How the Enemy Thinks (and How They Take Heart From both Heller and the Pragmatists)

"Grow the f#ck up, boy. I have a joke for ya though...how do ya pick up chicks at Mount Carmel? That's right buddy, with a dust buster....bahahaha!" -- Willy at Buzz-Flash


"Don't dance on our grave until you dig it." -- Mike Vanderboegh

Well, folks, I slapped some more gun grabbers who are making their naked desire desire for your liberty and property perfectly clear -- over at Buzz-Flash they're fairly slobbering. The exchange is so interesting that I'm going to waste space and reprint the whole thing lest they take it down or edit it.

Note how they interpret the much-vaunted Heller decision, and especially in the counterpunch to my response how "Willy" uses one of Jeff Knox's replies to me (without following that thread to its end -- Jeff and I have agreed to quit calling each other names and we are currently together fighting the Holder nomination) to indicate how we may be ignored and, of course, subsequently attacked. (Funny thing, Willy mistakenly attributes Jeff's words to his father Neal, thus indicating that he is at least old enough to know the difference. Is Willy a "progressive-pragmatist"? I'll leave you to judge.)

But as you will read, the interview is uninhibited grave dancing on the 2nd Amendment -- only thing is, we ain't dead yet. ;-) As I explain to Willy in the coda below.

Mike
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Scott Vogel and Freedom States Alliance See Americans' Attitudes About Guns Changing

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 12/23/2008 - 1:56pm. Interviews

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

On every single level, from the election of Barack Obama and Joe Biden to House Congressional races and local ballot initiatives, the gun lobby's fear mongering lost.
-- Scott Vogel, Communications Director, Freedom States Alliance

* * *

Is America's love affair with guns finally ready for a divorce? Is the NRA more bark than bite? Can anyone really make a sane argument for civilians having .50 caliber sniper rifles?

With a new administration not beholden to the zealots of the gun lobby, maybe some headway can finally be made in getting our national gun fixation under control.
BuzzFlash interviewed Scott Vogel, Communications Director of Freedom States Alliance (FSA). FSA is actively changing the way America thinks about guns in order to build and strengthen the grassroots movement to reduce gun violence. FSA believes that all Americans deserve to live in a country free from the fear, threat, and devastation caused by gun violence -- each one of us deserves to be safe in our homes, schools, and communities. The focus of FSA is to reduce gun-related deaths and injuries through public awareness campaigns and by providing technical assistance and support to grassroots organizations.

Freedom States Alliance works directly with a network of seven state-based gun violence prevention organizations. (In full disclosure, Mark Karlin, the Editor and Publisher of BuzzFlash.com, helped found FSA.)

* * *
BuzzFlash: Did the National Rifle Association, or NRA, suffer a decisive defeat at the polls this year in the presidential race?

Scott Vogel: First, the Freedom States Alliance, which oversees our daily news blog, GunGuys.com, does not endorse political candidates. But having said that, yes, the gun lobby suffered a major defeat in this year's election cycle. It is one of the most important, yet "under reported" stories of this year's campaign.

On every single level, from the election of Barack Obama and Joe Biden to House Congressional races and local ballot initiatives, the gun lobby's fear mongering lost, and sensible candidates who support gun violence prevention won. In states where the gun lobby boasts of its power in key battleground states, and where the NRA claims to have large numbers of hunters and NRA members, such as Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Barack Obama won handily.
The Obama-Biden victory demonstrated definitively that our country is making a dramatic shift from the extremist agenda of the gun lobby to endorsing new leadership to address important issues, such as gun violence prevention.

Now, in this political environment, it is clear that President-elect Obama must act with crushing urgency to fix the broken economy, deal with two wars in the Middle East, and tackle the climate crisis. As gun violence prevention advocates, we also believe that we have a sensible, non-ideological administration now that is open to solving important problems, such as gun violence, in very pragmatic terms.
BuzzFlash: How did the NRA fare in U.S. House and Senate races?

