Current-serving Army LTC and Small Wars Journal contributor, having taken an oath to defend the Constitution, solicits a very large and bloody civil war upon the nation he swore to protect.

The following essay is sponsored by 

The One Hundred Heads Life and Casualty Company. ;-)

LTC Robert Bateman, sticking his tongue out at the Constitution and the American people. (MBV Note: The original image provided with the post was of another LTC Robert Batemen, not the author of the Esquire column discussed below. My apologies.)

Reacting to this story, "Hoover police charge woman, 28, with murder in shooting at Iron Bowl party," a current-serving United States Army Lieutenant Colonel has come unglued in the blog pages of Esquire on the subject of firearms confiscation: "It's Time to Talk About Guns and the Supreme Court."

Here is LTC Bateman's proposed program for you and me:

1. The only guns permitted will be the following:

a. Smoothbore or Rifled muzzle-loading blackpowder muskets. No 7-11 in history has ever been held up with one of these.

b. Double-barrel breech-loading shotguns. Hunting with these is valid.

c. Bolt-action rifles with a magazine capacity no greater than five rounds. Like I said, hunting is valid. But if you cannot bring down a defenseless deer in under five rounds, then you have no fking reason to be holding a killing tool in the first place.

2. We will pry your gun from your cold, dead, fingers. That is because I am willing to wait until you die, hopefully of natural causes. Guns, except for the three approved categories, cannot be inherited. When you die your weapons must be turned into the local police department, which will then destroy them. (Weapons of historical significance will be de-milled, but may be preserved.)

3. Police departments are no longer allowed to sell or auction weapons used in crimes after the cases have been closed. (That will piss off some cops, since they really need this money. But you know what they need more? Less violence and death. By continuing the process of weapon recirculation, they are only making their jobs -- or the jobs of some other cops -- harder.)

4. We will submit a new tax on ammunition. In the first two years it will be 400 percent of the current retail cost of that type of ammunition. (Exemptions for the ammo used by the approved weapons.) Thereafter it will increase by 20 percent per year.

5. We will initiate a nationwide "buy-back" program, effective immediately, with the payouts coming from the DoD budget. This buy-back program will start purchasing weapons at 200 percent of their face value the first year, 150 percent the second year, 100 percent the third year. Thereafter there will be a 10 year pause, at which point the guns can be sold to the government at 10 percent of their value for the next 50 years.

6. The major gun manufactures of the United States, less those who create weapons for the federal government and the armed forces, will be bought out by the United States of America, for our own damned good.

Now LTC Bateman is a current-serving officer and has taught at Georgetown University, George Mason University, and the United States Military Academy at West Point. Here is his Small Wars Journal bio.

Bateman wrote in SWJ in 2010:

I have departed the Office of Net Assessment, OSD, and for the next four years, at least, I will serve the United States by serving with or among other nation's military forces. This means that, among other things, I can write again. I arrived at the NATO Defense College recently. Not exactly a hardship tour, to be sure. I am in Rome, Italy, for six months. At the end of this gig, so I hear, the odds are not bad that I will go downrange for a while, working as a Strategist for somebody. We will see. Following that...the European Rapid Reaction Corps, Lille, France, where I will be one of about six Americans.

Old Winnie once noted, "It is better to jaw jaw than to war war."

Now, leaving aside the absolute fact that Bateman's own "jaw-jaw" will certainly lead to civil "war-war,"  for a military-educated "strategist" Bateman seems woefully ignorant of at least three topics:

1. The Constitution of the United States, especially the history of the Second Amendment.

2. The Law of Unintended Consequences.

3. Fourth Generation Warfare as it may be applied in an American context in the event of just such a tyranny as the LTC proposes.

Bateman also wrote this in SWJ:

Now I am not a big one for the whole "emotional" thingeemabob. In most debates I want footnotes, documentation, and fracking proof for everything. People who know my history know this about me. But there are limits, and Jim's simple statement hit the mark. Sometimes, some very rare times, you don't need proof. You don't need evidence. You need only know how to feel, and be human.

Presumably Bateman is extrapolating not only from his own ignorance but from an evidence-free "feeling" in his reaction to the story he claims to have motivated this citizen-disarmament jeremiad. Somehow, though, I doubt the sincerity of his narrative on this point. I rather suspect that this tax-feeding oath breaker has long been an advocate of a government monopoly of violence and is merely using the Iron Bowl insanity as a convenient excuse springboard to curry favor with a regime that he knows covets citizen disarmament above all things. Perhaps, his Army career having reached a frustrating end-game, he is angling for the new post of Deputy Secretary of Defense in Charge of Citizen Disarmament.

Surely someone so allegedly intelligent would not unintentionally objectify the cause of the tragic murder of one woman by another over the results of a football game making it the fault of the firearm rather than the murderess? Surely it is no accident that he would then conflate that objectification into a call for wholesale citizen disarmament?

No, I rather think that this solicitation of bloody civil war is something Bateman has been pondering for some time and he has decided that the prevailing political winds won't threaten his career or his pension if he licks the arses of the political Mandarins of the same regime that gave us the Fast and Furious scandal.

I would ask Bateman, were he in front of me at the moment, how many millions of his fellow citizens (who he is nominally supposed to protect) is he willing to see dead in order to accomplish his bloody tyranny?

One million? Three? Ten?

At what point in this proposed stack of bodies would Bateman's thirst for the murder-by-government of his fellow citizens be overcome by the reality of his "You don't need evidence - You need only know how to feel, and be human" alleged benevolence?

Batemen is evidently unworried that he will one day be called to account by this egregious violation of the Law of Unintended Consequences -- should he get his way -- for the intellectual support he gives to his proposed American tyranny, this sought-after massacre of you and me, of our families, of all our friends.

I would suggest to the Lieutenant Colonel that he re-evaluate his bloody proposal in the light of  Bill Clinton's rules of engagement for the Serbian political and media elite in 1999 as well as the Chinese caution, "Be careful what you wish for, you may get it."