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VMI77 wrote:TAM, I would add to your write up that even just rogue elements in the military supporting the Constitution could do enough damage to derail a government attack on the people.

Agreed.

cb1000rider wrote:

The Annoyed Man wrote: CB, you posed a question previously about whether or not we can convert liberals to the cause, and I gave an answer as to why we can't. THIS answer is why I am not worried about their whining or hurting their feelings. Those liberals who cannot be converted and who continue to chip away at my civil rights ARE traitors. I don't care if I offend them with my logic. The truth SHOULD hurt, if one spends one's efforts in trying to subvert it.

I don't really get the liberal remark. I'm finding that there are many meanings of "liberal" on this forum, so it's tough to recall your particular meaning. I could conclude that anyone left of center is liberal and that you're indicating that they aren't worth converting because they're all traitors. And they're traitors because they can't be converted, so we're not going to try. I think that perhaps a little moderation is in order there, because ending discussion and saying that you're with me now or you're against me forever probably isn't the best long term strategy for bringing people around to your line of thinking. You're certainly right in some cases - some people will never get it. Discussion, statistics, rational thinking - they're impervious to all of it. Course, that's the case on both sides of the political isle. War on Drugs - case and point.

Truth is fact and should be heard - on that, you and I agree.. Opinions perhaps should be carefully crafted to the audience if our goal is to promote our agenda or have a rational discussion with an audience, that's all I'm saying... It's a bit like comparing in-your-fact tactics versus a little political strategy, even though two groups may be after the same goal.

CB, in my post previous to the last one, I made clear what I meant by "liberal", and I defined it very differently from "classical liberalism". I also clearly stated that when I used the word "liberal", I was referring explicitly to the other definition. But for you, I'll state it again:

The Annoyed Man wrote:I want to carefully distinguish between "classical liberalism", which is more like modern libertarianism, and "modern liberalism", which is more like statist fascism. Whenever I say "liberal" below, I am referring to the latter:

cb1000rider wrote:I don't think I agree with you on what it would accomplish. Back when the 2nd amendment was put in place, it was possible to own the same type of military firepower as the military. Guys lined up and shot at each other. It's no longer possible to compete with military firepower. Even if we could own "military grade" weapons without massive background checks and license costs, an armed populace would last about 30 seconds against a modern government willing to take steps to put down a "revolution". Technology has changed things. The military can kill people (bad guys) in their homes halfway around the world without leaving an armchair. The military can watch you in your backyard. They can see you in your home. Why should a modern government fear any militia?

I don't think the government fears an armed public. I think the government fears a irritated public that might vote career politicians out of office and take away their lifestyles.

(I want to make it plain that this is not advocacy on my part. I am merely pointing out some strategic and tactical issues that the American military would find almost impossible to overcome in any such effort to disarm the populace.)

I'll use Afghanistan as a current, and Iraq as a recent, valid comparison to demonstrate my next points.......

The strategic/tactical validity of using remote force projection as anything but an adjunct to traditional land/air/sea combat:
When we had 130,000+ troops in Afghanistan (plus the Brits and other militaries), of which only a small minority were engaged in remote projections of force through the use of airborne drones, etc., we were actually "winning the peace" there. We had actually successfully beaten back a pretty virulent insurgency and were gaining the trust of the populace. We had the same experience in Iraq. We surged and implemented COIN strategies, and things settled down. In both cases, the violence has since increased in direct proportion to our disengagement of American ground troops in both theaters, as we rely more and more heavily on remote force projections through the use of drones, satellite imagery, etc., etc. Yes, with a drone you can spy on an individual or small group, and take them out with a hellfire missile, but you cannot take out an entire movement that way. The Taliban is proving my point in Afghanistan at this very moment as I type this. I repeat, this is not advocacy....I don't give a damn what happens to foreign people who lack the courage or motivation to throw off oppressors, when the oppressors are not significantly better armed than the people.....I am merely stating the obvious.

Now, fast forward to a hypothetical future America where government is trying to put down a revolution and disarm The People. Who would build the drones, once they started being used against the friends and families of people employed at General Atomics (the builders of the Predator drone)? I'll bet that half or more of those people would quit their jobs. How long before a militia succeeded in finding a way to sabotage the factory? Aircraft have a shelf life. When the attrition rate exceeds the manufacturing rate, you stop having enough of them to be effective.

The strategic/tactical validity of using traditional assets and personnel to suppress The People:
In Afghanistan and Iraq, the ones who are currently winning live among the people over whom they are gaining control. DC politicians consider themselves too good to live among the people they govern, they are therefore disconnected from them in a way that would be fatal to their policies in these circumstances. What about conventional air assets? Anybody seriously think that most fighter jocks would follow orders to attack their own families on the ground? Anybody seriously think that a B-52 jockey would follow orders to carpet bomb Denton, or Houston, or Brownsville, when it is THEIR own families on the ground?

What about "boots on the ground" troops. What percentage of them would actually follow orders to massacre civilians who resisted disarmament?

Who exactly ARE these people who enlist in our military? They are the ones who swear an oath which begins with "I, ________, solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same," BEFORE they swear to obey the commands of the president, etc., etc. They are the sons and daughters of, for the most part, right of center families. They are, perhaps not exclusively, but overwhelmingly from the same tribe of people they would be commanded to suppress. They won't do it.

Let's localize this to Texas. Our state (plus Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana) contributes a higher percentage of its youth to the military than any of other states in the union.