Scott Vogel: There is no other way to say it, the gun lobby stepped into the "election ring" and got knocked out.

The Brady Campaign released a report in the aftermath of the elections and found that Brady-endorsed candidates won over 90% of their races. In U.S. Senate races between a Brady-backed candidate and an NRA -endorsed or "A" rated candidate, voters chose the Brady candidate 100% of the time, and in House races, 84% of the time.

Let's not forget that it was the NRA who said this was one of the most important elections in the organization's history, spending over $40 million dollars to defeat Barack Obama and other candidates who support common sense gun laws. After the gun lobby's dramatic defeats in 2006 and 2008, I think the American people should be asking if the gun lobby's extremist agenda is relevant anymore.

BuzzFlash: Putting this in context, is the reputation of the NRA as being invincible more perception than reality?

Scott Vogel: The NRA's political power is certainly based on "perception," but clearly that perspective is changing. Political observers and candidates are realizing that it doesn't help their careers and their standing to suck up to the gun lobby, and, in fact, it might spell the end of their political ambitions.

Also, keep in mind that over the last 25 years, fewer and fewer American households own guns, so the gun lobby's "base" has been dramatically shrinking. According to the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), only 34% of U.S. households have guns, and individual gun ownership has dropped to only 22%. By every measure, this trending will continue downward.

I also think that the paranoia of "gun confiscation" preached by the gun lobby to block any and all efforts to enact common sense gun laws just doesn't resonate with voters anymore. I think the American people have, at least significantly, stopped listening to the NRA's scare tactics.

Take the issue of background checks on all gun sales, for example. Making it harder for drug dealers, domestic abusers, felons, and gang members to obtain deadly weapons by mandating a background check on every gun sale is simply a mainstream and sensible position. The great majority of the American people, across the entire political spectrum, support background checks. But the gun lobby vehemently opposes them and claims it will lead to "confiscating" all guns. I think many Americans have stopped listening to the delusional voices within the gun lobby.

The only leg that the gun lobby stands on is this "threat" that they can sway an election - which, as we have discussed, they clearly can't. I think the NRA's desperation will only get worse.

BuzzFlash: Why in the world does the NRA Institute for Legislative Action support the sale of weapons such as the .50 caliber sniper rifle that can be used to assassinate people from a mile away?

Scott Vogel: The gun lobby's position on pretty much every proposal to protect our national security and our communities from the threat of gun violence, including .50 caliber sniper rifles, can be summed up in one word: "No." The NRA simply has a knee-jerk reaction to every life-saving policy, if it involves regulating the gun industry in any way. The gun lobby has blinders on to the real world, and they fight every policy on an extreme and ideological basis. Their opposition makes no sense.

Even though the NRA knows that the national security of the United States is vulnerable to attack from powerful .50 caliber sniper rifles, especially our civilian aircraft during takeoff and landing, the gun lobby opposes our efforts to keep .50 caliber sniper rifles out of the hands of terrorists. The reason is that supporting a ban on .50 caliber sniper rifles would make the gun lobby look "weak" to their base of extremists who fight under the banner of "no surrender," not to mention the immense profit motive by the gun industry to sell .50 caliber rifles. The five men just convicted on conspiracy charges for a terrorist plot against Ft. Dix had practiced with and tried to buy assault weapons.

But the NRA knows that if there was ever, god forbid, an attack with a .50 caliber sniper rifle - which is why we are urgently calling for an immediate federal ban on these weapons of terror - the gun lobby would have to face the intense scrutiny of the American public about why they enabled a terrorist attack to occur.
BuzzFlash: Likewise, why is the NRA pushing for the right of individuals to shoot anyone they even perceive as a threat to them, or "claim" is a threat to them?

Scott Vogel: To some extent, the gun lobby has started running out of ideas to push on behalf of their base. Their agenda to allow armed civilians a "license to murder," as we call it, to shoot and kill anyone whom a gun owner "feels" is a threat, even if his or her safety is not in jeopardy, is one of the most extreme positions that the NRA pushes.

