We often hear from anti-gun people things like:
It’s an argument that’s often echoed by gun nuts – as though their fully-loaded AR-15 with 100-bullet drum will keep them safe from Predator drones and cruise missiles.
Or this:
If you’re someone who honestly believes that you can stage an armed rebellion to overthrow the United States government, you’re too mentally unstable to own guns.
Is it asking too much for these people to learn something from the number of police being shot up in Dallas? ONE guy murdered five armed police officers and wounded several others in the span of a few minutes. He didn’t make it out alive, but still there are some things that could be learned here.
How many “gun nuts” would it take to overthrow, or at least completely remove the majority of those in control of, a small city government they thought was corrupt? Or a large city government? Or a state government?
Think about the resources tied up for a month when the two D.C. snipers were active. Think about the time and number of police it took to find, surround, and finish off the one rogue police officer in Los Angles a few years ago.
Multiple that by, picking a number, 3% of the number of gun owners in the U.S. (about 100 million). For those anti-gun people who may be arithmetic challenged that is 3,000,000. And 3,000,000 is much, much, larger than one or two. And there is a synergy with larger numbers that cause a systemic failure such that it would far worse than just 3,000,000 times the effect of one or two acting on their own. Nearly all of those 3% would do virtually nothing more than show up, look around, shrug, and talk among themselves about the replacement government to put in place.
Or looking at it another way, think about what might happen if ISIS, with a few thousand fanatics, decided to put together an ongoing, diversified, guerilla attack against us with a dozen or so people per team.* The evidence supplied in Dallas demonstrates our police would not do well. The military doesn’t have enough people to protect every local government or vulnerable target. It would require some percentage, maybe 3%, of U.S. gun owners to help defend our homeland—to protect “the security of a free state”.
See also my previous post on the topic, Boots on the ground.
But don’t expect anti-gun people to change their story. They believe what they want to believe. Facts are apparently not something within their domain of expertise. They work more with insults.
* I’ve seen some of the training tapes our military found in the caves of Afghanistan. One of those was about ambushing and killing police officers.
It’s not like it hasn’t happened before.
Veterans returning from WWII essentially overthrew the corrupt McMill County government in 1946 with a few carbines, handguns, and rifles.
http://www.constitution.org/mil/tn/batathen.htm
Look at the Navy Yard shooting. What would that have looked like if it had been a dozen trained ISIS operatives armed with rifles and body armor.
Or three or four shooters on different parts of an Army or Marine Coprs base working at the same time, Paris style. Who is going to use a drone or cruise missle strike on Camp LeJeune?
Or go with 0.03% – 30,000 active insurgents in this country. That would completely overwhelm LEO and military forces with no safe rear area. And bring our economy to a near complete halt.
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I think too many people fail to realize, for whatever reason, that one motivated individual with a weapon and the skill to use it, can change the course of history.
An incident that occurred in 1914 springs to mind. And the world still hasn’t gotten over it.
The proper response to the first quote, about predators and cruise missiles (and often they include tanks), is “are you seriously proposing martial law and divisions of armor, tanks, APCs, and full air support be used against the domestic civilian population? Really? Are you serious, or just mental?” When they realize what they are proposing, either the mask slips all the way off, or they have an epiphany and start to back-peddle.
For the mask slipping…
I’ve seen the clamoring for martial law.
In comments to an article about how the UK “de-escalation” style policing is superior and how their cops don’t need to carry guns.
That’s right, when talking about how US police are too heavily armed and use too much lethal force they’ll demand military occupation of American cities and using drones to blow up people’s houses.
Yep.
joe:
your points are well taken. but, consider some additional facts, and understand why the liberals/leftists/communists/bolsheviks are scared shitless of an armed population.
the power grid. the water supply. garbage collection. food production.
cities require all of the above systems to work flawlessly. you gotta eat, and if you are lucky enough to eat, you gotta poop, and you have garbage that must be taken away or things get unpleasant. (same w/ sewage.)
all of these systems begin or end with us country folk, and all these systems run through the country before they get to the city. none of these systems run themselves. all are susceptible, and quite vulnerable, to disruption and/or destruction.
you are some stuffed shirt liberal politician that thinks milks comes from a factory, and that sanitation is a given, and that people live forever w/ any luck.
think about it.
john jay
A very valid point.
In any medium to large-scale insurrection the government doesn’t have the manpower to hold their own positions, much less attempt to pacify the rabble.
They have too many facilities to protect – civil government buildings, military bases, weapons and munitions depots, munitions and explosives manufacturing plants, etc. This doesn’t even include civil assets deemed critical such as long distance phone relays, microwave towers, water supplies, natural gas & fuel pipelines into the bases and on and on. The manpower to protect those places comes out of a finite pool.
