Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Viva la revolucion! Viva la calling in sick on Monday!

I always wondered why so much time, effort, and planning on internet gun boards went into the least likely of scenarios, "The Great Door-To-Door Gun Grab". I mean, every fantasy started out with BATFEIEIO storm troopers or blue-helmeted Frenchmen or Boy Scouts or whatever showing up at the end of the block and going from the Johnsons to the Smiths to Our Hero's Front Yard, whereupon the shootin' starts.

Everybody knows that what's going to happen is another AWB just like '94, but without the sunset clause, or something very much like it. And people are going to grumble and go to work the next day, just like they did in 1994. But they'll pine for Der Tag; they'll dream of the Door-To-Door scenario. And do you know why?

Because a revolution means they won't have to go to work on Monday or pay the mortgage. "Boss? Yeah, this is Ralph. What's that? I can't hear you over the gunfire. Look, I can't come in today, I'm busy shooting JBTs." (...and face it, every desk-bound accountant fantasizes about being Mel Gibson in The Patriot.)

23 comments:

Jay G said...

And remember, during Katrina just a few years back we actually HAD a door-to-door gun grab.

And all the internet commandos were too busy interview for Food Court Team Six positions, apparently, to join their LA brethren in fighting the power...

TallTim said...

I always fantasized about being Mel Gibson in Mad Maxx...

Anonymous said...

Daydreaming about a final reckoning between the evil forces of The State and courageous, steely eyed neo-minutemen with their M14s is also a LOT less work than writing letters to your congressman, introducing ordinary people to shooting, contributing to our lobby groups and all the other mundane slogging that has actually produced pro-liberty results in the last 20 years.

Anonymous said...

'and face it, every desk-bound accountant fantasizes about being Mel Gibson in The Patriot.'

We do?

-SayUncle

Julie said...

being or doing??? re: Mel Gibson

Bob said...

Actually a lot of us with Scottish heritage see ourselves as Mel Gibson in Braveheart, minus the part about getting hanged, drawn and quartered, though...

Tam said...

That's Mel Gibson Kills The English, Vol I.

JD said...

Well, I for one can say I don't write in to congress often because in MA all you get back is a letter telling you how dumb you are and to let your betters take care of things. Kennedy don't like us thinking - he will do it for us. . .
And we keep voting these fools in so have no voice in our own government - By OUR OWN CHOICE. . . .
Whatever happens we did it to ourselves.
I just hope we can get pro gun folks back in to repeal whatever crap they pass this time. Although I still think Deal Leader will wait on a second term to do much on guns - he does not want to risk not having a second term. . .

Jeff the Baptist said...

"Well, I for one can say I don't write in to congress often because in MA all you get back is a letter telling you how dumb you are and to let your betters take care of things."

Ditto in Delaware. My congressman is behind many of the assault weapons ban renewal effort and he's our only Republican. The senators are just as bad.

Andrew said...

Maryland and Delaware guys: That's a cop-out. The antis need to hear from us at least as much as our friends do.

A few hundred letters a week might make them wonder how safe their seats really are.

Word verification: trancend -- what the American people will experience when they realize that The One has not paid their gas bill or mortgage.

JT said...

(...and face it, every desk-bound accountant fantasizes about being Mel Gibson in The Patriot.).

Not an accountant, but desk-bound, and... yes. Yes indeed.

Rabbit said...

I'm strangely comfortable with that statement.

Where's my warhawk?

Regards,
Rabbit.

Word verification- oparoly
Is that included with the stuffed grape leaf platter at Nick's Greek Taverna?

Anonymous said...

JD and Jeff, my old boss used to say, "Even when you can't accomplish what you wanted, you can STILL ruin somebody's day."

So make 'em GOOD letters... and envision some moonbat reading them, then groping for the antacids - or the scotch.

NotClauswitz said...

I get the same response in CA as JD gets in MA, the Feinstein-Boxer-Pelosi Central Committee happily ignores letters that conflict with its own agenda.
But I will go to the Courthouse in SF on the 15th to hear the Nordyke Oral Arguments and represent the Pro 2A side because despite spirit-crushing and insipid Democrat Machine Politics, The Court still seems to work independently.
Re: "Teh D'or-Tudor" and steely eyed minute-and-a-half-men - My castle is flimsy and I'd be taken down by jackbooted Gubbmint thugs so fast I couldn't begin to cry like a girl. Sorry.

Anonymous said...

If they ever do ban guns, they'll just send nasty demand letters to everyone suspected of owning them. The one's that don't surrender them will be put on a list.

Whenever anyone on that list happens to fall into police custody ( traffic stop anyone? ), they will be detained while a search of their residence takes place. Then they get gitmo'd

Samething is happening in CA as we speak, re "assault rifles".