The gun lobby is now venturing into areas that go beyond guns. They are supporting, in effect, vigilante justice. For example, there was an incident in Texas, where Joe Horn called a 9-1-1 operator to report that his neighbor's house was being burglarized. Although the 9-1-1 operator told Horn to stay in his home, he took his shotgun, left his house and shot to death two men, both Hispanic immigrants, then claiming self-defense. This is just one chilling example. It is very troubling, especially to law enforcement officials and prosecutors who strongly oppose these "castle doctrine" type laws. The truth is that we already have legal protections for people defending themselves.

But that's not all that the gun lobby is pushing for in terms of extending their radical agenda. The gun lobby is fervently pressing to allow college students - we're talking about 18, 19, 20-year-old males mind you - to carry hidden and loaded guns on campus and in dorm rooms, despite their pervasive access to drugs and alcohol. They claim that their argument is to stop another Virginia Tech type massacre, but the reality is that they just want to eviscerate any and all restrictions on carrying deadly guns, whether it be on college campuses, or at child day care centers, nursing homes, hospitals, and even government buildings and courtrooms. It's an extreme position to say the least.

BuzzFlash: How do you think the Supreme Court ruling this year that held, for the first time in its history, that the Second Amendment protects the "right to keep and bear arms" will affect gun control in the future?

Scott Vogel: It's difficult to say how the Supreme Court's ruling in Heller, which stripped the District of Columbia of its decades old handgun ban, will impact legislation to stop gun violence in the long term. My organization, the Freedom States Alliance, believes it was simply a craven, political decision by the conservative majority that ignored longstanding precedent and the robust history of gun regulations in the United States.

It was an unprecedented reversal by the Court to suddenly strike down a gun violence prevention measure based on the claim that DC's gun laws violated the Second Amendment. The Court simply had no basis to hear the case, and certainly an even weaker argument in its ruling. In fact, even conservative legal scholars have lambasted the Supreme Court's ruling, notably criticizing Justice Scalia for his incoherent opinion. They have said that the Court had no business telling an American city that they can't deal with gun violence on the local level.

On the one hand, cities such as Chicago, where we live, are fighting to keep our handgun ban. But after the Court's Heller ruling, it's very uncertain. A federal judge in Chicago just upheld the city's ban, but it is now being appealed. Other Illinois communities are ending their handgun bans and replacing them with stringent gun regulations for fear of the enormous legal costs, for local governments trying to fight the gun lobby and potentially losing. They just can't afford the potential cost with this weakened economy.

One "possibility" is that the Court's ruling in Heller will take the sting out of the gun lobby's radical agenda by acknowledging that there is a "Second Amendment" right to own guns - which we fervently disagree with - but that right, in no way, prohibits common sense gun regulations.

To cite Justice Scalia himself from his majority opinion:

"Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited...[It is not a] right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. ...[The Court's] opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms," (p. 54-55).

In short, based on the Court's own decision, there is nothing in its ruling to prohibit robust regulations of firearms or the gun industry.

BuzzFlash: As a follow-up, what constitutes an "arm"? Is a bazooka an "arm"? A .50 caliber sniper rifle? How can the Supreme Court decide what constitutes an "arm" when the only guns around when the Constitution was written were flintlocks and muskets?

Scott Vogel: It's a very good question. At what point, as the industry continues to innovate with deadlier and more powerful weapons, is a "gun" no longer just a gun? That's why we need to better identify and classify firearms and make clear distinctions between bolt action hunting rifles, and cop-killing assault weapons, because there are important differences. The gun lobby has succeeded in blurring and weakening the definitions and functions of firearms to block legislation, often claiming that any gun regulation will affect "hunting rifles," which is patently not true.

Your point is well taken. Even if you believe in an interpretation that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to gun ownership, the Amendment was written when muskets were not the deadly products that are mass produced today. Now a mentally unstable student can easily obtain two powerful handguns with multiple high-capacity magazines and commit mass murder, such as the 32 students and professors killed at Virginia Tech. As you said, a terrorist armed with a .50 caliber sniper rifle could target a chemical or industrial refinery in a horrific attack. Is this weapon a gun? I don't think so.