You want to disrupt a tyrannical government? You don’t fight it directly if you can avoid it. You can monkey wrench their ability to operate, disrupt basic services, slow and delay commerce and generally put a strain on their resources. How? Thanks for asking.
No one seems to comprehend that within any resistance there will be people of a wide variety of useful skills. But more importantly, people with specialized knowledge. City water or sanitation engineers who know where valves are and what they do. Local power company workers who know weak points in transmission networks. Pipeline or oil company workers who know where underground natural gas or fuel lines are. Just a couple of very good marksmen with suppressed rifles could disrupt long distance power transmission to one or more towns & cities.
Enormous amounts of commerce move by rail every day on hundreds of thousands of miles of track. Simply removing a pair or rails on a curve or in the middle of nowhere will stop a train. Since I’ve nothing against the train crew some warning signs a mile or two before might help save lives. At the extreme end dropping a rail bridge or creating a landslide onto tracks along a major traffic route creates bigger headaches.
In the reverse, where some foreign (*cough*Jihadist*cough*) extremists are the enemy the same folks could be organized to defend the nation. This might require the removal or amending of state laws to remove barriers to legally armed citizens in some states (e.g. magazine limits, registration, license to own, etc). There are about 20 million veterans who could be leveraged as volunteer instructors and mentors or organizers. At the very least it puts several million sets of eyes and ears out there to gather intelligence.
While I agree that the article and the comments are all factually correct, I suspect as arguments for convincing the wavering they aren’t going to work well. With one exception: Rolf’s answer.
The problem: the spin will we “we’re just trying to make the streets safe, and in response, those gun nuts are threatening civil war”.
That was exactly why I made the reference to the citizen militia protecting against insurrection as well as being insurrectionist.
The point is that with an armed populace the government is only by the consent of the governed. The numbers just don’t add up any other way.
But arithmetic and reading comprehension is difficult for these people and they will imagine whatever they want to believe regardless of what is said. Hence my conclusion is that I might as well say whatever it is that I want to say because they are going imagine crazy stuff regardless and I manage to get a few people to see things my way in the process.
“Safe for who? The rapist doesn’t disarm his victim for the victim’s good. The abductor and murder doesn’t order you to come quietly and not make a scene because it is good for you? What are you plans for your political opponents?
Any time guns get banned, the crime rate goes up! Police brutality goes up! You want to disarm us because that is a necessary first step before YOU want to start the regularly scheduled trains for the gulags. What sort of sick murderer-by-proxy are you?”
Exactly, and I stole this great quote, “Only my enemy wants me disarmed” and I have added to it, so it is now, “Only my enemy wants me disarmed, so he can do nefarious things.”
A disarmed population is not respected and is in a precarious position. Imagine a disarmed United States and then a muslim government coming to power. Well, there is your second Nazi Germany scenario against Christians.
“When someone is trying their best to disarm you, it’s NOT paranoid to worry what they might be planning next.”
Do you really think that you could defeat the strongest military in the world, battle harden veterans of conflicts around the world?
It didn’t seem to be a problem in 1776
Like I always say when it comes up, “armed resistance” is about marginal costs.
You don’t “fight tanks in the streets”; you snipe at officers and anyone who opens the hatches*.
Knowing this is possible and that the people are irreducibly armed makes the known cost of being so oppressive you actually get them to fight back high enough that nobody tries.
(* Not that, despite their fever dream fantasies, I’m worried about the US Army enacting fascist martial law on us. Everyone I’ve known in the services took their oath very seriously.)
I love how they assume that all of the US .mil and LE are going to be on their side just because whomever is in office says so. But I doubt many of those types have any real deep interaction with people that take their oaths of office seriously. Certainly no one on Capitol Hill or the Whitehouse.
I believe they’re slowly rectifying that problem with training and screening.
I believe we’re nearing a point where the authoritarians would like nothing better than an armed insurrection. The top has been coming down, the bottom has been coming up, sooner or later they need the insides to come out. It’s a necessary part of the formula.
Not just battle tanks, cruise missiles and drones. Add foreign enemies and jihadists, an army of mesmerized criminals, disease, and probably some shocking new evil we won’t guess until it’s underway.
It doesn’t require any particular side or faction winning either. If we end up like another third world failed state, that is enough.
Why shoot 5 cops when shooting the mayor or police chief has a greater effect?
Why fight a squad of Marines when you can shoot a government G-14 with a much better chance of survival?
That’s how you fight a successful insurgency.
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