No alamos ... just a quiet ride downtown when they catch you away from your stash of weapons.

Cold dead hands doesn't work. Burying them in the backyard doesn't work. Having them handy but not on your own property does work.

lrn2play Asymmetric War. If you can't figure that out, sell your guns to someone who can.

Farm.Dad said...

i am an old farmer/rancher who owns a few " off the books " Ill tell everyone this right now , the day a " ban " is put into effect for myself i wont regester anything . In fact i only own about 4 guns . I own about 10k acres , my step dad owns about 500k. Between us we own almost 7 miles of steel pipeing on wells . Yall go ahead and find it all . oO( when ya find a good return do me a favor and leave it open so i can recover that " lost " tractor and sell it on ebay lol . Welcome to farmeruse .

Anonymous said...

Someone - I believe it was Rachel Lucas - wrote about how we need to keep fighting the good fight because we cannot just roll over and give it all up. I'm not talking about the potential for a BATFEIEIO apocalypse – just more and more onerous laws. I live in CA and I write letters and send FAXes and sometimes even call. It may just be spitting in the wind, but I’m not going to let them think they have 100% support for the poison they are selling.

Tam said...

I keep spitting, too.

Anonymous said...

While the old crystal ball needs polishing, I expect the Shining One to issue an executive order revoking all firearms dealers licenses. Sometime about, oh, January 21, 2009.

And then wait a year or two, until ammo gets short, and offer scrap value for every gun turned in. And another year, and make possession a felony.

Pete Allen

Jayson said...

Tell me again why i should write to the people who've been shredding the Constitution for decades now?

I want a new civil war because i hate the leftists/communist/whatever, and i don't want to share my country with them anymore. I've had it up to *here* with being called racist and worse because I believe in smaller government lower taxes. They've pushed and i think it's time to push back. Hard.

Verification: reamf - that's exactly what i want to do to'em.

Tam said...

Pete Allen,

I'll cover that bet.Twenty bucks sound fair to you?

I'll even let you pad your prediction out 'til midnight of 1/31/09. If I can go buy a gun from an FFL on 2/1/09, you hit the tipjar for $20; if your gotterdammerung scenario has played out, I'll mail you a postal m.o. for a Jackson.

Fair?

Oleg Volk said...

Shooting JBTs is so 19th century. Even the Middle Eastern jihadis have figured out that a bomb and a remote detonator work better and expose the well-wisher to less return fire.

Anonymous said...