BuzzFlash: Recently the Interior Department implemented a regulation allowing individuals to carry hidden handguns into National Parks. Just why exactly would anyone need to bring a concealed handgun into a National Park?

Scott Vogel: Gun owners don't need to carry hidden and loaded guns in our national parks, or anywhere else, for that matter. The majority of Americans are in agreement, we simply don't want guns to be carried in our national pristine wilderness areas and national treasures. It's an offensive policy, frankly.

This is, yet again, another farewell gift by George W. Bush to his buddies in the gun lobby. There is simply no reason for this rule change. We are urging President-elect Obama, immediately upon taking office, to reverse the Interior Department's rule change.

During the Interior Department's public comment period on the proposed rule change, the Department received 140,000 comments, the vast majority opposing the gun lobby's radical agenda. But the Bush administration still went with the dangerous rule change anyway.

Most upsetting is that the Bush administration completely and utterly dismissed the advice of the career professionals who protect our national parks, including our park rangers, law enforcement officials, and conservationists. In a letter sent to Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne on April 3, 2008, seven former directors of the National Park Service said that there was no need to change the existing regulation.

BuzzFlash: Do you think that handgun control proponents have given up the fight, given the string of concessions that the Bush Administration made to the NRA over the past 8 years, many of which were supported by Democrats?

Scott Vogel: I think that gun violence prevention advocates have felt the sting of the last eight years, living in the wilderness, as it were, under the Bush administration's extremist and pro-gun ideology. Remember, the NRA bragged in 2000 that if George W. Bush won election, they would be working out of his office, and they were right.

The gun lobby and gun industry got pretty much everything they wanted out of the Bush administration. It was their version of a shopping spree. The gun lobby succeeded in giving unprecedented legal immunity to the gun industry against civil lawsuits. They blocked efforts to renew and strengthen the federal assault weapons ban in 2004. They succeeded in preventing the release of gun crime trace data to local law enforcement officials to curb gun trafficking, called the Tiahrt Amendment.

As we just discussed, they allowed guns to be carried in our national parks. And although Bush's own Solicitor General asked that the Supreme Court send back the Heller case to the District of Columbia's Court of Appeals for a less stringent standard of review, Vice-President Cheney went against his own President and joined a legal brief from members of Congress who support the NRA.

And then, of course, there is the list of things they "didn't do," pressing for life-saving policies such as extending Brady background checks on all gun sales, or closing the gun show loophole, or even fully funding ATF to effectively close down rogue gun dealers. The Bush administration permitted the ever increasing lethality of firearms, standing idly by while .50 caliber sniper rifles became more prevalent and allowing an explosion of new and powerful assault weapons to be mass produced and mass marketed.

Although it seems like ancient history now, one of the biggest issues in the democratic primary in 2000 between Sen. Bill Bradley and Vice-President Al Gore was their differences on gun violence prevention. Bradley supported both licensing gun owners and registering guns, whereas Gore preferred licensing, and later advocated for background checks against Gov. Bush during the 2000 election.

In fact, when Jim Lehrer of the NewsHour asked what was the difference between Gore and Bush on the gun issue, Gore said of the Texas Governor: "He's with the NRA -- and I'm not."

President Clinton used gun control as a scapegoat for losing Congress in the 1994 midterm elections. And several of Gore's campaign advisers said that the "gun issue" cost him West Virginia and Arkansas - despite the fact that Gore won the popular vote and received a half million more votes over Bush. With all that in mind, the funding from several foundations, large donors and even advocates for gun violence prevention dried up or went away.

The prevailing wisdom in politics was that the "gun issue" was a losing position. For a time, many advocates simply felt that under President Bush's radical administration, gun control was a lost cause, and so we saw a kind of "depression" set in. It has been difficult.

But the truth is that there are advocates and organizations across the country that have not given up, and that continue to fight for their principles to enact solutions to save lives from gun violence.