To put it another way, the states which would attempt to direct such an operation are vastly UNDER-represented in the military:


SOURCE: http://www.heritage.org/research/report ... d-officers

Other relevant military demographics:







Believe me, military planners are as aware of all of this as is any southern "gun-nut" (guilty as charged). Why on earth is it so important for NSA to spy on us NOW? You want chilling? Watch ALL of this video:
[youtube][/youtube]

Does anyone seriously think that troops born and raised in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, etc., will obey orders to disarm Texans, Oklahomans, Arkansans, or Louisianans? What are they going to do.....send the New York National Guard to subdue Texas? It would be a blood bath, and nobody in the NYNG would ever see home again.

No. There is only ONE way that an American government could successfully disarm the populace by force, and that would be to import foreign troops to do the job. On THAT day, POTUS, VPOTUS, and anybody else involved in that chain of command is in violation of the Constitution, and the U.S. military is not only no longer constrained to obey their orders, but in all likelihood would join in the resistance to what amounts to a foreign invasion. There would necessarily be a few zealots who follow unlawful orders, but they would be a small minority of the total, and their long term fate would be by no means secure.

Any remote projection of force through unmanned technologies is ultimately doomed to failure unless it used as an adjunct to a very robust traditional force presence. THAT is why I do not believe that any federal attempt to force the disarmament of the American population would ultimately fail; and that is why the far bigger threat consists of the traitors (and they ARE traitors, no matter whatever semantics one chooses to use to avoid that stain) on the left who consistently and insistently chip away at the RKBA.

CB, you posed a question previously about whether or not we can convert liberals to the cause, and I gave an answer as to why we can't. THIS answer is why I am not worried about their whining or hurting their feelings. Those liberals who cannot be converted and who continue to chip away at my civil rights ARE traitors. I don't care if I offend them with my logic. The truth SHOULD hurt, if one spends one's efforts in trying to subvert it.

cb1000rider wrote:Devils advocate:
So if I'm a moderate / centrist / person that really doesn't feel strongly about the 2nd amendment, which of the two solutions is more likely to have prevented this issue:
1) Removing the "gun free zone" status of public schools
2) Taking all the guns out of the USA so kids can't get them easily

I'm suggesting that we come up with something else other than blaming the liberals...

Colorado has had an awful recent history of incidents like this.. We need to do what we can as a group to be sympathetic, supportive, and come up with productive solutions otherwise the centrist moms and dads will start to think that removing all guns might solve the problem. The more this kind of stuff happens, the bigger fight we've got.

I want to carefully distinguish between "classical liberalism", which is more like modern libertarianism, and "modern liberalism", which is more like statist fascism. Whenever I say "liberal" below, I am referring to the latter:

It is what liberals have done to the culture over the past 100 years that produces these incidents. For the most part, those metropolises with liberal governments ALSO happen to be the cities with the nation's highest murder rates by firearm. THIS IS NOT A COINCIDENCE. This is a direct consequence of liberal policies, liberal thinking, and liberal government. Don't believe me? I submit Detroit, Chicago, and DC. Case closed. When those same liberals get hoist by their own petard, they move out of the cities and out to places like Colorado and Vermont (and Texas), where they pollute the local politics with their same sociopolitical poison which resulted in the degradation of the cities which they left. Colorado wasn't always full of hippies. It used to be a consistently right of center state, with a strong tradition of independent thought and a profound respect for the 2nd Amendment. Liberals trashed New York and other places, and then moved to Colorado to escape the consequences of their own policies. The problem is, they brought their policies with them because, at its heart, modern liberalism is an infantile state which, when dragged into physical adulthood can easily be characterized as a psychological deficiency. They are childish thinkers whose thought processes reside in the emotional, not in the logical.

They can't be convinced until their own fecklessness and failures of logic cost them catastrophically in a personal way; hence the bromide that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. They hate guns, until someone armed with guns—in defiance of all laws and morality—invades their homes, pistol whips them, and rapes their wives and daughters. Only THEN, when none of their fellow travelers are looking, do they sneak down to the gun store and buy a .38 or a Glock 19. Then later, after they can no longer reconcile their thinking with their actions, and they come to the conclusion that they have to abandon one or the other in order to shed the cognitive dissonance, they choose to turn in their guns at a local gun buy-back, nominally in the name of assuaging their consciences, but in reality so that they don't have to give up their infantile state and become fully self-realized adults.............because being an adult is too damned hard for them, and being assimilated into the socialist borg is just easier than resisting.

If you cannot win an argument with a liberal based exclusively on facts, and minus the emotional content, then they cannot ever be converted to adulthood no matter what you say, and just like with any badly-behaved child, I no longer care if their feelings are hurt, so long as their feelings don't do any more damage to my civil liberties.

Period.

http://weaselzippers.us/2013/12/14/colo ... socialist/

Quoting the shooter:

“I was wondering to all the neoclassicals and neoliberals, why isn’t the market correcting itself?” he wrote. “If the invisible hand is so strong, shouldn’t it be able to overpower regulations?”

AND... his FaceBook postings:

“you republicans are so cute” ........ “The Republican Party: Health Care: Let ‘em Die, Climate Change: Let ‘em Die, Gun Violence: Let ‘em Die, Women’s Rights: Let ‘em Die, More War: Let ‘em Die. Is this really the side you want to be on?”

The bit about gun violence is ironic, considering the circumstances around his own death.