Sadly, what any of us would do if pushed far enough becomes academic in the face of a government capable of monitoring all telephone calls in the U.S., and most of the calls outside the U.S., for any key words they don't like.
I would imagine the job would be far easier with the printed word online. Virtually the only way a nation wide "asymmetrical expression of discontent" could be coordinated would be by word of mouth.
Got a salesman buddy flying to Minneapolis this week? Can you trust him to drop off a "burn after reading" letter to Joe Blow?
Break the contact chain in even one place and you roll up the entire network.
Should the bombs start popping, watch the availability of battery acid, asparin, and Tang disappear to tightly controlled near nothing.
We're not looking at confiscation here, at least at first, although I remember the surrender notices mailed out in New Jersey a few years ago for all registered AR's and M1A's.
I believe the reembursement for losses offered by the New Jersey government was $50 each, based on the fact that, as illegal weapons, they had no resale value.
With New Jersey as a precedent, and the California and Illinois congressional delegations essentially running the country, confiscation of semiautomatic weapons becomes virtually inevitable a bit further down the road, if we allow them to stay in power.
There is no possibility of a conservative third party being made to work before the Demoncrats and media have propagandized away any resemblance of reasonable in the posession of firearms in an urban or suburban area. The best anaology would be Great Britain.
The central point of my windy phillipic is this: The concept of the Constitution as a "living document" by the left, capable of being altered at will by judicial fiat, means that whomever controls the courts controls the country.
The second amendment victory in Heller v. D.C. was only by one vote, and strictly along partisan lines. That means we are only one heart attack, one car crash, one lunatic assasination attempt away from being England.
Our legal system differs from it's British parent in only two particulars. Wigs, and the Bill of Rights. Eliminate the Bill of Rights as an absolute, and you might as well hand out the wigs.
Britain also has, and uses frequently, something called the Official Secrets Act. It means the government can shut up anyone, any time, including the media, without explaining why, or even getting a court order. Not that it would be a difficulty.
We have an anologous situation here in the U.S. with the media being essentially controlled by people most conservatives would consider extremist.
Even Fox News had to buckle under to his holiness B.O. during his campaign, when his not so subtle expulsion of their news team from his plane left them completly
"outside the loop", unable to compete with other news sources that had access.
Without access, you're not delivering the news, you're delivering opinion, and that's controllable under the Fairness Doctrine. See where this all leads?
Following the British example, when the Irish independent movement won 75 of 103 parlimentary seats in Ireland at the end of the First World War, the British disallowed the election, established martial law, and set about rounding up all personal firearms.
When the local police proved unwilling to do the job, they moved in the Royal Army, aided by the B-Specials, the Irish National Secret Police. It should be noted that the B-Special force was used by Felix Dzerzhinsky as his model for the KGB.
The regular army, with a few exceptions like the Essex regiment, proved unwilling to commit the atrocities needed to break the rebellion.
Britain countered by recruiting, often from military prisons, a paramilitary force called the Black and Tans, from their uniform of a policeman's dark jacket and a soldiers brown pants.
In 1922, a British panel led by the Archbishop of Canterbury documented almost 300 massacres committed by various British special units, as well as thousands of individual murders, rapes, and tortures.
How is any of this relevant to our hypothetical near future? Tempramentally,the Irish are far more like conservative Americans than virtually anyone else on the planet, even more so than the Australians or New Zealanders.
Their success as tax cutting, bureaucracy eliminating lassez-faire capitalists has given them the highest per capita income in Europe, and earned the wrath of the European Union.
Also, their recent liberalizing of firearms laws makes them the easiest nation in Europe in which to obtain a carry permit for handguns.
Ireland has the same legal system as the U.S., mostly the same language, and people who would not seem out of place in Idaho, Arizona, or Kentucky. As good a control group as we're likely to find.
Travel back to the 1920's Ireland, and compare their situation to America in 2010.
Where would Obama get his thuggish equivalent of the Black and Tans?
BATFE has never been known for it's professionalism or impartiality, but a few dozen arguementative incidents nation wide would probably leave them unwilling to do the job.
Given that local law enforcment is, in small town America, essentially part of the community held in mistrust by the national government, it's use as a confiscatory force would be marginal at best.
Likewise the regular military, whose combat units are, quite consistently, 90% European-American and 7 to 9% Mexican American.
Said forces are recruited overwhelmingly in the deep south, the Rocky Mountain west, or among blue collar Irish Americans. As one liberal commentator in Harper's Magazine contemptuously put it, "Crackers, Cowboys, and Cops".
As step three or four in the process, what would be needed would be a national paramilitary force specifically targeted to the job of eliminating personal firearms.
Where could his holiness find people sufficiently alienated from conservative America to, if needed, kick in doors and terrify kiddies and Grannies?
Remember Obama's campaign promise to create a "civilian" force equal in number to the military to "rebuild our infrastructure"?
Odd he chose that specific numerical comparison as a specific amount. Freudian slip perhaps, a subconsious wanting to balance "Them" and "Us"?
Anyway, I suspect the possibility of getting legal minimum, living in a barracks, and having to march around all day in shiny black boots and a spiffing blue beret would have little appeal to most middle class Americans, even those out of work.
More than likely, the bulk of his recruits would be from the already socialized inner city, adding a nasty note of incipient race war to the unfortunate mix.
I suspect any number of these "civilians" would volunteer to trade their lace-ups for jackboots, better pay, and a little excitement.
Again, If it could happen in England, it could happen even easier here, given the greater differences of race and percieved class.
A Cuban friend of mine, quite blond and blue eyed, had the dubious distinction of spending considerable time in one of Mr. Castro's concentration camps.
He pointed out that, not only was the army overwhelmingly black, but all the private farms around the camps had been confiscated and handed over to Afro-Cuban and mulatto families. They kept their property as long as no "Hueros" escaped from the camps.
I recall a company dinner a few years ago, a moderate discussion of affirmative action,and a well educated middle class black co-worker who, after a few too many, said "After your women have been our whores for a century, maybe we can talk about fair".
Imagine what the feelings must be like in the ghetto, where all caucasians are portrayed as craven little doughboys, who would buckle and scream "yes master" at the first scary face.
It could make a hell of a novel, couldn't it? All the more reason we have to somehow purge what's left of the Republican party of RINOs and get every uncommited kiester out there organized, registered, and voting 22 months from now.
Frankly, I know a fair number of people who would, as individuals, sacrifice themselves if push came to shove, but I don't think there are enough of them to make up a serious resistance.
Certainly not outside rural areas, and this thing is going to be decided in the 'burbs. So organize and vote damn it, and stay angry, stay focused.
I am a fairly regular contributor to Tammy's comments, but, for plausable denial should the day come, I'll do the Zorro thing for I.D. on this post.