Now, with a new administration, and a dramatically different point of view and expectation that government has a significant role to play in bettering our lives and society, we believe that there are opportunities, even small incremental steps, to start making a difference on the gun violence epidemic.

BuzzFlash: Do you believe that there might come a time when NRA members might become rational about the dangers of certain types of weaponry? After all, the NRA successfully supported the "right" of people on the FBI terrorists watch list to buy a gun. That threatens our national security. Why do members of the NRA support compromising our safety as a nation?

Scott Vogel: I think there will always be a radical fringe of the pro-gun movement that will always see attempts to reduce gun violence as an infringement on their survival, power, and identity. The gun issue is symbolic, and deeply embedded in the psyche of a lot of extreme gun owners. Those individuals are not like to change their beliefs and support efforts to curb gun violence.

Those gun owners see the world through a prism of fear, and imagine that enemies such as gun violence prevention advocates, are trying to take away their ability to defend themselves and their families.

But you're right, it is deeply ironic that the same radical gun owners who live in perpetual fear of stronger gun laws being enacted actually risk their own lives and their families by owning guns, especially if their weapons are not stored securely.
But those fringe groups or individuals bear no real impact on our politics. The truth is that over time, as gun ownership continues to decrease, and as older generations pass on, the youth of today simply do not share the extremist viewpoints by the gun proponents of the past. Young people today, on the whole, don't see guns, just like the issue of equality for gay and lesbian Americans, as a divisive cultural issue. They are far more pragmatic and less ideological and extreme than the older generation.

I think the younger generation demonstrated that, in carrying Barack Obama to the White House, there is a space for a new and hopeful era in politics where government becomes a "solutions business." I also think that, just like the issue of global warming, we will continue to see a shift where gun violence becomes less of a divisive political issue, and more of a mainstream and bipartisan challenge for our generation to solve.

BuzzFlash interview by Mark Karlin.
* * *



My reply:

Extrapolating from your own cowardice

Submitted by Dutchman6 on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 12:55am.

As a "bitter clinger" I will concede to Mr. Vogel the point that the GOP and the NRA have been poltically neutered and swept from the field and firearm owners like me no longer can count on any buffer between us and further gun control. You would be surprised how little that worries us. You have us surrounded, you poor bastards.

Your mistake is in thinking that the NRA and the GOP protected US, whereas they were actually protecting YOU. As long as there was a reasonable expectation of deflecting the further seizure of our liberty and our property by political means, we were content to let the NRA and GOP play the game. Now, nothing separates you from both us and the unintended consequences of your actions.

You can already see this played out in every gun shop in the country, as they are swamped with customers, many of them first time buyers. The question you must ask yourselves is: Are these people arming, spending good money during hard times, merely to turn them over when told to by the Obama regime? Don't extrapolate our behavior from your own cowardice. Just because YOU wouldn't think of disobeying a government order at the risk of your life, doesn't mean we wouldn't. And do I need to remind you that we're the ones with the firearms?

Surely you understand we outnumber the federal police by many orders of magnitude. For 75 years we have been pushed back from our traditional liberties when it comes to firearms and each time we backed up, grumbling but complying. But now many of us are done backing up and we will refuse to obey any new limitations on our liberty or property.

For what have we to show for our seven plus decades of increasingly tighter gun laws? Have they limited criminal behavior? No, gun laws by definition are only aimed at the law abiding. Criminals will do what they will. It has recently become popular for criminals to steal AR-15 patrol rifles from police cars. In what way would banning civilians from owning AR-15s prevent that? And if the street gangs are armed with such weapons, why should honest folks be debarred from the same weapons to defend themselves against the gangs?

Understand this, you can pass any "law" you like but we will not obey them. Then you must reconcile yourselves to come to our homes and seize them from us. And sometime after the first few of us die in your confiscatory raids, you will discover another truth taught by history. Read the story of the Deacons for Defense and Justice during the 60s. They would be the first to spit on your proposals. For those black veterans who took up arms against the Klan understood that just because a government was "elected" didn't mean it was fair, or legitimate.

