, “But the government has tanks, artillery, and fighter jets!”

    I’m guessing these people never worked in or around an armor, artillery, or aviation unit, nor did they ever work in logistics. Nor did they ever have to do a FOD walk on an airfield (or even a clearing in the woods being used as a PZ.) Nor sit around large amounts of ordnance waiting to be loaded.

    You DON’T engage tanks with sporting rifles, if you have any choice. You engage TANK CREWMEN. Like when they are in barracks, walking to the tank, refueling the tank, changing a thrown track, etc.

    Same thing, only moreso, with aviation. Most aircraft are VERY susceptible to being damaged by small arms fire while they are stationary and idling their engines (which they do, for a variety of perfectly logical reasons at fairly predictable times) for extended periods. Damned few intakes are armored to stop full power jacketed or solid rifle bullets (you know, like hunting rifles use for stuff bigger than Southeastern whitetail deer?). I can assure you, those turbine blades spinning at dizzying speeds don’t like getting pinged by slugs, either. They tend to go all verklempt and fly away from the shaft at supersonic speeds (right through anything in their way, like the fuselage, fuel lines, etc.) The trouble with engaging aircraft with small arms is HITTING them — something made much easier when they are parked while being prepped for a sortie. Plus never forget, if you don’t have highly qualified maintainers and pilots, you DO NOT have an aviation asset.

    There’s a reason when the USAAF did a statistical evaluation of repairable versus heavily damaged and scrapped bombers returning from runs over Germany, they almost decided the cockpit didn’t need armor — because the planes that came back rarely had much damage in the cockpit area at all. Without the flight crew, the bomber is an uncomfortable and flammable shelter on the ground, and an unaimed cruise nissile in the sky. Without wrench turners (ESPECIALLY avionics guys these days!), the aircraft is a waste of hanger space.

    Artillery units may be attacked the same as armored ones (and they have less armor), or you can target their ordnance and ordnance handlers (just as you can with aviation). Fuel is easy to destroy, hard to protect. Admittedly, it’s easier to replace their maintainers and crew, in many cases.

    Given that a certain percentage (unknown, but certainly greater than zero) of service members will have sympathy for the resistors, makes shutting down that sort of thing nearly impossible if there is any sort of popular support. If the PFC on that part of the perimeter simply decides “not to see something”, that passivity can often be a decisive amount of support for that attack.

    Unlike our military when it’s deployed overseas in a war zone, in CONUS, it is far less defensible, because it’s AT HOME.

  16. “The relationship” as Joe so aptly puts it, is more of a state of mind than a state of hardware. In that sense we’ve already given it over, but there is a growing awareness that that was a big mistake.

  17. ubu; I know several first generation immigrants. Without exception they are more American than most natural borns. They know what statism leads to, because they fled it, only to have to face its hastening emergence here. They are pissed. And who said anything about “overthrowing the government”? If restoring the constitutional republic we were promised, is now to be regarded as “overthrowing the government” then logically that can mean only one thing– that we have already been overthrown.

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