And when that happens, even when democracy turns to tyranny, we of the despised minority still get to vote. We just won't use voting booths to do it. Sparking a civil war is a funny way to "reduce gun deaths."

Mike Vanderboegh, Three Percenter

PS: I was once asked, "What do you think about gun control? Give me the short answer." To which I replied, "If you try to take our firearms we will kill you."

Then we have Willy (an appropriate moniker if there ever was one). I present Willy's posts as they appear (the "progressive's apparently aren't big on paragraphs on their blogs).

extrapolating...something
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Submitted by willy on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 4:04am.
Wow... you must not be a big fan of Neal Knox...who has been making a lot of sense. try reading his articles in the shotgun news these last couple issues. The reason all you delusional paranoid gun f*gs are buying all the guns (and raising the prices for normal folks such as myself) is because you're easily manipulated. its great fun to watch the rumor mill on gunboards.com-all I have to say is that the UN is destroying the world's surplus ammo stores and you send AIM and Century and the rest of 'em the money you should be saving for your kid's college fund-tell you obama isa commie and you eat it right up...end of the world dude!. Pathetic really. Try to remember Colt and Ruger where big supporters of the assualt rifle ban...which failed to ban their products for some reason. But never mind that now, instead, tell me who you think you are going to shoot if the "Gobnit" comes for yer guns? the vegetarian couple down the street or Operators from blackwater security? Who exactly? Lets be clear here, on the off chance this mildly right of center administration actually has time to worry about you and your little guns, they will come for them in Strykers and APCs and they will kill you and half the people on your block, just like we do in Iraq. Your small arms would be about as effective as a AK in every house in iraq is at the moment.Grow the f#ck up, boy. I have a joke for ya though...how do ya pick up chicks at Mount Carmel? That's right buddy, with a dust buster....bahahaha! Sooo...Big talk from a guy in camo underwear, but sadly, you're more likely to use your guns to shoot your fellow citizens than anyone who actually has any power over you-maybe your gun angst will alow you to shoot all the black guys in your neigborhood? Somehow I doubt you're smart enough to do anything effective. The folks setting your pathetic little gun agenda have great experience at playing you against me. and you fell for it. You might want to consider this: Everyone I know is buying guns to protect ourselves from dipsticks like you, rather than from a gun thieving government. while I suspect you're probably a fat pussy, and hardly man enough to shoot anyone, I could be wrong so, in the Spirit of hope...I suggest you might want to turn your rage in the direction of your actual tormentors...and try to remember, that in this country, your power doesn't really come from the barrel of a gun. in fact, the second you start shooting, you will be lost. "They" live for that shit.

more bad spelling lol
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Submitted by willy on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 4:27am.
ps, after saying all of that, I do have to admit the article is mildly annoying. The little blue hyper links on "cop killing assualt weapons" are a bit moronic. One wonders if this is a good time to antagonise the little gunnies right now...I do have a saying myself though: "it's not guns that kill people, it's morons with guns". Sadly, it just so happens we have a lot of them there morons here in 'murika-the one above would be a perfect example of someone who maybe should have to take some sort of written exam before plunking donne 300 bucks for a WASR at his local Dunhams. One also wonders how it would be if the gunf@gs went to as much trouble supporting a actual democracy with decent paying jobs like they have in say...Switzerland...as they do in hoarding weapons and taking carbine classes here in preparation for the "SHTF" as they love to say...whether it would be just as safe in american as in switzerland where, as the gunf*gs like to point out, there is a machine gun in every home

reprinted with permission
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Submitted by willy on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 4:44am.
The Knox Report From the Firearms Coalition Mutual Assured Destruction The power is in the threat, not the execution By Jeff Knox (October 29, 2008) There are some who are fond of repeating Jefferson’s comment about the tree of liberty needing to be “refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” though they often skip the part about patriots and choose to only include the tyrants. The problem is that in actual practice you couldn’t leave out, “the blood of patriots,” because when the blood of tyrants is spilt, the blood of patriots must also be spilt. There is simply no way around it. The same guys are often fond of bumper sticker slogans like, “…from my cold dead fingers,” and the more erudite, “MOLON LAVE,” and while I can appreciate the sentiment, I also know that in 99.995% of cases it’s simply not true. The fact is that only those who have nothing to lose (and nothing to live for) are willing to give up everything – including their lives – in a symbolic gesture of defiance. The rest of us, those with families – kids, grand-kids, vulnerable parents – and homes, jobs, and lives, are not interested in ditching the house, refrigerator, and HD-TV in exchange for a prison cell or a mountain cave. Sure, if the Russian paratroopers start landing in “Red Dawn” fashion, many of us will grab our guns and go join the “Wolverines,” but that’s only when everything is gone anyway. Don’t expect average Americans to rise up in revolution because the government is playing fast and loose with the Bill of Rights or because taxes get too high. That’s not the way modern Americans think, nor is it the way the world works today. Armed revolt in America would not lead to a renaissance of Jeffersonian liberalism; it would lead to the destruction of our nation and the guarantee that whatever replaced it would be worse than what it replaced. Like nuclear deterrence, it is the threat that saves the world, not the execution. If all of the 60 to 80 million gunowners in this nation were to rise up as one to ward off invasion or reject tyranny, they would be an unstoppable force. Nay-sayers like to dismiss this idea because of the technological advantages enjoyed by the modern military, but there are 90 guns for every 100 people in the US and many, if not most, of the 2 million members of the military and the 1 million sworn law enforcement officers are strong supporters of the Second Amendment and the principles of liberty. There is simply no doubt that the citizens’ militia does have the capacity and potential to defeat just about any military force in the world. Only serious application of nuclear and/or biological weapons – wiping out a substantial portion of the population – would be able to turn the tide. While this is all accurate and works well on paper, just like Marxism and Amway networks, the whole thing falls apart in practice because people never do what you want them to do or what they ought to do – even when doing so is clearly in their own best interests. During the Revolutionary war, a full 40 to 45% of Americans actively supported the revolt. Today, less than 6% of gunowners are even minimally active in political activism. Gunowners turn out for elections at about the same rate as the non-gun owning public. If gunowners and supporters of liberty can’t even agree on a presidential candidate, what makes any of them think that they will be able to agree on a revolution? The threat of armed revolt must be maintained, but like the mutual assured destruction of nuclear war, its implementation must be avoided at all costs. If we have the numbers and the commitment to win a revolution then we should easily be able to win an election. The solution lies in the ballot box rather than the ammo box because the reality of a new revolution is that it is an all or worse than nothing proposition. When people who should know better talk about revolution being the answer, impressionable idiots and misfits like Timothy McVeigh or the morons caught plotting to assassinate Barack Obama, believe that they are leading the revolution when in reality they are just giving the government an excuse to tighten the screws and pushing the public to accept the screw-tightening as necessary. The whole idea behind mutual assured destruction is that it forces the parties to find better ways to settle their differences. Our founders put the mechanisms in place and it’s up to us to use those mechanisms to restore liberty and save the republic. Permission to reprint or post this article in its entirety for non-commercial purposes is hereby granted provided this credit is included. Text is available at www.FirearmsCoalition.org. To receive The Firearms Coalition’s bi-monthly newsletter, The Hard Corps Report, write to PO Box 3313, Manassas, VA 20108
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Submitted by willy on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 4:45am.
Written by Jeff Knox, on 10-30-2008 14:19 As expected, and intended, my latest Knox Report column has upset some in the, "All is lost; let's start a shooting war" camp. It is mind boggling to me that intelligent people could be so short sighted and misguided as to think that killing people and blowing things up is somehow going to make things better for our grandchildren. They seem to think that because only about 5% of the populace supported the idea of seceding from the English Empire back in 1776, that their "magic number" is 3% and they think they have that because some survey suggested that 3% of the population thinks violence against the government is justified or could be justified today. What they fail to take into account is the "bluster factor" of people who will agree with such a statement, but who don't really mean it, and the radical other side - the people who support the terrorist tactics of the Animal Liberation Front and radical Leftists like Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. What I want to know is, where are the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Adamses and Hancocks? Who do these Bozos think is going to lead the new America out of the ashes and back to its Constitutional glory, and why arent these giants running for public office and leading the political revolution? What do they think China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea are going to be doing while their merry little band of terrorists is busy crippling our nation and trying to foment rebellion? What exactly do they expect the "end" of their rebellion to look like? How are our children and grandchildren going to be better off? Revolution is like cannibalism; it can be justified, but only when there is absolutely no other choice for survival. Anyone who talks revolution but isn't actively and diligently working hard every day to elect quality people to office at every level and to educate the elected officials already in office about their core responsibilities, is just a bag of hot air who would rather talk about sacrificing everything - and possibly act on that talk - than do the hard work and make the sacrifices necessary to solve the problems within the system our founders created. When our forefathers revolted against English rule, they were in an untenable situation. They had no vote in the legislative body. They had no say in their government. They had no voice in regulatory matters. They were mere subjects and had no means of redressing wrongs. That is not our situation today. We have a voice. We have a vote. We have the means to talk directly to our elected officials and our fellow citizens, and we have the means to fire politicians who don't listen to our council and to replace them with politicians who understand their jobs. It is not easy and it is often frustrating, but it is not impossible and our situation is not hopeless. Things might be headed further in the wrong direction with the coming elections, but such swings are part of a pendulum and that pendulum will swing back in our direction again - unless some self-proclaimed freedom fighters screw it all up and convince the majority that liberty is too dangerous and freedom too costly. That's exactly what happened in 1995 when Timothy McVeigh decided that he was going to get the revolution rolling by blowing up a federal building in Oklahoma City. The pendulum was already swinging back to the right. The public was fed up with the federal government's anti-liberty actions and had sent a large crop of, mostly very conservative, mostly firs-time politicians to Washington to start straightening out the mess. The "far right" was building and growing and, while there was a loud "lunatic fringe" element to the militia movement, the overall motion was in the right direction - until McVeigh took his action. The destruction of the Murrah Federal Building caused a backlash that continues today. Where once "unorganized militias" and groups calling themselves "patriots" with a focus on the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, suddenly there were empty shells and the name "patriot" became tainted and remains suspect to this day. Timothy McVeigh - and the gun show philosophers who fueled his misguided sense of patriotism - did more to hurt the cause of liberty than Janet Reno and Bill Clinton could have ever dreamed. One misguided moron with a rifle can do more harm to the fight to restore our gun rights than a thousand Barack Obamas or Hillary Clintons. So I say to Mike Vanderboegh and those who believe as he apparently does: If you want to start a violent revolution, go do it in Iran, or Cuba, or Mexico, but don't bring you destructive, self-defeating, chest beating into my fight for the Constitution and liberty. If the time comes when we must resort to violence to restore our republic, I will be in the vanguard, but until that time comes, I will dedicate my life - as my father dedicated his life - to using the Constitution, and the rights and limits it illuminates, as the most powerful weapon for preserving it and the republic. ----------------


To which I responded:

Don't dance on our grave until you dig it.

new

Submitted by Dutchman6 on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 8:24am.

Hey, Willy, it's Jeff Knox not his late father Neal and I wouldn't place too much faith on an old post of his. You can call us all the names in the world and make tasteless jokes about dead Davidian innocents, it still changes nothing. Pass what laws you may wish. Pass them, and watch what happens. We're done backing up. You may kill us for our temerity, but you will find the killing a far longer, larger and more mutually ghastly outcome than the Clintonistas gave the Davidians. We understand Waco rules now. May God have mercy on the souls of those who try to reapply them to us. On them, and those who send them.

Mike Vanderboegh, Three Percenter